Category: media

“Echochrome is a videogame adaptation of the drawings of MC Escher. When it’s released for the PlayStation Portable later this year, you’ll be taking care of a tireless little marionette as he trudges through a series of paradoxical staircases and impossible corridors. … Even better would be to fly through Salvador Dalí landscapes, dodging monsters from Francis Bacon paintings.”

“British television is not sure what to do about culture and its bosses seem to agree on only one thing: not many people watch it. … But viewing figures that can seem small when set against programmes that reach millions are still worth having. An audience of a few hundred thousand may be off the radar of ratings-chasing producers but it is far more than can ever see a performance at, say, the Royal Opera House….”

“Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival has long been an event spanning many venues – theaters, studios, churches, streets, and even audience members’ living rooms (check out this year’s Kamerdans). Its latest frontier? The iPod. That’s right – the Fringe … is branching out into a new aural medium by offering its first-ever podcast, The Many Men of Martha Manning. The first of its six episodes is already available online.”

The UK Fim Council says that movies set in Britain are a tourist magnet. “Visitors were previously drawn to Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, to see a mighty medieval fortress, one of Europe’s finest. Since it became the setting for Hogwarts, the boy wizard’s school, there has been a 120 per cent increase in visitor numbers. That in turn has brought an estimated £9 million in tourist revenue to the area.”

“Ratings giant Nielsen Media Research today plans to pull the plug on a separate service that it created 15 years ago to measure the size of Latino TV audiences. Latinos are now so important to the overall TV ratings picture that it would be misleading to relegate them to a separate system.”

“Since its inception, television has been threatened as the doom of movies. And we may be getting to the point where it’s actually true. TV has never looked so good, with cable channels from Lifetime to AMC finally following the HBO model and creating edgy original series with the look, cast and soul-searching of good indie films. And not even indie films. Of good mid-budget films, the kind they used to make in the ’70s and ’80s when movies didn’t have to make a profit on the first weekend, when they didn’t open for 3 1/2 seconds on 1,000 screens.”

“Estimates suggest that this summer’s box office returns will stand at $4.15bn (£2.05bn) by the time the season officially ends on 3 September. But they added that actual summer ticket sales are expected to be about 606m, only the sixth-best in modern times.”

Sequels are the surest thing in Hollywood to a safe bet. So “Hollywood responded this summer with an unprecedented number of franchise movies — nine in all — most of which scared up satisfying revenue if not critical approval. But only three films succeeded on both fronts.”

After the flap over the lack of hispanics in Ken Burns’ WWII documentary, PBS seems to be airing more hispanic programs. “PBS spokeswoman Lea Sloan said it was unfair to credit the Burns controversy for all of this activity, and noted that PBS already airs more Latino-oriented programming than other mainstream networks. But she did note that the episode caused PBS to work harder to reach out to this rapidly growing part of the population.”

Film critic Roger Ebert he never told producers they couldn’t use his trademark Thumbs up/down on the movie show. “They made a first offer on Friday which I considered offensively low. I responded with a counteroffer. They did not reply to this, and on Monday ordered the Thumbs removed from the show. This is not something I expected after an association of over 22 years.”