Category: media

The Italian government says it will sell off 30 percent of RAI, the country’s public broadcaster. The sale should be complete by the end of the year. “A media reform law passed in 2004 eased restrictions on media ownership and paved the way for the partial sale of RAI and some of its branches. The controversial law once again raised accusations that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – a billionaire media tycoon as well as a head of state with influence on the public broadcaster – faced a conflict of interest.”

Get ready for a slew of films and TV shows about war on American TV. “Not since World War II has Hollywood so embraced an ongoing conflict. It took years for pop culture to tackle the Korean and Vietnam wars, and it took time before the country was ready to be entertained by those politically charged conflicts. With Iraq, however, and after 9/11, all bets are off.”

The Oscars are changing the way some of its awards are presented. “Some winners will not go on stage to pick up their awards – while in other categories, all five nominees will get on stage before being told who has won. The traditional system where the winner walks up to the podium after their name is read out will also still be used.”

The EZ-D is a disposable DVD, and while Disney has abandoned it, others are giving it a try. “The EZ-D was marketed to consumers as a way to avoid late fees from movie rental shops. Once opened, the EZ-D can be played unlimited times in 48 hours. Then a chemical compound on the disc combines with oxygen, rendering the DVD opaque and unreadable after two days. Movie fans can throw away the expired disk or pack it off to a special recycling facility to be recycled.”

Last year, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe “malfunction” at the Superbowl sparked months of “morality” debates and crackdowns. “This year an old guy sang at halftime and a cheap dot-com ad — now there’s a Super Bowl chestnut — tried to send up the whole affair and failed. Does this mean we’re a more civilized, less sex-obsessed, fully cultured country? Nah, it was still mostly beer, boobs, cars and head-crunching football all day long.”

Critics are torn when it comes to writing about the surprise ending of Million Dollar Baby. “Plot twists are sacred in entertainment culture, as lovingly protected as slumbering infants. And people who give away surprise endings are shunned and ostracized, treated as if they’ve raffled off nuclear secrets to terrorists. Apparently, the worst sin a critic can commit — judging from the zealous care with which many critics announce that they are tiptoeing delicately around certain plot points or earnestly warn that they’re about to spill the beans — is to mistakenly give away a surprise ending.”

“Jamie Foxx was named best lead male movie actor for his portrayal of the late R&B legend Ray Charles in Ray, and Hilary Swank won best female lead actor for playing a scrappy boxer in Million Dollar Baby on Saturday night at the 11th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. Foxx and Swank both won acting awards three weeks ago at the Golden Globes, and both are nominated for Oscars. It remains to be seen whether the SAG awards will live up to their reputation as a prognosticator of the Academy Awards.”

Eyes on the Prize, the acclaimed documentary series focusing on the civil rights movement, has not been seen in more than a decade, due to copyright laws governing snippets of film and music used in the series. “In late January, members of Downhill Battle, a group of four young activists, appalled that there is so little access to the film, made a digitized copy of the series available through its website.” But the activists are now drawing the ire not only of copyright enforcers, but of the filmmakers themselves, who are preparing to renew their expired rights.

The recent controversy over an episode of the children’s program Postcards From Buster, which featured the main character learning about sugar mapling from a family with two women at its helm, has sent PBS scurrying for cover, and has conservatives once again suggesting that public broadcasting is incurably liberal. Caught in the middle of the firestorm is an 11-year-old girl from Vermont who was to be the star of the episode. The “immoral” family featured in the show is her family, the two mothers are her two mothers, and she doesn’t quite understand what is so objectionable about her demonstration of how to tap a maple.

Robert deNiro’s performance as boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull stands as the defining cinematic portrait of pure human rage, and the film may be the perfect representation of the strength and weakness of the American character ideal. “The violence that defines [LaMotta] — and that part of the American character he represents — emerges as simultaneously the source of his great success and the agent of his pathetic undoing… Violence is his path to freedom (sound familiar?) and the means by which he liberates himself from the violent dictates of others, from the despotic gangsters who run his neighbourhood and control his sport. Yet, the same violence is a manifestation of his self-hatred and his sexual insecurity and his paranoid jealousy.”