Category: media

The number of pirated DVDs made and seized in the UK is up 133 perfcent in the first half of this year. Police “seized 386,569 UK-made fake DVDs from January to June, as UK seizures of pirate DVDs from abroad fell. UK criminals earn £600m per year from pirate DVDs, an anti-piracy campaign fronted by TV host Jonathan Ross said.”

The Venice Film Festival has an uncertain future. “Plans to replace the festival’s current home have stalled once again and there is increasing uncertainty as plans for a new iceberg-shaped Palace of Cinema remain at the drawing board stage. ‘It is a question of money, and we should not be ashamed. Cinema is, after all, an industry’.”

Why are bad talent shows such hot business on TV? “Who’s to blame for those gladiatorial talent shows if not the millions of people who ring in to register their votes? Light entertainment is now a slave to the users of mobile phones, which allows you to understand why phone companies are falling over themselves to sponsor these shows and raise their profits. It’s a fake new democracy: people get to vote for their favourite bad singer and feel they’re involved in creating an entertainment phenomenon, while raising their own personal connection to the processes of fame.”

The city of Salzburg is considering building a museum for “The Sound of Music.” “Discussions are under way to create a centre about the Von Trapp family, whose story was told in the 1965 Hollywood classic about a family singing troupe that flees the Nazis. Around 300,000 people visit Salzburg each year simply because of the movie.”

While the CBC labour dispute is on, some employees of CBC radio are podcasting. Is this a decent substitute for those missing Canada’s public broadcaster? Murray Whyte samples the shows and reports that so far podcasting is a poor substitute…

Reflecting the growing Hispanic influence in America, “starting Sept. 19, ABC will offer its entire primetime entertainment lineup in Spanish — saying that it’s the first English-language broadcast network to do so on such a large scale — through a combination of closed-captioning and dubbing.”

A river of anxiety runs through this fall’s American TV lineup. “A dominant theme of the fall season is that of invasion – and survival. In many, though by no means all, of the new shows, the nation is under attack, but is fighting back, led by its best and brightest.”

Ang Lee’s gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain wins the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. “George Clooney’s film Good Night, and Good Luck had been the hot favourite among film critics to take the Golden Lion on the last night of the annual 11-day festival.”

“The [Canadian] government has appointed screenwriter and journalist Guy Fournier as new chairman of the CBC’s board of directors, prompting hope among the broadcaster’s locked-out employees that the board will move to resolve the four-week-old dispute. Fournier, who was also instrumental in founding Quebec’s Télévision Quatre-Saisons network, was named to the board for a four-year term in February and takes over a top job that has been vacant throughout the build-up to the labour showdown.” The union representing the locked-out CBC workers made hopeful noises about Fournier’s appointment, but an independent watchdog group says that a change in board leadership will likely do little to change CBC president Robert Rabinovitch’s hard-line stance towards his employees.

Film buffs are, by nature, always looking for the next hot thing in moviegoing, but sometimes, even the devotees need a push to begin looking seriously at unfamiliar work. So goes the thinking behind the Toronto International Film Festival’s “Planet Africa” project, which has recently been retired after ten years of specifically promoting African films at the fest. The idea is not to create a one-time celebration of underappreciated cultures, but to bring those cultures permanently onto the North American radar screen by making them a valued part of the festival.