Category: media

For 25 years, the Hawaii Film Festival has been plugging along, flying more or less completely under the Hollywood radar. So Roger Ebert was surprised this year to attend the fest and discover something that looks quite a bit like an event on the rise. “I remember Sundance and Toronto in their earliest days, when everybody at the festival could fit into one hotel banquet room. Look at them now. Then I look at the enormous crowds at Hawaii, its 200 films, its creative programming, and I think, yes, the dream that Jeannette Paulson had when she started the festival 25 years ago is becoming a reality.”

“The biggest post-Soviet film blockbuster packing the country’s multiplexes is a bloody tear-jerker about a topic many Russians would rather forget – the 10-year war that resulted in the Soviet Union’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. For many here the film also is apparently read not only as a metaphor for Russia’s Chechen quagmire, but even for the very collapse of the Soviet Union. The movie, Company 9, has grossed $23.47 million since its Sept. 29 opening and is close to doubling the total receipts here of the latest installments of the popular Lord of the Rings and Star Wars films.”

CBC president Robert Rabinovitch appeared before a parliamentary committee Thursday to answer questions about the company’s recent lockout. “The questioning from the members of Parliament on the committee was sharp and accusatory, blaming Rabinovitch for locking out workers for nearly two months and breaking management’s commitment to CBC viewers and listeners, let alone to its workers.”

Remember back before recording companies started to make buckets of money from downloadable music, when they were so desperate to stop illegal file-trading that they started suing hundreds of college kids for millions of dollars? Yeah, well, they never actually stopped doing that. This week, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 745 new “John Doe” lawsuits against users of various peer-to-peer networks whom the RIAA suspects of passing copyrighted material. Why the “John Doe” caveat? The RIAA doesn’t actually know who the offenders are, so they effectively sue the user’s IP address, then try to sue or intimidate colleges and other internet providers into revealing the identities of the people behind the computer signature.

The CBC lockout is over, and programming has returned to normal for most Canadians. But why did such a fiasco have to occur in the first place? Since CBC president Robert Rabinovitch was hired in 1999, there have actually been four work stoppages, and Michael Posner says that all fingers should be pointing squarely at Rabinovitch and his overly aggressive, even evangelical style of management. “By some bizarre inversion, the obsession with process and efficiency had actually become the primary operational focus. An entire generation of journalists and producers were being trained to think like actuaries.”

A record 58 movies have been entered in contention for the Oscars. Iraq, Costa Rica and Fiji have movies under consideration for the first time.

When Aaron McGruder’s blunt and unapologetic comic strip, The Boondocks, hit newspapers in the late 1990s, it sparked enough outrage to make even Garry Trudeau flinch. Now, the strip is migrating to TV (albeit late-night cable,) and McGruder has obviously refused to tone down his inflammatory style for wide distribution. The hope, of course, is that Boondocks will be an underground hit with the disenfranchised left. “But can underage conspiracy theories, racial paranoia and offensive stereotypes come across as funny on television? Can you really say the n-word so many times and still get laughs, shock or outrage?”

Admit it, men. When Apple rolled out the video iPod last week, your first thought (possibly your second, after “who would possibly need such a thing?”) was, “I wonder if that baby is porn-capable?” After all, every other new technology eventually seems to become fodder for the frighteningly large adult-entertainment industry, so why not the little jukebox that could? Well, don’t hold your breath. “With a couple of exceptions, porno producers are in no hurry to provide stag movies for the iPod, thanks to fears of a public outcry and a government crackdown.”

Time Warner Cable is offering its customers the ability to “rewind” shows. “With Start Over, digital cable customers who miss the beginning of certain shows, but who tune in before the end, can push a button and go back to the start. They also can pause and rewind the show — but can’t fast-forward through commercials. The service lets viewers act on impulse or because of unexpected delays. They don’t have to plan ahead to record a show, as they do with digital video recorders.”

Mark Cuban believes that Hollywood’s distribution system requires radical change. “He wants to do away with artificial windows so that consumers can buy a movie ‘how they want it, when they want it, where they want it.’ He argues that movies should be made available simultaneously on cable television, DVD, and in movie theaters, letting consumers decide whether they prefer to see it at home (even if it means paying a premium for a new release) or in the theater. This is not mere theory.”