Category: media

“Today, screenings in a theatrical setting are merely one part of the commercial life of a studio release. As DVD sales figures testify, people are twice as likely to see a movie on disc than in a theatre. And why not? When one factors in the ticket cost of seeing a first-run movie, the divisive nature for many of the multiplex experience (which older patrons, in particular, can find noisy and uninviting), the speed at which movies reappear on DVD, and the number of alternative viewing options (DVD players, computers, TiVo, iPod, etc.), you can hardly blame people for choosing to pass on the formerly glorious big-screen experience.”

“For many years, public radio executives have studied the makeup of their audience and concluded that its single most defining characteristic is college education. Consultants advising programmers on how to shape their stations blame the audience’s lack of racial diversity on ‘longstanding educational inequities.’ Whatever the cause of the divide, more and more public stations are trying to broaden their mix of listeners.”

Do big stars really matter to the movies? “If carefully tended, thoughtfully managed and brilliantly used, stars can still make a movie work as an almost dizzyingly proficient entertainment. If mishandled, they throw the project out of whack so that it putters along like a toy car with a wheel missing.”

The idea of movies made specifically to be viewed on cell phones is still a hard sell to many in Hollywood. But there is no question that some of the shorts being produced for the tiny screen are of extremely high quality, and many are counting on mobile movies to be the next big content boom. “This week at the San Francisco International Film Festival, 20 movies made for mobile devices with 2-inch-by-3-inch screens will be shown as part of the festival’s Pocket Cinema program.”

Imagine you’re an actor of Middle Eastern descent trying to make a career in Hollywood. For years, you had endless trouble getting parts. Now, the industry can’t get enough of you, but most of the parts available will have you playing a terrorist, and if you do your job as an actor and try to humanize the character, you’ll stir up the animosity of countless viewers. What do you do?

The controversial and much-anticipated United 93 made its debut in New York last night, and the reaction, as might be expected, was emotional in the extreme. “The screen went dark after the stomach-turning sequence showing the plane’s nosedive. The theatre was silent except for the gut-wrenching sobs and wails from the loge, where the relatives [of the flight’s passengers] were seated together.”

Satire is hot right now, but the biting political send-ups that have made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert millionaires seem to lose some of their specificity when Hollywood translates the idea to film. Caryn James says there’s a good reason for that: “Political satires on screen may be most successful when they don’t aim at specific politicians at all… At their shrewdest, movies like American Dreamz and Thank You for Smoking follow the lead of Wag the Dog. They don’t attack individual politicians or entertainers (not even Simon); they are really satirizing how all those scoundrels in Washington and Hollywood talk down to us.”

TV is such a huge part of most lives these days that the notion of “TV Turnoff Week” (yes, it’s this week) might seem a bit antiquated. Some critics clearly feel that there’s enough good available on the set today to make the anti-tube forces seem out of step. But at least one UK writer wonders when exactly we all began building our lives around the infernal thing, anyway. “I’m sure there are good things to see on TV. I’m simply not convinced that it’s something you need to watch every single day… We have become a slovenly nation of living, breathing, wan-faced sponge fingers, entranced by some blinking, bawling machine.”

The new head of Telefilm Canada is taking on more than a simple CEO’s job. On his shoulders rest the hopes and dreams of Canada’s entire filmmaking community, and if that seems hyperbolic, you probably aren’t acquainted with the struggles of filmmakers north of the border. “As Telefilm’s newly minted go-to guy for approving and funding English-language features, [Michael Jenkinson] replaces an antiquated (and generally loathed) national decision committee which had been responsible for spreading around roughly $80-million a year.”

To judge by the entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York, the days of movies as America’s grand escape from difficult reality may be over. “In the shadows of [a few] glittering billboards seethes a mass of films, many taped on digital video or filmed with hand-held cameras, in which reality is the thing. An immersion in this year’s festival might be described as an intensive course in compassion, suffering and outrage. For a festival born out of the ashes of 9/11, could it be any other way?”