Category: media

“Telefilm Canada and Quebec’s film agency SODEC have rejected the four proposals submitted to receive funding for a Montreal film festival… Unhappy with the Montreal World Film Festival and its director, Serge Losique, the government agencies called for proposals Sept. 7. The call came after a study highlighted several problems with the existing festival, compared to others run in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax.”

Satellite radio is gaining steam in the U.S., but in Canada, the technology still hasn’t managed to get the government’s stamp of approval. In a country which is deathly afraid of being overrun by American culture, the notion of a national radio service exempt from Canadian-first cultural rules is a controversial one. But satellite companies argue that their service would actually help independent Canadian musicians.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is offering a new course studying the TV show “American Idol.” Beginning in January, students at UNCC will earn three credit hours for the class “Examining ‘American Idol’ Through Musical Critique.”

A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor’s weekly variety show focused on the fictional prairie town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, will shortly be going Hollywood. Director Robert Altman and a cast chock full of Hollywood bigs will be collaborating with Keillor on a movie version of the show, with filming to take place during live performances this winter in St. Paul.

Hollywood’s brief dalliance with political filmmaking appears to have been short-lived. As the election season steamrolls towards its conclusion, big-budget studios are turning back to that old Hollywood standby, escapism, to sell tickets. While left-leaning documentaries have done big business this year, “politically oriented films like Paramount’s Team America: World Police, which has taken in only about $23 million so far, and The Manchurian Candidate… with about $66 million in ticket sales, have been disappointments at the box office.”

It’s been such a lacklustre year for movies there’s little buzz about which movies might contend for Oscars. “Most years, November and December bring a number of sweeping epics and ambitious dramas to woo Oscar voters, but this year only a few such films are left to open before the end of the year.”

It’s the latest in high-tech advertising. Little boxes are being installed along roadsides that detect which radio stations drivers are listening to. “The monitoring aims to help retailers choose where to advertise by giving them a snapshot of which stations consumers tune into as they drive by their businesses. The most enthusiastic MobilTrak adopters: auto dealers, who generally believe that 80 percent of their business is with people who live or work within 10 miles of a given dealership.”

How important are movie reviews to the success of a movie? Not much. “A survey of 2,000 people by three business school researchers found that television ads and recommendations from others were the biggest influences on movie-going habits, each factor cited by about 70 percent of respondents. Professional reviews ran a distant third at 33 percent, while online ratings on such sites as Yahoo and the Internet Movie Database influenced 28 percent.”

Who’s in line to run Canada’s Telefilm? Someone a little more Toronto-friendly? “Telefilm also needs someone who can make peace with key English-language producers in Toronto. They have become increasingly critical in public of Telefilm’s recent emphasis on movies it deems commercial rather than artistic (though many of these have tanked at the box office).”