Category: media

The Romanian film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” wins top honors at the Cannes Film Festival. “The film, which follows the harrowing journey of two women as they seek an illegal abortion in Communist Romania, is directed by Cristian Mungiu. A Russian actor and a South Korean actress took top acting honours at the annual festival, now in its 60th year.”

Viewers are fleeing their TV sets. “The steepest decline was in live viewership, which fell 10% year-over-year among the four major broadcast networks. Adding in DVR viewership, which can boost shows’ ratings by as much as 25% or more, the Big Four were still down 5%.”

A public broadcasting funder has stepped in to distribute a program PBS had rejected as unworthy. “The federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped find a new distributor for ‘Islam vs. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center’ after seven Republican members of Congress and one Democrat demanded that CPB ask PBS to air it or release it elsewhere.”

“In these digital days, it seems anyone can direct. But with hundreds of microbudgeted movies made each year, demand for venues and audiences is way up. Many films don’t reach the festival circuit, let alone get a theatrical release or rack space at Blockbuster. Some go straight to DVD. Some find a specialized audience on the Internet. Some go nowhere. The measure of “success” has come to mean something other than a Spider-Man 3-sized opening weekend for indie filmmakers, who have become creative marketers to rally a fan base.”

When talking about American movies, the word ‘art” doesn’t often surface. But “one of the sustaining pleasures of Cannes is that it allows you to immerse yourself fully from early morning to evening in the kind of aesthetically adventurous, intellectually exhilarating cinematic practices that end up in the American art-house ghetto or being shut out of theaters completely.”

“Much of Hollywood’s globalization movement has focused on U.S. studios hiring foreign directors to make English-language movies, or American productions shooting in Morocco, Hungary, Romania — wherever the story works and the labor is cheap. But a different kind of international business is mushrooming, and its dividends are palpably visible at the 60th annual Cannes Film Festival.”

Landmark executives remain insistent that the scope and thrust of the finished project — namely, its commitment to environmentalism, cutting-edge screen and sound technology, high design and even gourmet hot dog toppings — will go beyond anything comparable at the city’s other luxury movie halls, the Grove and the Bridge among them.

Where are the tough beautiful female roles in movies? “It’s so dumb the way females are portrayed. Women who can kick ass but still have a heart–we’re not represented at all in the cinema.”

Indian film has long had a presence at Cannes. But this year, two full days have been devoted to the world’s second biggest movie industry, and Bollywood is hoping that the attention it garners in the south of France will translate to new global success.

When a private equity firm offered £2.4bn to buy UK music giant EMI, the immediate question from most observers was whether previous EMI suitor Warner Music would submit its own offer, and if so, whether regulators on either side of the Atlantic would allow such a huge merger. Warner hasn’t officially decided whether to submit a bid, but a decidedly relaxed regulatory climate in Europe would seem to make such a move likely.