Category: media

“A Pew Research Center survey released this week found that 75 percent of adults prefer watching movies at home to going to the cinema. So what can theaters do to entice people to leave their cozy couches and high-definition TVs for a night out at the movies?”

US Senator Sam Brownback is trying to fasttrack “indecency” legislation through the Senate. “Brownback’s Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act would increase fines for indecent broadcasts from $32,500 per incident to $325,000 per violation.”

It’s now been a few days since the hotly anticipated premiere, and Jonathan Gibbs says it’s time to ask the question that everyone at Cannes is asking: has anyone given The DaVinci Code a good review?

Universal Pictures and producer Brian Grazer have purchased the film rights to a magazine article documenting the tragic terrorist attack on a schoolhouse in the tiny town of Beslan, Russia in September 2004. “The article, entitled The School, was written by Chris Chivers of the New York Times. Chivers covered the September 2004 siege during which 331 people, most of them schoolchildren, died when the three-day standoff in southern Russia ended in a bloody and chaotic gunfight.”

“Political rows erupted at the Cannes film festival yesterday as censors in Beijing rejected for domestic screening a Chinese film in competition for the Palme d’Or, and Ken Loach, the director of The Wind that Shakes the Barley, launched an attack on the British government’s recent actions in Iraq.”

When NBC’s long-running sitcom, Will & Grace, says its final goodbyes tonight, it will probably seem to most viewers a minor event. And that, says Gail Shister, is a testament to just how far American audiences have come in their perception of gay culture since the show debuted in 1998. “If Ellen opened the door, Will & Grace burst into the room with a marching band, tastefully accessorized… Without a single sermon, [the show] advanced the national conversation about homosexuality.”

This year’s edition of the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival (M-SPIFF) almost didn’t happen, due to financial problems, staff changes, and other difficulties. But the festival went off as scheduled in the end, and this week, organizers announced that the event finished in the black, with even a small surplus left over after all the bills were paid.

“The English-Canadian film industry reacted with more wry amusement than outrage yesterday after learning Michael Jenkinson, the man hired by Telefilm Canada to whip the moribund feature-film sector into shape, would not be showing up for work. Less than three weeks after Los Angeles-based Jenkinson was exuberantly introduced at a Toronto press conference as Telefilm’s newly minted go-to-guy with a mandate to revitalize English-language cinema, a red-faced Telefilm issued late Tuesday a vague press release that suggested business complications in California had forced Jenkinson to back out at the final hour.”

As the number of listeners purchasing and using satellite radio increases, an unexpected problem is becoming a major irritant to some of those still relying on terrestrial radio. Many satellite users employ a small mini-transmitter to allow their satellite signal to be heard on their existing FM radios, and despite the limited range of the transmitter signal, complaints have begun rolling in to FM stations whose frequency is the same as the mini-transmitters that listeners are being forced to listen to Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony “bleeding” into the FM signal from some unknown location.

A New York building owner is trying to evict popular hip-hop radio station Hot 97 from its Manhattan studios, saying that the station encourages violence and has been the site of multiple shootings tied to various gangsta rappers and their entourages. The carpenters’ union that owns the building says it is just trying to protect its other tenants, and is also seeking to bar entourages from accompanying rappers to the station for appearances.