Category: media

“Columbia won an auction late Thursday for screen rights to Foundation, Isaac Asimov’s ground-breaking sci-fi trilogy. The project will be developed as a directing vehicle for Roland Emmerich.”

Variety‘s John Anderson didn’t like a film that’s being repped at Sundance by producer/agent Jeff “The Dude” Dowd (the real-life inspiration for The Dude in The Big Lebowski). Dowd followed Anderson from cinema to breakfast table trying to change the critic’s mind, Anderson wanted to eat in peace, and tempers were lost.

“Opera and ballet lovers are to be offered major productions from some of the world’s leading companies as pay-per-view internet broadcasts. Eleven shows from the new season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York will be among those streamed by Classical TV. Productions by the Bolshoi, Marinsky, Zurich Opera and Paris Opera Ballet will be broadcast live on the Classical TV website, which launches next month.”

“As plot twists go, this one is a doozy: after an eight-year legal battle over the lease of a movie theater, the former owners of a multiplex in Aspen, Colo., now own the rights to Ingmar Bergman’s entire film library. Or do they?”

“With George Bush back in Crawford, Texas, and Barack Obama in the White House trying to deal with the nation’s woes, will ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ still have enough satirical fodder for its four-nights-per week/161-episodes-per-year broadcast?” After all, the new guy in the White House has been a guest on the show four times — and, complicating matters, is smart.

“China could be on the verge of implementing its first film classification system after the all-powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (Sarft) submitted a new law to the cabinet — but it faces hardline opposition at the senior level within the ruling Communist Party. At the moment, films are deemed either suitable for all audiences or unsuitable, in which case censors cut entire scenes or ban the movie altogether — both drastic steps considering that scripts must be approved before a movie goes into production.”

“One person who spoke to the hundreds of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday was the Rev. Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop whose ordination created a rift in his church. However, you would never have known that from watching TV, as it was not included as part of HBO’s televised coverage.” The Presidential Inaugural Committee says it regrets the error.

“There must be a reason that Buddha and Jesus conveyed their most profound teachings in parables, or fictional stories,” Ken Russell writes. “Stories are the narratives of life, truer than the facts. They’re where we delve deeply into the complexities of human nature.” TV’s current mania for nonfiction, then, can’t be a good thing.

“I knew it would do well because it was aimed at an audience that has been neglected in recent years in film offerings – women. They are the last group anybody ever cares about.”

“Today the film’s observational strategies – its long takes and scrupulous framing – practically amount to a lingua franca of international art film… Nothing can quite prepare the first-time viewer for the force of [director Chantal] Akerman’s concentration, for the film’s overwhelming concreteness or the horrifying logic of its ending.”