Category: media

After five consecutive hits—Pixar’s other two movies are the inspired Toy Story 2 and the middling A Bug’s Life—the animation studio must now be considered ‘the most reliable creative force in Hollywood. Perhaps not since Preston Sturges made seven classic comedies in a row between 1940 and 1944 has one name been such a consistent indicator of audience and critical pleasure.’ The ‘next Disney’ comparisons that have long been lavished upon Pixar and its creative head, John Lasseter, have become more emphatic: Now Pixar and Lasseter are compared not just to Disney, but to Disney during its ‘golden age some 60 years ago,’ as the Los Angeles Daily News put it.”

The South Korean government denies it is thinking about easing a law that forces Korean movie theatres to show Korean movies 40 percent of the time. “The screen quota is not just an issue for the film industry, it is vital to the future of our visual media industry as a whole. If we lower our guards on film, then the rest of the market is lost.”

Sensing a national mood that opposes the FCC’s decision Monday to relax television media ownsership rules, members of Congress are drafting bills to reverse the FCC decision. “Identical bills have been introduced in both houses to overturn Monday’s decision on television-station ownership. The old rule said a network cannot own a group of stations that combine to reach more than 35 percent of the national viewing audience. Monday’s vote raises that threshold to 45 percent.”

The secret to why animation film-maker Pixar keeps turning out high quality movies? “If you don’t create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in which weird ideas can be floated, then it’s likely you’re going to be producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace. Those kind of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, ‘Wow, I never would have thought about it.'”

Why are there so few women on talk radio? Is it that women are less likely to possess the conservative leanings that dominate the medium? Are they simply uninterested in having their voices heard by the vast talk radio audience? Not likely. “If there is one explanation that seems to resonate, it may be that women are out of fashion in an industry that puts a premium on constant aggression and throbbing neck veins.” Put another way, talk radio’s audience is unapologetically sexist, and has no interest in a female host who acts as boorishly as most of the men currently on the air.

Britons are watching fewer foreign films in theatres. Why? “The problem with foreign-language films is that they became increasingly marginalised in the schedules on BBC2. They would be shown intermittently and late at night because that was the only way we could get them into the schedule, partly because BBC2 has become a more mainstream channel. It’s not a niche channel any more.”

Big media companies have been trying to catch pirates by trying to track down people trading the movies or music. But Paul Kocher is trying a different way. “Instead of trying to track everyone’s habits and patterns, Kocher’s code would create a forensic trail to allow law-enforcement authorities to hunt down criminals – but only after there is evidence that illegal copies have been made. Says Kocher: ‘We’re trying to create a system where there will be consequences if people don’t obey the laws, but anonymity will be protected if they do’.”

“Since the 1950s, the free broadcast system has served as the great galvanizer and equalizer, accessible to anyone in the nation owning a rooftop antenna and a TV. Even today, most Americans get their news from TV broadcasters. Yet some critics say the system is irreparably broken and growing more irrelevant in the face of competition from cable and satellite services, even as the federal government has moved to prop up the broadcast industry.”

“There’s still an audience for good foreign films, but it isn’t getting any younger, or bigger. On the other hand, Hollywood’s favorite customers, heavy movie users in their mid-teens to their mid- or late 20s, have been turning away from subtitled films in droves, and not just because their mothers warned them about reading in the dark.”

“Three small companies that manufacture technologies that filter out the sex, gore and violence from DVD movies are hoping to avoid a protracted legal fight with Hollywood. ClearPlay, Family Shield Technologies and Trilogy Studios filed a motion Friday in the United States District Court in Denver to dismiss claims that their products infringe on the copyrights of motion pictures. The companies sell hardware and software applications that allow consumers to automatically skip or mute obscene or sexually explicit content in movies. They claim that the technology does not alter the movie itself, but customizes the way the film is viewed.”