What’s all this about movie attendance dropping? In New York at least, getting in to a movie is tough. “In the age of Fandango, premovie advertising and sellouts every weekend, it has become increasingly difficult to simply “catch” a movie. Going to see a film has become an exercise in elaborate planning and, particularly this holiday season – when many big films like “Munich,” “The New World” and most famously “King Kong,” are clocking in at two and a half to three hours – a major time commitment. It’s basically impossible to see a movie spontaneously.”
Blog
Turkey: Charges Against Novelist Pamuk A Mistake?
Turkey’s foreign minister acknowledged yesterday that charges brought against Orhan Pamuk, the country’s best-known novelist, have tarnished Turkey’s image, and said laws that limit freedom of expression may be changed.
What New York Means To the Arts
How big does New York loom on America’s creative landscape? A new report takes some measures: “No other place in the U.S. even comes close to matching the city’s creative assets. In fact, 8.3 percent of all creative sector workers in the U.S. are based in New York. The city is home to over a third of all the country’s actors and roughly 27 percent of the nation’s fashion designers,12 percent of film editors,10 percent of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.”
Technology As Liberal Arts Liberator
“Many students and faculty believe that there is no place for technology in small liberal arts colleges, a belief they cherish and are loathe to let go of. But technology doesn’t have to be the great invader, the destructor of the special nature of a liberal arts college education. It can, in fact, make that education better and more sustainable.”
NY Touts Film Tax Credit For New Revenue
New York’s film office says new tax incentives are responsible for $600 million of new film shooting and 6000 jobs in the city this year. “The mayor’s office also claimed that more than 250 movies and 100 new and continuing TV productions were shot in New York during the past year as a result of the program. It was one of several initiatives launched this year to help boost city entertainment projects and the resulting income from them.”
311 Movies Run For Oscar
Three hundred and eleven movies are in contention for this year’s Oscars. That’s a 16 percent jump from last year. “Academy credits coordinator Howard Loberfeld cited an increase in the number of feature-length documentaries playing theatrically (35 vs. 15 in 2004) for the spike, as well as industrywide distributor reorganizations, which led to the release of an unusual number of long-delayed projects.”
The First Great Pianist Of the 21st Century?
Following the release of two CDs this year, critics are prophesying that Yevgeny Sudbin – who spent part of his childhood in the basement of a refugee hostel – will be one of the greatest pianists of the new century.
Elliott Carter At 97
“Perhaps the key to his longevity and the feeling of constant rejuvenation in his music lies in his attitude to writing it. ‘I go to bed every night, and just before I go to sleep I read one or two pages of Proust. This gives me a great deal of pleasure, so one of the things about music is that I want to write something that gives me pleasure. I would never write anything that didn’t say something to me that I thought was important or interesting’.”
Statistics Wrong For Da Vinci Code Success
A team of statisticians developed a model to predict books that would hit big. Trouble is, books like “The Da Vinci Code” didn’t rate high in the model. “This year’s runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Alvai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life.”
Brits Fail Musical Literacy
More than half of Britons polled do not realise that Elgar was English or that Beethoven was born in Germany, according to a survey for the digital arts and culture channel Artsworld.