Category: media

Europeana brings together more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films. But it crashed soon after launching last month after 10 million hits an hour overwhelomed servers. “The website’s server capacity has been quadrupled to cope with demand. But the homepage – at www.europeana.eu – warns that “the user experience may not be optimal in this test phase”.

“Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway is a documentary about a Broadway musical that is based on a documentary. If that has a certain snake-eating-tail improbability to it, well, the Grey Gardens story of two eccentric former socialites is, in any medium, all about improbability.”

“Some of today’s most vaunted tech philosophers are embroiled in a ferocious argument. On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold….”

“Facing growing internal dissent, leaders of the Screen Actors Guild have postponed SAG’s divisive strike authorization vote for two weeks. … The delay comes with the anti-authorization effort gaining traction among SAG members with over 1,400 having publicly declared that they’ll vote against the measure.”

“We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

“The critics might have hoped it would meet its Waterloo after just a few weeks, but four months after it opened the Abba-themed musical Mamma Mia! has become the highest grossing movie ever to be released in the UK, usurping Titanic‘s decade-long hold on the record.”

A national commission has suggested that half of all radio listening in Great Britain could be via digital signals by 2015 – a benchmark which could trigger a switchover to digital-only in two to five years.

“Filmmakers in this hub of Indian cinema are already exploring how to bring the trauma of the deadly three-day siege of Mumbai to the big screen… Bollywood stars have responded cautiously to the Mumbai attacks, even though filmmakers were eager to draw audiences back to the theatres at a time when the industry was already hit by global economic woes.”

It may be a classic holiday film, but Wendell Jameson says that It’s a Wonderful Life is anything but an uplifting tale. “[It] is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife.”

“The Roman Catholic drama Doubt leads contenders for the Screen Actors Guild Awards with five nominations, including honours for Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis.”