Category: media

“There is an inequity, a lack of fairness. Film festivals take up the slack but the cinema I grew up with and love is a cinema of films that were visceral and touched the heart… I’m not knocking it, because I earn my living doing it, but I want a reasonable platform to show the work which I consider to be my best work.”

“What Siskel and Ebert not-so-secretly ushered into being was a new way to get movie clips on free TV. The boys and their natter were incidental to the promotion. They’d convinced themselves they were performing an evaluative function and were extending the film news and commentary business to a new medium. What they were really doing was giving a giant boost to the movie hype business, which rendered their own influence decidedly moot.”

“Vintage reruns and other inexpensive shows are in vogue, as stations and programmers rush into a potentially important new business: multicast networks.”

“The proportion of people with an internet connection who watch TV online was 17% in 2007, compared with 8% the year before. Online advertising spend was up by almost 40% year-on-year, reaching £2.8 billion in 2007. For the first time, more money was spent on internet advertising than the combined advertising spending of ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and Five, which was £2.4 billion.”

“Now that product placement has become the norm (and thus quite easy to ignore), some brands are coming up with increasingly surreptitious means of showcasing their products – even to the extent of becoming film financiers. The advantage in financing the picture is that companies have complete control over how and where their logos are used.”

The group, Unite for Strength, made its announcement Wednesday. It’s trying to wrest control of SAG’s 71-member national board from a coalition called Membership First, which has seen talks with studios come to a standstill.

Earning 302 million yuan ($44.04 million) in the month since its July 10 opening, Red Cliff smashed the previous domestic record held by Curse of the Golden Flower.

“As Warners goes through the arduous process of absorbing two dozen or so New Line films into its distribution system, the studio simply has too many movies to release, so it’s starting to pick out the weak calves from the herd.”

“The nature of television comedy has shifted. Over the past five or 10 years, the phenomenon of standup actors getting development deals, centered on his brightly lit comic personality, is not happening as much. Today you have more interesting setups for comedy, so you need actors to fill that.”