Category: media

Hollywood’s Producers’ Guild is out with its annual list of nominees for producer of the year in film and TV. This would be the ultimate “inside baseball” news, except for the fact that the Guild traditionally does an uncanny job of predicting how the Oscar race will shape up. “Over the last 14 years only four films that didn’t win the Producers Guild award… went on to receive the best picture Oscar.”

“The simple news is this: Unless a deal can be reached in the next four days, actors will be on the picket lines first thing Monday morning and all film and television productions employing members of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists will come to a grinding halt. But, in fact, talks between actors and producers involve a much more complicated story.”

In the age of the instant online review, people working on a new television show have to get used to some negative reaction. But the blistering critiques that have been directed at Aaron Sorkin’s highly touted “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” this season have been notable not only for their vitriol, but for who’s been doing the complaining. Much of the criticism of the show has come not from the great unwashed viewing masses, but from the very comedy writers whose story the show purports to tell.

Hollywood movie studios approve a new content lock for DVDs which should make available thousands of movies for downloading and burning to DVD. “The system can also be used in retail kiosks, which could hold hundreds of thousands of older films and TV shows for which studios don’t see a huge market. Customers could pick a film, TV episode or an entire season’s worth of shows and have them transferred to DVD on the spot.”

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation appears to have decided that the arts have little to no place on its television schedule, and its programming chief has made it abundantly clear that he isn’t interested in scheduling any program that can’t pull at least a million viewers. (That’s the ratings equivalent of ten million viewers in the U.S.) “[But] surely the mandate of any public broadcaster is to forget about competing with popular U.S. shows and provide an alternative.”

The shortlist for Oscar’s Best Documentary category is often a useful way to measure the mood of the industry, if not the world. And there’s no doubt about what the films on this year’s list tell us. “This is the year of the angry documentary, of the ‘Take back America’ documentary.” But some filmmakers are worried that the use of documentaries as weapons of political attack will cost them credibility.

“In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display–at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids.”

“The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) had voted to walk off the job on Monday if a labour deal was not reached.” But the union will return to the bargaining table to try to work out a deal Wednesday.

“Coming soon to German cinemas: a demoralized, drug-addled Adolf Hitler who plays with a toy battleship in the bathtub, dresses his dog in a Nazi uniform and takes acting tips from a Jewish concentration camp inmate. The movie, which opens Jan. 11, is treading ground that once would have been off-limits. This is not Mel Brooks’ ‘The Producers’ or Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator,’ but a German movie that dares to treat Hitler as comedy.”

“Most Americans felt there was nothing special about the shows out this year — yet 58% said they got hooked on one. For women, the top show was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which often tops the weekly Nielsen ratings. For men, it was “House,” with the curmudgeonly Hugh Laurie, on Fox.”