Category: media

“Concerned that downtown is turning into an urban back lot for movie, TV and commercial producers, the area’s growing number of residents and merchants are rebelling. A surge in filming, combined with incidents such as the March chopper episode, is galvanizing residents to push for tighter rules that could crimp shoots in one of the world’s busiest places for filming.”

Why is Tom Cruise having difficuly shooting a movie in Germany about the hero Col. Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German Army officer who tried to blow up Hitler toward the end of World War II? “Stauffenberg for Germans is like Jefferson and Lincoln, motherhood, and apple pie all rolled into one. Germany is a country of established churches, and so Scientology is viewed as a cult and, worse, totalitarian and exploitative. A professing Scientologist in the role of Stauffenberg is like casting Judas as Jesus. It is secular blasphemy.”

The video-sharing website spawns multi-lingually. “YouTube’s multiplication is one more sign that the young video site is following its mother ship’s loving admonitions: Don’t ever stop growing, be friendly to everyone you meet, facilitate geocultural interconnection and — this one’s important, Yutie — try to make billions in ad revenue while you’re at it.”

“For the past two years Chinese films have shattered box-office records here, while outperforming Hollywood imports. Yet far from inspiring national pride, these films, from the well-known directors Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang, have sparked a heated, sometimes vituperative domestic debate about the future of Chinese cinema and whether the country’s leading filmmakers are true artists or merely politically savvy hacks.”

“MySpace plans to expand its video offerings this week with a new site that combines amateur and professional material. The new pages, available at MySpaceTV.com, will be the first MySpace spinoff accessible to those who don’t register with the main site. But the new site is also intended as a gathering spot for the wide array of videos that get posted to personal profiles and viewed there.”

Remember all those predictions about a record summer at the movie box office? Not going to happen. “Blame it on the old guys of ‘Ocean’s Thirteen,’ God in ‘Evan Almighty’ or simply the widely hyped sequels like ‘Spider-Man 3’ that opened to huge ticket sales but failed to keep audiences returning the way their predecessors did.”

“Teens aged 12 to 17 listened to a mere 7.6 hours a week of radio, according to a survey taken in fall 2006. That’s down from 8.6 hours in 2005 and 11.3 hours in 1996.”

“Across the Internet, the music will die today. It’s a protest staged by online radio stations to preview what they say will happen when substantially higher royalty rates kick in next month, silencing for good stations that can’t afford them. Thousands of webcasters will replace their music streams today with periods of silence and occasional messages about the dispute, urging people to press Congress to reverse the royalty rate and fee increase set by a federal board.”

“Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military sites because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the Defence Ministry said on Monday. Cruise, also one of the film’s producers, is a member of the Church of Scientology which the German government does not recognize as a church. Berlin says it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject.”

Sunday’s debate at the American Medical Association “centered on whether enough science was available to classify excessive video game playing as an addiction and whether the organization should advocate an outright classification as an addiction or push for limits on game playing such as one to two hours of total daily screen time.”