Category: media

AO Scott likes the best of today’s movies. “The good movies may be doing just fine — they may even be better than ever — but I can’t shake the gloomy feeling that the bad movies just aren’t as good as they used to be. Now, by bad I don’t mean actually incompetent or unpleasant to watch. Nor am I referring to movies that have become fodder for slumming, tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-camp enjoyment. What I mean is that a vital strain of American filmmaking — unpretentious, easily ignored by polite opinion, the opposite of respectable — may be in crisis, and that this malaise may be in danger of spreading upward and outward, robbing the best and the worst alike of intensity and conviction.”

A new DVD digital scan process promises to deliver movies that approach the quality of a 35 millimeter print. “The scenes look as brilliant as anything I’ve seen on a video disc — and better than any video of a color movie that was shot 35 to 40 years ago. Colors are saturated and natural. Gardens have dozens of shades of green. Flesh tones are uncannily lifelike. Shadows look like shadows, not gray blots. Motions are smooth, not jumpy.”

As Howard Stern gets forced off the radio airwaves by the morality police, satellite radio execs hope Stern will jump to them. “Like cable television, satellite radio does not face federal indecency scrutiny because it is only available to paid subscribers. So the indecency dust-up has satellite radio companies executives salivating.”

The Nielsen company’s new “people meters” to monitor TV viewership have come “under attack from television networks, minority groups and even lawmakers when a test of its electronic “people meters,” newly installed in select New York homes, began reporting a sharp decrease in viewership for television shows that feature minorities. Because the current system — a decades-old technique involving week-long diaries that are mailed to the homes — had never yielded such a drastic swing, the critics contended that the new technique must somehow be unreliable.”

Should parents not let their toddlers watch TV? That’s what the new study says. “It’s worth remembering that there are some significant flaws in the study, including that results were based solely on interviews with children’s parents, who may not have accurately recollected how much television their kids watch. Still, it’s hard to ignore the findings that, of 1,345 children ages 1 and 3, the risk of developing attention problems by age 7 increased by roughly 10 percent for every hour of television watched daily.”

One of Canada’s most venerable arts institutions is in an unexpected financial crisis. The Banff Television Foundation yesterday “confirmed that the 33-person operation, cash-strapped and burdened with debt, sought protection yesterday from its creditors in a Calgary court. The organization mounts cultural events such as the 25-year-old Banff Television Festival.” Officially, the foundation is blaming the SARS epidemic and the war in Iraq for much of its fiscal decline, but sources inside the organization are whispering that a pattern of mismanagement is the real culprit.

The makers of the Kazaa file-sharing software have made some big changes to the team of lawyers defending them from charges of aiding and abetting piracy. The shakeup in the legal team occurred after the Australian recording industry launched a lawsuit against the company. The new lawsuit charges that Kazaa’s very existence constitutes a breach of fair trade practices, and that the company engages in “misleading and deceptive conduct.”

Passion of the Christ may or may not be a good movie. But it’s breaking box office records around the world and making a ton of money. “It’s clear that the film has tapped into something which Hollywood normally avoids like the plague: Strong, assertive religious belief. Mel Gibson, who directed and financed the film himself outside the usual channels, will make a fortune from his enterprise, but it mirrors his strong belief.”

US film critics have named Mafia boss Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, as the greatest movie character of all time.”

The soundtrack to Mel Gibson’s controversial film about Jesus’s last hours has been certified gold after selling 500,000 copies in February alone.