Category: media

Marco Muller, former director of the Locarno Film Festival, has been named director of the Venice Film Festival and will “run the Venice event for four years. The festival has undergone a turbulent few years, with changes of top staff amid charges of political interference.”

Alan Artner looks at “The Passion of the Christ” with an art critic’s perspective. “Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is turning out to be many things to many people, but to me it’s primarily a film in a genre that has been deeply indebted to other forms of visual art: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking.”

What is it about males 18-34? “They are the most sought-after demographic – early adopters of technology, tastemakers and trend shapers who influence much of what we see on television, the Internet, billboards and in the movies. They are the muses for The Howard Stern Show and Jackass: The Movie.”

It would certainly seems so, given what’s currently on the air. And there seems to be little creativity coming along to take the place of the shows going off the air. A panel of TV folk gets together to talk about the state of the art: “Though everyone agreed that the traditional sitcom was coming to the end of its dominant era, they said that what is ahead is visible only in fragments. Forces like talk radio and the Internet have made the tried-and-true development process too slow in responding to the cultural climate; the adult-content comedies available on cable have made conflicting demands on the networks, both to sauce up their offerings and to offer clean-cut alternatives. And financial pressures are always an issue…”

The new American crackdown on broadcast “obscenity” has claimed its first public radio personality. Commentator Sandra Tsing Loh, who is known nationally for her contributions to Public Radio International’s Marketplace and This American Life, has been fired from her regular position at Los Angeles-area station KCRW after using an expletive in one of her Sunday monologues. Loh claims that the word was supposed to be bleeped out in editing, but the station claims it was a deliberate attempt to flout broadcast standards, and, in a telling statement, called the firing “a precautionary measure to show the station has distanced itself from Loh in case the FCC investigates the matter.”

The Oscars hadn’t even ended on Sunday night when the cries of “BO-ring!” began to be heard ringing from every armchair in North America. And yes, Hollywood has been a pretty yawn-inducing place of late, says Tina Brown. But what do we expect of the film industry when our culture has become so paranoid, so easily offended, and so willing to pounce on anyone deemed controversial, or worse, un-American? Add in the self-appointed fashionistas who make every star’s life hell at every new awards show, and it’s no wonder that Hollywood seems ready to retreat into ultra-safe territory.

Lost amid all the bluster over intellectual property and illegal file-swapping is the undeniable fact that a large part of America’s cultural history wouldn’t exist without some form of piracy. The film and recording industries got their start through the work of individuals skirting the edges of copyright and patent law, and radio still operates under a bizarre set of rules in which authors and composers are paid for the right to broadcast their work, but performers aren’t. Is online file-swapping really any worse than any of these practices?

“Two lawmakers introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate Wednesday to prohibit corporations from selling the personal information of children under the age of 16 without their parents’ consent. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) introduced the Children’s Listbroker Privacy Act to limit the sale of personally identifiable information for purposes of marketing to children, as part of a larger package of legislation intended to help parents combat commercial attacks on their children.”

Why are there so few older characters on Australian TV? And those older characters there are don’t seem realistic. There’s a “failure of local dramas to depict the 60-plus generation as people with sex lives, aspirations, careers and sporting ability. ‘Everyone knows we’re not all young and gorgeous so why doesn’t television show it’?”