Category: media

A plan by the BBC to cover the cost of providing digital TV access to disadvantaged groups such as the elderly and infirm with a hike in the country’s television license fee reportedly has nearly half of UK viewers opposed. (The BBC is funded through collection of an annual fee – currently £131.50 – charged to anyone owning a TV in the UK.) UK broadcasters are supposed to convert completely to digital signals by 2012, but the government wants the BBC to help cover the cost of switching viewers over to the new technology.

“When a horrifying shared reality is forced through the pipeline of history and comes out a pop-cultural attraction, is the artistic result worth a further eroding of what little space we have left for private contemplation?”

Too soon? I think the question is irrelevant. Timing is less important than quality. “United 93” makes a fierce and honorable case for this being the right time for Greengrass’ brand of storytelling. The film has something to do with courage under unimaginable circumstances, but it does not go in for any of the usual methods. Nor does it allow the audience the usual peaks and valleys of tension and release.

“Listeners create a station simply by typing in a song name or artist, and Pandora launches a radio stream, playing songs that have similar attributes to the individual user’s selection. Each listener can then fine-tune the personal station, giving a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to songs, and Pandora responds, paring the attributes more specifically to the user’s taste. Conversely, users can add more music to expand the musical gene pool. Listeners can share their personally created “radio stations” with others by e-mail and can also view top stations being played.”

Why are some people upset over the new movie about doomed Flight 93? There have been TV depictions, and there haven’t been protests. “Movies have a tendency to work on our unconscious, while television works on our conscious. The big picture, the sound, the effects. We expect different things of movies. Movies create the feeling of reality, whereas all the other [art forms] can go into abstraction. And we deal with things through abstraction in a very different way.”

“Oakland is one of a nearly a dozen Bay Area cities committing millions to theater restoration projects. They are dusting off old architectural relics — some dating back to vaudeville days — that closed and sat dormant after being damaged in earthquakes or made redundant by television, cineplexes and other entertainment options. Local officials, like their counterparts in cities across the nation, are betting that their investments will bring cultural capital to rundown neighborhoods, particularly downtowns, and spur economic activity.”

As iPod’s video capability continues to gain credibility in the marketplace, Ty Burr wonders where movies are headed. “This could be insanity. Or it could be the way our kids may someday watch movies: if not on an iPod, then on a similar portable device bigger than a postage stamp and smaller than a kitchen television. Rend your garments and wail over the death of the big-screen experience all you want, movies are slowly and unstoppably becoming disassociated from the theaters in which we’ve been seeing them for more than a century.”

It’s TV Turn-Off Week again, that time of year when the culture police beg us all to reconnect our brains and find something, anything, to do other than watching the tube. “Consider, however, before you reach for the remote, the holes you’d have in your education if you’d never watched television. From geo-politics to physics, through romance and relationship advice, to grand philosophical ideas and simple, helpful, practical hints, it’s all there when you turn on your television.”

The CBC says it will eliminate 79 design jobs, from set builders and costume makers to makeup artists and hairstylists in Toronto. “We’re sad about this. It is an end of an era. For 50 years, there has been in-house design at CBC, and now there is not going to be.”

There has been an explosion in the number of screenplays jockeying for attention. “Last year, some 40,000 screenplays were registered by the Writers Guild of America, and, since relatively few screenwriters go to the trouble to seek this early-stage copyright protection, the officials there reckon this figure represents only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.”