Category: media

Movie trailers have become an artform intheir own right. “At the multiplex, it is now common for a theater to present seven, sometimes 10 trailers before the feature film (as is the case now with the latest “Star Wars” episode).” Now there’s a festival to screen the best of them. “At the Golden Trailers, known as the Trailzees, organizers showed 95. It was like some kind of extreme scientific experiment you would perform with crack monkeys in cages. If it were legal.”

The Illinois legislature votes to ban sales of violent or sexually explicit video games to minors. “Under the legislation, clerks who knowingly sell adult video games to minors could be fined $1,000. They could defend themselves by showing they did not know the buyer was a minor or that they followed the industry ratings on the games.”

More and more radio stations are abandoning the rock music format. “With the share of people age 18-34 listening to modern-rock stations down more than 20 percent in the past five years – and with thriving numbers for 13-21-year-olds, a demo some big advertisers don’t care about – rock radio should be on a quest to redefine itself. But it’s not. “

“Forty years ago this Memorial Day weekend, “The Sound of Music” was not just the summer movie of 1965. It was the spring, fall and winter one, too, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, it remains the third-biggest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo. It hit the Billboard Top 40 video sales chart shortly after it became one of the first movies ever released on home video in 1979, and still holds the chart’s longevity record, of more than 300 weeks and counting.”

Star Wars is a juggernaut that has little to do with whether or not it is a good movie (which many critics say it is not). “Whether the final Star Wars installment is good or bad seems largely irrelevant. Regardless of what ink-stained critics aver, the benighted masses that queue up at theaters at 3 in the morning will continue to debate the philosophical intricacies of C-3PO, Anakin Skywalker and Count Dooku with all the gravity and entrail scrutiny with which monastics once pondered Cartesian dualism.”

A character from the original Star Trek TV show has agreed to star in an internet fan film that continues the series story line. “The actor’s appearance in the yet-to-be-made film, titled To Serve All My Days, is a watershed: it marks the first time in the internet age that a regular player from the much-loved show has reprised his role in a fan-produced project.”

Recent political fighting over American public television has David Shaw wondering why we still need PBS…”We now live in a cable world, a “500-channel universe,” and while I would not argue that many of these cable offerings match PBS at its best, they (and Fox) do provide many alternatives to the three original networks we had in 1967.”

“With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained – a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood. Studios have made more on DVD sales and licensing products than on theatrical releases for some time. Now, technologies like TiVo and video-on-demand are keeping even more people at home.”

The latest Star Wars movie becomes the highest-grossing movie of 2005 after only six days. “Sith set yet another record Tuesday by surpassing last summer’s Spider-Man 2 to secure the biggest six-day gross. The film already has records for the biggest two-day, three-day, four-day and five-day grosses, biggest opening day and single day gross in history ($50 million), as well as the biggest four-day opening ($158.4 million).”

Does American media need reform? More than 2,400 people gathered recently in St. Louis to talk about it. One issue? “In a very near future, high-definition television, telephone service, radio, and the internet could all be reliably piped into homes, cars, and portable devices through a single wireless service provider. The cable and telephone companies are banking on that destiny. Municipal wireless networks are an alternative, by which local governments offer low-cost or free use of high-speed internet as a public utility rather than a private luxury. But — surprise — bills banning municipal wireless have been recently passed in 11 states and are being considered in a dozen more, including Texas.”