Category: media

“Message documentaries” have of late become the liberal answer to conservative talk radio – ideology-driven propaganda with an annoying habit of playing fast and loose with the facts. “The makers of such films today see their cinematic contributions as an antidote to media consolidation that, they say, restricts topics and voices to the bland and the commercial. As such, they feel little or no obligation to heed documentary-film traditions like point-by-point rebuttal or formal reality checks.”

Playing the stock market is risky business, and let’s face it, it’s damn boring, besides. If only we could buy stock in, oh, say, the cast of Desperate Housewives, and watch it soar as the dork in the cubicle next to us chokes on his overzealous 200-share purchase of Geena Davis. That would be truly excellent. Hmm? We can do that? Oh. Very good, then.

The headquarters of The Pirate Bay, a web site that enables users to find and download pirated music and movies, was raided by Swedish police this week, setting up a legal confrontation over the issue of whether such sites can be held responsible for the actions of their users. Courts in several other countries, including the U.S., have held that sites clearly intended to facilitate illegal activity are not protected by law. The fight is likely to be more complicated in Sweden, however – the country is notorious for tolerating file-sharing, and has no specific law prohibiting it.

“A veteran who lost both arms in the war in Iraq is suing filmmaker Michael Moore for $85-million, alleging that Moore used snippets of a television interview without his permission to falsely portray him as anti-war in Fahrenheit 9/11… He claims in his lawsuit that the way Moore used the film clip makes him appear to ‘voice a complaint about the war effort’ when he was actually complaining about ‘the excruciating type of pain’ that comes with the injury he suffered.”

The chairman of the CBC has sparked a furor among Francophone Canadians by suggesting that Radio-Canada, the French-language version of CBC (both radio and television), has become too centered on Quebec and its insular world. Guy Fournier’s desire to make the French networks more nationally relevant might have slipped in under the radar, but for his use of a word fraught with controversy in French Canada – “unification.”

Lately, it seems like Hollywood and the environmental movement can’t get enough of each other. The wave of eco-friendly films seems to have been sparked by the success of last year’s March of the Penguins. “Whether this trend speaks to mere copycatting or a shared morality isn’t clear. Either way, Hollywood has sensed an opportunity to capitalize on high-profile debates about mounting planetary issues: oil, land-hogging McMansions, oil, frequent natural disasters, oil, melting glaciers, oil.”

Yahoo is reprogramming its online video service so it’s more like YouTube, an internet upstart that has amassed a large audience during the past year with a free web service that encourages people to post and share homemade clips.

The Walt Disney Co. will sell its films online the same day they become available on DVD, thus closing the gap between DVD sales and video-on-demand by several months. The deal includes new releases plus some library titles.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is set in Ireland in the 1920s and “recounts events that led to the formation of an independent Ireland and the creation of Northern Ireland, still under the rule of Great Britain. Director Ken Loach’s aim is to cast his political eye on events that are rarely discussed in the UK and beyond and remain open wounds for many Irish citizens.”

Tom Shales thinks so. “The 2005-06 TV season probably boasted more solid hours of good drama than television has seen in many years. The networks showed what could be done when they let producers dare to stray from the familiar and formulaic — from the old cops-and-robbers and doctors-and-nurses templates. You know: the sick and the dead.”