Category: media

“The message from Hollywood increasingly seems to be — to glibify it to a tag line — bleak is chic. Hopeless is hot.”

Aging Gen-Xers may see the Cube as a blast from the 1980s past, but videos of various people solving the puzzle – from director Michel Gondrey appearing to work the Cube with his toes to YouTube’s “3-Year-Old Solves Rubik’s Cube in 114 Seconds” to a guy that does it while blindfolded – are popping up all over the Web. The short vidcasts are “part of a larger genre of popular online video: the ‘solving spectacle,’ which typically shows a soloist in a modestly appointed room trying to work out a problem – an intricate guitar solo, a speed painting – that is largely in his head.”

Indian movie stars are speaking out against the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where Bollywood is based. “My pain has been the sight and plight of my innocent and vulnerable and completely insecure countrymen, facing the wrath of this terror attack,” one action star wrote on his blog. “And my anger has been at the ineptitude of the authorities that have been ordained to look after us.”

Will the election of Barack Obama have an effect on the way Hollywood casts movies and TV shows? “After years of ensemble dramas sprinkled with nonwhite supporting actors, the excitement surrounding the election… could help to open doors for more minorities in leading dramatic roles, executives from television production studios said.”

“Who would have thought, 20 years after the movie first hit the screens, now the merchandising kicks in. The Princess Bride had everything: Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles” — but, it’s now clear, insufficient product tie-ins. Enter the Dread Pirate Roberts action figure. Seriously.

Wired‘s Kevin Kelly: “The rich databases [Flickr, YouTube, 3D Warehouse] of component images form a new grammar for moving images. After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them… What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.”

“It isn’t the terrible economy – yet. People are still going to movies. The big problem is Wall Street. Without money from private equity and big investment banks, which injected an estimated $10 to $18 billion into Hollywood in the last four years, studios have had to change the way they do business – fast.”

“Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, whose giant Buddha, bug-eyed monsters and magical mushrooms packed in huge crowds last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is putting down roots in Los Angeles. A multifaceted artist who embraces painting and sculpture, film and mass-produced goods as part of a single enterprise, he is planning to open an animation studio here next summer.”

“Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones.”

A French film journal is out with a list of the top 100 films of all time, and the number of British movies on the list is… zero. Gramophone’s list of the top 20 orchestras in the world included just one from the UK. “It seems as if the British judges might just have been honest about their choices instead of flying the flag.”