Category: media

“CBC’s classical music station, Radio Two, is revamping its evening and late-night programming in a bid to attract younger listeners.” The changes will include an increase in jazz and pop music programming, and a marked decrease in classical. The CBC says that fully half of the current Radio Two audience is over 65, and the changes were unavoidable.

After 13 years, it’s difficult for a film festival to maintain its edge and convince the world that it still has something fresh and challenging to say. But Sundance isn’t worried: it’s organizers have obviously figured out that “if you want to get people worked up, you can’t beat the combination of incendiary politics and twisted sex.”

Hollywood is considering a package of changes for its much-maligned film ratings system.”The most substantive rule change will let aggrieved filmmakers refer on appeal to other movies — for example, to argue that because another film was permitted to run a similar scene, their film should be permitted to as well… The ratings administration would [also] work on clarifying how its ratings are defined.”

High-definition digital radio is booming in the UK, offering crystal-clear sound and a wider range of listening options. But even though many American stations are now broadcasting in HD, consumers are largely unaware that the format even exists. “While the U.K. government — which controls much of the country’s broadcasting industry — was able to influence a national shift to digital, for-profit U.S. broadcasters were hesitant to embrace the unproven and expensive technology until satellite radio emerged as a competitive threat.”

“It should be remembered that the birth and growth of cinema was almost immediately parallel to the birth and growth of modernism in the other arts. Film is generally at its best when it recognises its roots in modernism, ie when it rejects conventional notions of realism, disengages from bourgeois values, and questions the primacy of narration.”

“I know I’m not supposed to use this trope anymore, but I can’t resist: On ‘quality TV,’ Darkness is The New Black. Darkness has become a signifier for deepness, for deep seriousness–most often a substitute for it, alas.”

You just never know what might happen at the Sundance Film Festival, and picking the indie flicks that will later have a chance to captivate the world (or at least the U.S.) has become a cottage industry among critics. Last year’s surprise smash, Little Miss Sunshine, was a textbook case of an indie achieving wide success, but few saw it coming. “It becomes more apparent every year that William Goldman’s great rule of studio filmmaking applies to the independent world as well: Nobody knows anything.”

“About 50 movies are at risk and producers are in jeopardy of losing funding after [Canadian film distributor] ThinkFilm was sold to American interests. Now the filmmakers have called in the lawyers… The filmmakers say the issue isn’t just their movies aren’t being seen, but government rules mean their funding could be in jeopardy.”

“Somewhere between amazing greatness and raving geek fantasies of world domination lives the Venice Project,” an ambitious collaboration aiming to combine the best of television and the internet. “Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!” Of course, it’s never actually that simple…

How did Hollywood’s big movie studios fare in 2006? Well, Fox is at the top. “Big Fox is an assembly line, making low-risk movies with low-wattage filmmakers.” Here’s a scorcard on how the studios fared last year.