Category: media

Pop culture is everywhere. TV is pop culture. Ergo, there’s more and more TV about pop culture. “The extent to which pop culture has become the focus of more and more TV networks is undeniable. It’s the nature of it. Pop culture is the stuff everybody is talking about, and if everybody is talking about it, networks are naturally going to want to find programming that taps into that.”

What are the 20 longest-running shows on American television? More or less the same as they were last year. Longevity means never having to say goodbye.

“An arts school dropout is directing Iraq’s first feature-length movie in more than a decade, shooting it with film he “liberated” from Saddam Hussein’s culture ministry during the looting that followed the dictator’s fall.”

What’s with all the war movies set out in prime movie season, wonders Frank Rich. “Intentionally or not, three of the four new Christmas war movies play on our current fears rather than reprise the slam-dunk triumphalism of “Top Gun.” And they do so even though most of them are top-heavy with creative talent (actors, directors, screenwriters) who hail from countries in the coalition of the willing (England, Australia, Japan, even Romania).”

A TV viewers’ strike was organized over the weekend in Italy. “Television is one of the principal causes of dullness and isolation, and is a drain on precious commodity of human time” say the organizers. We want to say to people that there are better ways of spending their free time than to stay home staring at television. “The strike’s organisers have arranged discounts at a range of venues for people who bring their remote controls with them. Organisers say they are expecting around 400,000 people to join the strike against what they call Trash TV.”

DVD’s are the standard for watching video these days. And there is a flood of movies newly released with every passing week. “More than 36,000 films are now available on DVD and nearly half of those were released in just the last two years. So why, among this vast stockpile, is there not a single Marx Brothers comedy or Astaire-Rogers musical?”

“It felt disorientating to be British at the European Film Awards, now in their 16th year and celebrated at a ceremony in Berlin last weekend. Those of us from the UK mingled with movie-makers and press from a score of countries, all perfectly relaxed about enjoying films from other nations, even those requiring subtitles. It was hard not to muse gloomily on the difficulty for even exceptional non-English-language films to obtain exposure in a British cinema culture so in thrall to Hollywood.”

PBS programming is staid and unadventurous. Why? Consider an acclaimed 36-year-old one-man show about Mark Twain and why PBS declined to air it: “What could literary legend Mark Twain have said 130 years ago that would cause PBS programmers of two different regimes to reject an acclaimed performance of his wit and wisdom by one of America’s most respected actors? Well, about 35 minutes into the one-man show, after the first intermission, Twain/ Holbrook includes a passage ofHuckleberry Finn. In this five minutes of the program, “Twain” acts out the parts of young Huck, his drunk father Pap and old Jim, a slave…”

“As budget-conscious film studios increasingly greenlight remakes of old films and recycled television shows (coming soon: “Cheaper by the Dozen” and “The Stepford Wives”), independent video stores are finding themselves with a new role in the $9 billion-a-year video-rental industry. They are often used as research libraries and idea factories for the movie studios in whose shadows they lurk.”

“Noah Cowan, who began his cinematic career at age 15 selling tickets for the Toronto International Film Festival, was crowned the fete’s new co-director yesterday. This self-described ‘child of the festival,’ was one of 12 American and Canadian candidates who applied for the job, one of the top film-related postings on the planet.” Cowan was previously associate director of programming for TIFF, before leaving in 1997 to head up a distribution company in New York.