Category: media

Sydney has seen a surge in the number of art film theatres. But are the films they’re showing as good as in previous years? “Yes, there is more choice now because there are more screens. But people are putting on some films that once upon a time would have gone straight to video. Because of the number of screens, more and more mediocre films are being released. Standards have dropped.”

Spike Lee is trying to prevent an American cable network from changing its name to the Spike Network. But other Spikes are getting into the act. “The latest twist in the case came yesterday, when Spike Jones Jr, the son of the 1950s comic bandleader Spike Jones, filed court papers saying a ruling in Lee’s favour would be disastrous for other well-known Spikes. Jones Jr said Lee’s injunction might interfere with his own efforts to promote, sell and market both his father’s work and other autobiographical commercial projects.” And Spike Jonze, the quirky filmmaker might have something to say…

“The Canadian TV racket used to be a simple thing: Buy U.S. programming cheap, sell ads for more than what you paid for the shows and presto chango! Your broadcast licence became a licence to print money. Lots of money.” Not anymore. So Canada’s big media companies are fighting for changes.

Three Boston TV stations used to have arts reporters covering the local scene. But two years one of the stations cut its coverage, and last week another one was let go. That leaves one…

In the 1950s in the era of La Dolce Vita, Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome was a center of cinema, home to Federico Fellini. Inevitably, over the years the studio fell into disrepair. Now it’s undergoing a rebirth, led by a wave of American films. “The studio, built in 1937 by Mussolini as a propaganda instrument, is too often seen as a relic, fettered to Fellini and his peers: ‘It should be seen as a current place, full of people who will be in the cinema tomorrow, not decades ago. Now the most important are the Americans.’Many American productions have used the studio recently.”

For a new BBC TV series of the complete organ works of JS Bach, the producers asked artist Damien Hirst to create the opening titles. And what did he come up with? “A cloud of bees, like musical notes risen from the score, circles and hovers before settling like a thick black and gold wig on a bust of the composer JS Bach.”

A new documentary about Fellini spends time with the director just before he died. “Fellini was a huge narcissist, hugely generous in other ways, a contradictory man. There are a lot of nasty things we can say about Fellini because he had a diva personality, but he really was a genius. He’s someone who stayed true to his vision, and didn’t compromise one bit . And I have great respect for that.”

Used to be you could tell where you were in America by what was on the radio. “When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ‘morning zoo’ hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn’t help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes. What a miserable trip. I heard America droning.”

A Toronto radio station airs a promotional spot full of obscenities. The uptight Canadian Broadcast Standards Council rules that the spot was okay. “Yes, the content was ‘coarse, crass, vulgar’ and ‘very much on the edge of acceptability,’ but it didn’t violate the code of ethics subscribed to by private broadcasters. Moreover, KISS’s defence was ‘entirely plausible,’ the CBSC ruled. The standards council went on to say it was ‘comforted by the fact that fewer people [were likely to have been] offended by the coarseness of the language’ since the comments were made in Italian.”

The Senate Commerce Committee votes to overturn parts of a Federal Communications Commission decision freeing media companies from decades-old ownership limits and allowing them to buy more outlets and merge in new ways. The proposal would “roll back changes that allowed individual companies to own television stations reaching nearly half the nation’s viewers and combinations of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city. The Republican-controlled FCC relaxed those rules on June 2 with a 3-2 party-line vote.”