Category: media

The CBC’s leaders have failed Canada’s public broadcaster. “The longer they allow their lockout of 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild to grind on — it’s now well into its fifth week — the more precarious CBC’s position becomes. True, negotiations are back on, but the hard slogging of the big issues still lies ahead. Meanwhile, listeners tired of hearing the same old classical tunes on a loop are fleeing to their CD players and iPods. News junkies are turning to CTV Newsnet or CNN. And now the door has been opened to a nasty national dialogue about CBC’s alleged political bias.”

Canadian independent producer Lions Gate has made a bid to buy DVD producer Image Entertainment. “Lions Gate, which is based in British Columbia with offices in Santa Monica, California, announced plans last year to make strategic acquisitions. In May, it considered, but then dropped, an effort to bid for British production company HIT Entertainment. Image said Lions Gate was interested in the depth of its library of programs and films and growing music business.”

Three of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s films will be remade. “Dutch and US co-producers will re-make 06, Blind Date and Interview in early 2006, Screen International said. In July radical Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and stabbing van Gogh.”

Conservative groups have turned the documentary “March of the Penguins” and “its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.” This is “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing. This is the first movie they’ve enjoyed since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ This is ‘The ‘Passion of the Penguins.’ In part, the movie’s appeal to conservatives may lie in its soft-pedaling of topics like evolution and global warming.”

“The poll taken by The Associated Press and TV Guide shows viewers actually believe reality TV is primarily bogus. A whopping 82% of the respondents said the shows, ranging from “American Idol” to “The Apprentice” and “Survivor,” are either “totally made up” or “mostly distorted.”

Two movie studios are each claiming ownership of a film. “Two competing studios were each claiming to have bought the independent film “Thank You for Smoking,” a political satire by the first-time director Jason Reitman, financed by the first-time producer David Sacks.”

Keeping or attracting film production in Louisiana is a difficult but important task. “Film production has become a crucial source of income for Louisiana, which in 2002 adopted among the most aggressive tax incentives in the country. An estimated 20 movies will be shot in the state this year, with a direct economic benefit estimated at $125 million.”

Louisiana’s movie industry appeals to producers to shoot their films in the state. “Yes, we are wounded; but we are healing and we need your help to continue doing that.”

Susan Sontag’s last writing about movies was in 1995; “in retrospect, it was her farewell to film criticism. Renunciation, along with such reverberant partners as epiphany, retraction, and reaffirmation, was one of her familiar dramatic modes. She brought a certain histrionic (i.e., Parisian) quality into American intellectual life—position-taking as existential drama—and, if you regard her seriously, the portentous turning points of her journey have to be endured. What she renounced, of course, was nothing like regular movie criticism. Sontag wrote only a dozen or so articles about film. Yet all of them were substantial, both as intellectual performance and as a challenge to conventional assumptions about movie form and routine reviewing.”

“In the last few years, publishers have taken a cue from the booming world of fan fiction and have begun commissioning novels based on famous games. It’s now such a successful cottage industry that when you wander into any Barnes & Noble, there are shelves groaning under the weight of books written from Resident Evil, Halo, Tomb Raider and MechWarrior. Consider it the ultimate port: cutting-edge digital entertainment delivered via a media platform that’s 200 years old.”