Category: media

The Toronto Film Festival is back and as big as ever, and while the festival has gained an international reputation by embracing films from around the world, it, like nearly every other cultural enterprise in the country, reserves a significant portion of time and exposure for home-grown work. This year’s top Canadian film at the TFF will be Gary Burns’s A Problem With Fear, which impressed festival organizers enough for them to give it a prime opening-night showing, outside of the normal “Perspective Canada” portion of the event.

Hollywood has been watching the heavy-handed tactics of the recording industry as it attempts to put an end to illegal online file-swapping, and it can’t have failed to notice that that none of the hardball tactics have yet made a dent in the problem. So the Motion Picture Association of America is trying more of a good cop routine in its own battle against movie piracy. A new series of anti-piracy ads will begin running this week, with the message coming from set designers, craft people, and other lower-level movie types, rather than from studio execs, for whom consumers are unlikely to have a lot of sympathy.

After hemming and hawing and delaying and looking nervously over their shoulders for the better part of two years, the folks at Miramax are finally releasing a supposedly controversial Australian film into the U.S. market. The delay, which began after the 9/11 attacks, and continued through the invasion of Iraq, was a result of studio fears that Americans would be furious at the plotline of Buffalo Soldiers, which revolves around American soldiers involved in “illegal activities.”

“For years BBC buildings have been like BBC coffee. Both carry the same beigegrey miasma of depression which makes it a miracle that any programme of quality ever emits from the corporation’s portals. The defining monument is the broadcast centre in west London known as White City One, a building with all the charisma of a plastic cup out of a drinks dispenser.” But a turnaround appears to be in the works, with plans to erect several dazzling new buildings in the near future, with the main jewel being “a music centre, also in White City, currently budgeted at £54 million and the subject of an architectural competition.”

“When this nation of immigrants began flocking to the movies, they went to see stories about themselves. From 1905, when nickelodeons first appeared, to the end of the 1920s, when Hollywood began to create a star system, innumerable romances, comedies and melodramas featured immigrants and working-class laborers as their central characters… [But] in recent years, Hollywood has shied away from exploring the immigrant experience, in part because it’s become such a political hot potato, in part because well-heeled studio executives find it hard to identify with the subject.”

“A Colorado startup, Interact-TV, has released a hacker-friendly digital entertainment center that plays, records and archives TV shows, DVDs, music and even digital photo albums. The Telly MC1000 Digital Entertainment Center, available now from the company’s website for $900, can also surf the Web and act as a home media server… Unlike TiVo or ReplayTV, the Telly is designed to be easily upgraded and expanded by the consumer and third-party software developers. Most other set-top boxes are expressly designed not to be hacked, and their warranties are voided if the owner opens them up to tinker. By contrast, the Telly is expandable like a PC.”

“A standoff over one of the most illustrious artifacts of American film, the Oscar won by Orson Welles in 1942 as the co-writer of Citizen Kane, ended yesterday when Christie’s withdrew it from sale. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Hollywood trade group that sponsors the Oscars, had objected to its sale, claiming the right to buy back the statue for $1.”

The future of animation is here, and it is computer-generated. This is no surprise, of course: CG movies have been cleaning up at the box office ever since Toy Story, and cutting-edge companies like Pixar Animation have upped the technology ante considerably in recent years. But for those who were still hoping that old-school line animation and CG technology might be able to coexist in Hollywood, the current goings-on at Disney will be quite disheartening. “The company, whose very name is synonymous with cartoon castles and ink-and-paint dwarves, is going digital.”

The documentary is suddenly big business in the film industry, and filmmakers specializing in the form, who couldn’t even get a meeting in Hollywood a decade ago, are enjoying unprecedented success. Part of the reason for the new popularity of the form is financial, of course – documentaries are much cheaper to make than feature films – but it is also true that there are simply a lot of great docs getting made these days. “It would be easier to put together a list of 10 good documentaries for the year than it would be to come up with a list of 10 good fictional movies.”

What if the Emmys were handed out based on the quality of the nominated shows, rather than (apparently) based on what was really popular two years ago? Well, then, they’d be the Television Critics Association Awards, which were dispensed this past weekend. The big winners were NBC’s Boomtown, which didn’t rate a nomination from the Emmy folks, and Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, host of the satirical Daily Show, which has been frequently cited by critics as virtually the only “news” outlet willing to be openly critical of American foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks.