Category: media

US broadcast networks are suffering the summer doldrums. “More viewers are watching cable than all the big networks combined. In June, about 57.7 percent of the TVs in the U.S. were watching cable, up 7.4 percent from the year before.”

“Three foul words, including the F-word, have been bleeped from the new PBS drama Cop Shop, much to the chagrin of Richard Dreyfuss, its star and executive producer.” Why the exorcising? FOFCC – Fear of the FCC.

The new R-Card allows teenagers to see “R”-rated movies without an adult. But “the problem with the R-card is that all R-rated movies are not equal. The rating has been assigned to movies as diverse as the charming “Billy Elliot” (theatrically released as an R for bad language and brief sexual references, but later edited for a PG-13 on video) and the ultra-violent “Kill Bill” (rated R for constant carnage as well as strong language and sexual violence).”

Staff at Voice of America claim that their network is being ruined. “Nearly half of Voice of America’s (VOA) 1,000 staffers have signed a petition protesting what they call the ”piece-by-piece” dismantling of the 62-year-old service, which reaches 87 million people in 44 languages.”

The passing of Marlon Brando has Renée Graham wondering where the movie icons of today are. Sure there are stars, but “there’s nothing special to grasp or hang onto. Absent is that extraordinary, almost otherworldly sizzle that inspires our adulation and those performances that become a blueprint for behavior, both good and bad.”

Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ have been surprise hits this year. But their audiences are very different. “The top theaters for “Fahrenheit” have been in urban, traditionally Democratic strongholds, including Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay Area, Chicago and Boston. The highest grossing theaters for “Passion” were typically more suburban and far more widely dispersed, from Texas and New Mexico to Ohio, Florida and Orange County, Calif.”

Is PBS slanting right because it gave conservative Tucker Carlson his own show? “If the debate, then, is whether PBS is allowed to have a conservative on the air, well, that’s the kind of ridiculousness that paints liberals into a corner and makes PBS look bad in the process, as if it knew it was biased all along.”

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman doesn’t have the cachet he once had. “It is perhaps frivolous to speak of a great artist ‘falling from fashion.’ But many of the values that are so highly prized in artworks of the early 21st century — irony, multiculturalism, a certain breeziness of affect — are quite different from those that Bergman offers. He is an unapologetically “high culture” European modernist, from a very specific time and place, one deeply influenced by the Lutheran faith (which he abandoned but not without a struggle), by psychoanalysis and existentialism, and by the dreamlike chamber plays of his great countryman August Strindberg. To this heritage, he has added his own filmic innovations, his own anxieties and obsessions, and a matchless linear intensity.”

The CBC is looking for a new executive to run its English-language TV netork. The “job isn’t quite the plum it was even 10 years ago. The television universe is more crowded, competitive and confused than ever. Even with the continued popularity of Hockey Night in Canada, the CBC, like most traditional broadcasters, has lost audience share to the sundry cable and satellite-delivered services out there. Then, of course, there’s the constant insecurity over just how much the CBC can expect each year from its parliamentary appropriation.”

AO Scott ponders the phenomena of Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11’s success at the box office. “It was clear long before anyone had seen a frame of either “Passion” or “Fahrenheit” that what audiences would witness was the uncompromised, unfiltered vision of a strong-willed, stubborn and bloody-minded director. Is it too idealistic of me to think that this freedom from compromise is part of what attracted audiences? Perhaps more than ever before, the movie studios are ruled by timidity, anxiously tailoring their releases to avoid giving offense. Yes, they sometimes engage in the mock-provocations of sex and brutality, but these tepid buttons are pushed much less forcefully than they were 30 years ago. For the most part, movies, intent on maintaining an illusion of consensus, tread cautiously around the thornier thickets of our civic life.”