Category: media

“The 57th Cannes Film Festival heads into its closing weekend with no clear favorite for the Palme d’Or, and with critics generally agreeing there have been good films but no sensation that has pulled ahead of the pack. The most rapturous reception was for Michael Moore’s Bush-whacking documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but the applause was as much for its politics as its filmmaking.” In fact, Roger Ebert says that some of the best films he’s seen this year at Cannes are playing on the fringes of the festival, and aren’t even officially entered in the competition.

Could Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 win Cannes’s big prize? “Trade paper Screen International ranked Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 as a leading contender, based on the views of critics from around the world. The controversial film received a 15-minute standing ovation when it was screened at the festival on Monday. The last documentary to win the Palme d’Or was The World Of Silence in 1956.”

European Union delegates and film directors met together at Cannes. “The meeting resulted in a pledge to try and boost European film, which is under threat from Hollywood dominance. They also wanted European films to ‘cross borders’ within the continent.”

Michael Moore is a hero to many American liberals, but with his tendency towards self-promotion, overhype, and constant broadsides against the right wing, he can also occasionally be a liability to his own cause. Moore, of course, is currently riding high on the wave of publicity he created when he announced to the world that those nasty right-wingers at Disney were trying to censor his film. In fact, Moore and his distribution company are so concerned about the attacks they believe will shortly be launched against him that they have hired a cadre of former Clinton/Gore spin doctors to help with the marketing push.

“It took five separate screenings to accommodate the press demand to see Michael Moore’s heavily anticipated anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, and when it came to turning up the political heat here, neither the movie nor its maker failed to disappoint. The audience at a afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation.”

Increasingly, scholars are studying the history of radio. “Occupying a research niche between the older, higher-profile province of film studies and the more cutting-edge terrain of television studies — and aided by an obsessive Internet-linked web of buffs devoted to old-time radio — scholars are shuffling through the metal disks, wax records, and audiotapes that compose the archival remnants of the original broadcasting medium. Collectively these researchers seek to break through the static of moving-image centricity in media scholarship and remind us of the first true network of simultaneous mass communications in human history.”

“Hollywood’s thousands of journeymen are losing ground, fast, as age-old presumptions and ways of doing business collide with new market forces. In the past few years, the cultural juggernaut known as reality TV and other factors have turned a difficult job market into an untenable one for many of the entertainment industry’s rank-and-file actors, artists and technicians. And those jobs that remain often pay less than they did years ago as studios are forced to surrender more of their films’ budgets to above-the-line talent, new technology reduces the length of shoots and nonunion shops grab ever bigger shares of the entertainment industry’s myriad professions.”

This is the time of year TV execs decide what’s going to make their schedules next season. “This year, however, a dark horse has charged onto the TV scene: animation, a genre that to date has provided some of the edgiest and most sophisticated shows on TV. NBC, Fox, the SciFi Channel, and Comedy Central – to name a few – plan to add animated fare to their menu next season. Just as “The Simpsons” essentially saved Fox Network 15 years ago, animated cartoons could become the small screen’s pinch hitters, even if they’ve been benched for a while.”

Protesting workers shut down the Cannes Film Festival for a time on Saturday. “The demonstration by about 500 entertainment industry workers over government cuts to their unemployment benefits paralysed the seafront area of the Riviera town for about two hours.”

Heads of the world’s movie studios meet in Cannes to talk about how to shut down piracy. “Executives from Hollywood, France, India, China, and Russia held an “unprecedented” meeting on Sunday. They said directors should be involved in the campaign because “they are the major victims” of piracy.”