Category: media

“In what is surely the most bizarre commercial endorsement since Eleanor Roosevelt did an ad for Good Luck Margarine in 1959, the ailing pontiff has been recruited, however unwittingly, to help hawk “The Passion of the Christ,” as Mel Gibson’s film about Jesus’s final 12 hours is now titled. While Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed a margarine for charity, John Paul’s free plug is being exploited by the Gibson camp to aid the movie star’s effort to recoup the $25 million he personally sank into a biblical drama filmed in those crowd-pleasing tongues of Latin and Aramaic.”

Foreign investors are putting money into Bollywood films. The Indian film industry is the most prolific in the world, turning out 1000 movies a year. “The cost of producing and marketing the average Indian film ranges from $2 million to $4 million, a fraction of the average cost of a Hollywood film that ranges from $70 million to $80 million, industry observers say.”

The BBC has been blasted for the ratings some of its new digital channels have attracted (or not attracted). But finally there seem to be some shows that people want to watch. And besides, writes Torin Douglas, complaints or compliments – what really counts is that they’re talking about you.

If American TV execs are panicking about their ratings being down, they’re not showing it to critics. “This TV season, viewership for NBC is down 9 per cent, for CBS it’s down 3 per cent, ABC is down 5 per cent and Fox isn’t down at all, but it isn’t growing either. In fact Fox can thank a handful of avidly watched baseball games for its holding-steady starts. You’d think this might cause a touch of panic at NBC, for instance, but devil the bit of it.”

It’s been 20 years since Robert Redford took over the Sundance Film Festical. Since then, the festival has “morphed from the “granola Sundance” of the 1980s into the “cell-phone Sundance” of the 1990s and now, as the shoestring cinéastes of the early days, true anti-studio aesthetes like Jim Jarmusch, Victor Nuñez and Allison Anders, were shoved aside by Hollywood heavies looking for the Next Big Thing among talented newcomers.”

Yes, National Public Radio just got a gift of $200 million. But “the truth is that the Kroc gift will have no effect on the financial needs or the fundraising efforts of NPR’s 750 member stations. Instead of receiving financial support from NPR, these stations have to pay for NPR programming.” And the gift might even have a negative impact as donors assume public radio is now awash in cash.

The Sundance Film Festival was famously conceived to showcase independent film, and encourage aspiring young directors. But it’s been so successful that it’s now difficult to separate the world of the indies from mainstream Hollywood. A new book drives home that point by looking at the history of the festival, as well as at supposedly “independent” studio Miramax, which was actually sold to Disney more than a decade ago. Of course, “Sundance wouldn’t be Sundance without people grousing about celebrities, all while running from movies to parties featuring those same celebrities,” so it’s possible that the whole debate is missing the point.

It’s been decades since comedian George Carlin first gained fame with an unprintable routine he called “Seven Words You Can’t Say On The Radio.” So broadcasters and consumers nationwide were stunned recently, when the FCC announced that U.S. broadcast standards had not been violated during a live awards show broadcast on NBC, when the singer Bono used the word “fucking.” The word was allowable, said the FCC’s board of governors, because Bono had used it as an emphatic adjective, rather than as a verb meant to describe a sexual act. That’s a bit too far into the realm of semantics for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who is now pushing for a flat ban of the word.

“In the late 1990s, a half-dozen online film companies – each promising to revolutionize movie viewing – were among the noisiest participants at the Sundance Film Festival. A few years later, the revolution has stalled. Most online film channels have disappeared (Steven Spielberg’s Pop, AntEye, Digital Entertainment Net, Scour and Pseudo), with some changing direction (Eveo is now a purveyor of rich media). The two leaders, AtomFilms and IFilm, have settled into relatively mellow maturity. But online film festivals, an offshoot of the commercial film channel, are stepping up to fill the void.”

This was a terrible year for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, writes Rex Reed. “An award from the New York Film Critics Circle used to be the most powerful and prestigious of all the prizes in the overcrowded traffic jam of back-patting cinematic supermarket giveaway shows. People who thumbed their noses at the Academy Awards were always proud to accept a NYFCC award, and always said so onstage and in print. This is no longer true. Hasn’t been since the year the NYFCC named Cameron Diaz the best actress of the year. This year, more than one person present was overheard comparing this once-august event to an awards-show spoof on Saturday Night Live.”