Category: media

“The Motion Picture Association of America has censored a poster advertising a film about the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The image that ran afoul of the MPAA is tame by the standards set by the amateur photographers of Abu Ghraib. It shows a man hanging by his handcuffed wrists, with a burlap sack over his head and a blindfold tied around the hood.” The MPAA says the picture depicts torture, and is therefore not appropriate for general viewing. But Philip Kennicott points out that the U.S. government has officially approved the use of the techniques depicted in the poster, and that brings up an interesting side debate concerning what constitutes torture, and what Americans are willing to turn away from.

As worldwide protests by devout Catholics continue unabated, The DaVinci Code got its first screening at Cannes last night, and Simon Houpt says that all the hand-wringing isn’t necessary. Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic sect depicted as murderous in Dan Brown’s novel, “is granted some slack in the big-screen version, which opens across the world on Friday. Furthermore, theories about the life of Jesus Christ that have caused consternation in the Catholic world, brought condemnation from the Vatican, and provoked calls for boycotts across the globe, are presented with a measure of skepticism on film that the book does not possess.”

Cannes is on, and with it comes the usual litany of complaints regarding the supposed commercialization of the festival, the Hollywood exploitation, and, on the other side of the coin, the continued insistence on pushing a bunch of low-budget, esoteric art films that no one understands. “But both forms of grousing miss the point and the glory of this festival, which since the beginning — this is its 59th edition —has mingled the lofty and the crass with particular Gallic flair.”

An early version of a report on who’s getting work writing in Hollywood is out, and it doesn’t look good for minority writers. “The full 2006-07 “Hollywood Writers Report” is set to be released in September, but the early results suggest that women and minorities may find it even harder to get work in the TV industry now that the urban- oriented UPN and WB networks have merged into the CW network.”

In Hollywood, success comes with the most public of accolades, and the richest of financial rewards. So it stands to reason that failure on the Tinseltown stage would be an equally dramatic event. “Hollywood is so enamored by success that few people can cope with the flop sweat of failure… After a fall, some people flee the city, seeking refuge. Others stay inside, the doors closed and lights dim. After all, who wants to work the room when your friends, not to mention your enemies, can barely disguise their glee at seeing you fall on your face?”

The world of bloggers, on-demand media, and participatory journalism has required a lot of adjustment from the traditional press, and those at the helm of America’s public broadcasters have been struggling to decide which elements of the global online world they can afford to embrace, and which ones they can’t afford not to.

Ordinarily, when a movie is released without critics being given an advance screening, it’s because the product is so mind-blowingly awful that the studio doesn’t want to give the press a chance to bad-mouth it before the first weekend’s receipts are in. But for the producers of The DaVinci Code, who have raised hype to an art form in the months leading up to this weekend’s premiere, the withholding of advance screenings is all about building the suspense.

The Da Vinci Code is controversial with Christians. But is Sony (who owns the movie) trying to minimize the conflict? No. In fact…

As high-definition video clips become more popular on the internet, things are slowing down, say ISPs. “Most home internet use is in brief bursts — an e-mail here, a web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV — for hours at a time — that puts a strain on the internet that it wasn’t designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example. Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans.”

“Sony’s strategy with the film has been unusual in that so far, no outsiders have seen Ron Howard’s two-and-a-half-hour opus. Sony has forgone the usual advance press screenings and a splashy stateside premiere, forfeiting some coverage in the interest of keeping the picture under wraps. The studio will unveil The Da Vinci Code at the Cannes Film Festival next week.”