Category: media

As the AIDS epidemic closes in on a quarter-century of global devastation, many of the world’s biggest television networks are embarking on a concerted effort to increase awareness about the disease. For some networks, this means more prominence for news coverage about the epidemic; for others, HIV-positive characters will soon begin finding their way into sitcoms and other staple programming.

Some of the best foreign-language films of the year will have no chance at winning the Academy Award for best foreign language film, due to industry politics and an outmoded set of rules regarding which films can be considered. “Every country designates a group that presents a single film to the Academy, which has special committees that winnow submissions down to the five nominees announced in January.” So what if your country actually managed to crank out more than one Oscar-worthy picture this year? Tough. And if you’re a director with an enemy or two on your country’s panel? Gee, that’s a shame. See you next year. Maybe.

Satellite radio is predicated on the idea that listeners desperate for an escape from the bland sameness of corporate radio will be willing to pay for niche broadcasting aimed directly at them. And certainly, any radio service offering options as diverse as public radio exile Bob Edwards and shock jocks Opie & Anthony must be said to be making good on its claims of wide-ranging service. Currently, the two satellite services available in the U.S. have only 3.1 million subscribers between them, but XM’s subscriber rolls have jumped 19 percent in the months since Edwards was hired away from NPR, and many observers expect the numbers to continue to increase.

Sony, which pioneered a new copy-protected CD in 2002, is abandoning the technology, saying that the anti-piracy message being touted by the recording industry has sunk in sufficiently with consumers to make additional measures unnecessary. The statement appears to be somewhat at odds with the industry’s continued insistence that global music piracy is a serious threat to recording, and the decision to drop copy protection may have more to do with Sony’s expansion into the online music marketplace.

There are a lot of movies being made these days. Perhaps too many. “Each year, as more of them arrive in American theaters – and as an even greater number are left behind to wander the festival circuit in perpetuity – the conditions they face become more starkly Darwinian.” Brilliant films are in ever greater danger of being lost in the crowd, and lowest-common-denominator dreck will always win out if there is Hollywood money behind it. “There may be more variety, more creativity and more money in movies than ever before, but is there a tipping point at which more becomes too much?”

The Chicago International Film Festival turns 40 this year, and in its middle age, it has settled nicely into its role in the film world. The Chicago Fest is not a big event on Hollywood’s calendar, but the organizers have long since come to grips with that fact and, rather than begging for world premieres and striving for recognition from the big studios, “the Chicago event began concentrating more on showing quality films no matter whether they’d screened elsewhere.”

The Recording Industry Association of America has filed another 762 lawsuits against individuals suspected of illegal file-swapping. “Among those sued were students at 26 different colleges and universities, where the prevalence of high-speed networks and cash-poor music fans has led to an explosion of peer-to-peer traffic.” As usual, the RIAA doesn’t actually know the identities of the people they are suing, just their computers’ IP addresses – typically, the industry compels internet service providers to reveal the names behind the codes during legal proceedings.

The new season of American television is sending a strong message that the industry is through with political correctness. In fact, the major networks seem positively giddy about a horrific return to casual sexism and racism, says Alessanda Stanley. “Desperate Housewives is entertaining, but it turns the clock back to pre-Betty Friedan America, lampooning four bored, frustrated, white upper-middle-class ladies who lunch. Boston Legal lets women practice law, but mostly on their backs… Meanwhile, comedy-variety shows are positively reveling in their new-found freedom to be unfair.”

“The Republicans finally have Hollywood’s answer to Michael Moore: ‘Celsius 41.11 – The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die,’ a documentary made in six weeks that is billed as ‘The Truth Behind the Lies of Fahrenheit 9/11!'” Although it premiered in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, box-office hopes aren’t high. For one thing, the Federal Elections Commission has forbidden the film’s producers to advertise it.

When a Hollywood blockbuster purports to have “a message” at its core, or to delve into complicated questions of science and ethics, you can pretty much count on the filmmakers to get all the details of the science wrong in their dogged pursuit of facts that fit neatly within the confines of narrative fiction. This shouldn’t be a problem, of course, since movies are, well, fiction, but when thousands of people claim to get their news from comedy programs and believe that Oregon is located somewhere near Portugal, there’s always a chance that certain knuckleheads could come away from the multiplex convinced that global warming could flood New York next week. All this explains why Chemical and Engineering News is now publishing film reviews…