Category: media

Actors are considering striking against video game producers. “The companies have refused to open the door to any form of profit participation for those actors who lend their voice, likeness and/or performance to a video game.”

Films about the dark side of America are everywhere at Cannes this year, including a scathing portrait by Danish director Lars von Trier: “We are all under the influence — and it’s a very bad influence — from America,” said the 49-year-old Dane. “In my country everything has to do with America. America is kind of sitting on the world. “America has to do with 60 percent of my brain and all things I experience in my life, and I’m not happy about that,” von Trier said. I’d say 60 percent of my life is American so I am in fact an ‘American’ too. But I can’t go there and vote or change anything there. That is why I make films about America.”

PBS is headed for a political showdown with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “CPB’s drive for political balance on the air could lead to a public or private showdown with PBS over editorial standards. The corporation’s annual production aid to PBS, worth $26.5 million next year, will depend on its approval of the PBS standards on balance and other journalistic issues, now being reviewed by a panel of outside journalists. Further conflict could be expected if CPB hires Tomlinson’s reported candidate for president, Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.”

Sure, there’s plenty of music and video online. But how do you filter it all so you can find what you’re looking for? “This desire for a better multimedia mousetrap has led Internet firms large and small to respond with search engines that can filter results by media type like music or video, similar to how they can for images or news today. Such functionality represents the next battlefield of the Internet search wars, and a potential opportunity for those challenging Google’s crown.”

So VCRs and Tivo and DVDs have changed the ways we watch TV. But has it really changed TV? “Time-shifting was supposed to revolutionize the way we watch TV. But while there’s an undeniable shift towards more consumer control at work here, time-shifting hasn’t changed the overall pattern of viewing TV shows: You still watch a standard rotation of programs — you just get to juggle the rotation to fit your schedule.”

Woody Allen has been the man of the hour thus far at Cannes, and his latest film is generating more buzz than anything else on the screening list. But all the attention still won’t net Allen the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or – his film is being screened out of competition. Still, the French adulation for a filmmaker who is better known for his personal quirks than his movies in America appears to be well justified this time around, as Match Point is being hailed as Allen’s best work in decades.

Those old homemade film reels squirreled away in a box in your attic may just have some value beyond your immediate family. “In Toronto, [two film historians] founded Home Made Movies, a database dedicated to helping people catalogue and preserve the tiny fragments of film, scattered in attics, basements, flea markets and second-hand stores, that they believe serve as significant documents of our informal, domestic social history. Alongside them, an international groundswell with the same priorities has emerged.”

The inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has agreed to investigate some of the activities of CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson, including the hiring of an outside consultant to monitor the political leanings of guests on the PBS public affairs program “Now.”

“The opening ceremonies of the Cannes International Film Festival are, have been and will always remain the most lavishly meaningless event in the world of cinema, compared with which the Oscars resemble a seminar in German philosophy. This is not necessarily a put-down…”

BBC unions have announced they’ll strike on three days over the next month to protest plans to cut more than 3000 jobs. “The unions said the cuts were the most damaging in BBC history. The corporation said it regretted the decision to take industrial action.”