Category: media

“Britain’s top film awards could be heading for catastrophe next year if Hollywood does not resolve a row over voting, says organiser Bafta. No preview DVDs of new films can be sent to voters of any awards except the Oscars, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has ruled. They say there is too much chance that the advance copies could be pirated. But others say it will harm the award chances of small independent films, and Bafta wants the ban overturned.”

New rules allowing media companies to restrict the recording of TV shows are needed to protect the industry. But consumer advocates say the rules overly restrict fair use.

What’s the scariest scene in all of movies? According to a new British poll, it’s Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johny!” in “The Shining. “The scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining topped a poll for a Channel 4 special on The 100 Scariest Moments on TV and film. It beat classic terror scenes such as the head-spinning scene in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist and the moment a severed head tumbles from a hole in a boat in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.”

There’s an epidemic of “director’s cut” dvd’s being issued. “It’s hard not to detect a whiff of marketing ploy in all these bulked-up reissues. Far from rectifying the wrongs done to their work the first time round, it tends to look as if the directors just can’t leave well enough alone. Forman’s Amadeus feels 20 minutes longer without feeling noticeably different at all; Cameron’s revamped Abyss adds lots more of what doesn’t work in the film anyway and hardly any of what does; and the new stuff in Apocalypse Now Redux is at best a curiosity box, with the lengthy plantation sequence the obvious low point of the movie as it now stands.”

A slew of unbelievably violent and bloody new movies is hitting American multiplexes this fall, and absolutely no one seems concerned about it. Not only that, the Motion Picture Association of America appears not even to have considered assigning such gorefests as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill its strictest rating of NC-17, which is generally given to films with graphic nudity and/or particularly harsh language. Should we care that movies are becoming bloodier by the day? Or, as the MPAA claims, is it all just good fun so long as the violence remains “cartoonish,” whatever that is?

“We are so numb it no longer hurts when people call us demented. Once-unspeakable violence has moved from the unbalanced fringe into the middle of our surround-sound home theater systems. We’ve gone from ‘Impeach Bill’ to Kill Bill, from Animal House to House of the Dead, from the post-Sept. 11 death of irony to the postmodern death of revulsion.”

The British government is launching an online culture site. “The venture, designed to for both adults and children, will sponsor 20 to 30 projects and will go live next year. One of the first projects is called Webplay and allows school children to direct a play online. Others include Scoop for would-be journalists and a virtual collection of plants curated by Kew Gardens.”

Fresh Air host Terry Gross responds to NPR’s ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin’s criticisms of her interview with Bill O’Reilly: “I think some of his criticisms play into the hands of O’Reilly. O’Reilly has the attitude, I believe, that if you criticize him, or ask him anything critical, then you are therefore a part of the, quote, liberal media and therefore you are part of the, quote, cultural jihad against O’Reilly.”

“Radio stations must pay royalties to recording companies and performers, as they do to composers and songwriters, when musical broadcasts are streamed over the Internet, a federal appeals court has affirmed… Traditional radio broadcasts haven’t been subject to royalties to recording companies and performers because they have served to promote sales of recordings. But Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which required such royalties from webcasters.”

“U.S. regulators in coming weeks will adopt strict limits on sending digital television programs over the Internet to avoid the problems now plaguing the music industry, U.S. officials said on Tuesday. The Federal Communications Commission will likely adopt rules that will allow programmers to attach a code to digital broadcasts that will in most cases bar consumers from sending copies of popular shows around the world.” Few law-abiding sorts would have reason to object, it would seem, but consumer advocates are warning that the new digital ‘flags’ would require most consumers to replace their DVD players at their own cost, at a time when everyone will be forced to replace their TVs just to receive the digital signal.