Category: media

“The shock of this Cannes was the overall mediocrity of the official competition slate, which, by the time the awards were announced last Sunday, had overwhelmed even the most tolerant and optimistic observers. There were calls for the ouster of Gilles Jacob, the president of the Board of Directors, or of Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s artistic head, and competing theories as to which one was responsible for the debacle.”

“The movie industry is hardly alone in its tenuous grasp of mental illness… But the movies are writ wide and large, and they’re heavily reliant on drama and excitement that everyone can see for the price of a ticket. Short cuts and misrepresentations are common, if not always malicious. And they have an enormous influence on the ways we view a variety of very painful conditions.”

The general consensus among critics is that this year’s Cannes Film Festival did not measure up to previous installments. Several writers went so far as to call it the ‘worst Cannes ever.’ Michael Wilmington isn’t buying, although he acknowledges that the field of main category entries was the weakest in quite some time: “I tend to take acerbic verdicts on Cannes, even seemingly well founded ones, with a grain of sel – because I hear them so often. Every single year – with the exception of 1997, the 50th anniversary annum – I’ve heard somebody at Cannes insist this was the worst fest ever. Often the nix comes from dilettantes who see no more than one or two movies a day while hunting the next party to crash or celebrity to schmooze.”

CNN’s Ted Turner argues against media consolidation, as proposed by the FCC. “It’s hard to compete when your suppliers are owned by your competitors. We bought MGM, and we later sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner, because we had little choice. The big were getting bigger. The small were disappearing. We had to gain access to programming to survive. Many other independent media companies were swallowed up for the same reason – because they didn’t have everything they needed under their own roof, and their competitors did. The climate after Monday’s expected FCC decision will encourage even more consolidation and be even more inhospitable to smaller businesses.”

“Though the last few seasons have witnessed unprecedented international circulation and acclaim for Thai cinema, Thai films have not traditionally been stamped for export. Indeed, though film production in Thailand reached an all-time high of more than 200 features a year in the mid-70s, most of them were made with a kind of haplessly self-engendered expiration date: shot without synchronised sound on 16mm colour reversal stock, there was never an original negative to hold on to, let alone archive. Thai Film Archive director Dome Sukwong today suggests that 75% of all Thai films ever made are already lost; no wonder a comprehensive history of Thai cinema – in Thai or any other language – has yet to be written.”

For the first time, Boston public TV station WGBH, the leading producer of programming for public television, has signed a deal to produce a program for a commercial channel. ”My objective is to make ‘GBH the leading producer of educational programming for kids on TV. ‘We would always try to produce for public television first. But if there is no room on their schedule or money, we’ll go where we need to go.”

A new study reports that players of video games develop better visual skills than non-players. “Experienced players of these games are 30 percent to 50 percent better than nonplayers at taking in everything that happens around them, according to the research, which appears today in the journal Nature. They identify objects in their peripheral vision, perceiving numerous objects without having to count them, switch attention rapidly and track many items at once. Nor are players simply faster at these tasks. First-person action games increase the brain’s capacity to spread attention over a wide range of events.

National Public Radio is teaming up with online magazine Slate to produce a new daily midday magazine show. “Not only is it an unusual media partnership, the NPR/Slate production, a one-hour weekday program called ‘Day to Day,’ is the first programming collaboration NPR has had with a commercial outlet in its 33-year history.”

‘Reading Rainbow’ is one of public broadcasting’s most successful and award-winning programs. The program, which focuses on bringing books to life for a young audience, is twenty years old, but has had to cut back production in recent years due to a lack of funding. Executive producer and host LeVar Burton continues to shake every money tree that comes his way, but as he picked up the show’s seventh Emmy this month, even Burton had to acknowledge that ‘Reading Rainbow’ may not be around for much longer.

Toronto has, in recent years, enjoyed a healthy economic bump from a burgeoning film and television industry. But this year is different: SARS, a weak economy, and various other factors have contributed to a marked slowdown in the industry, and other Canadian cities are cherry-picking Toronto productions on a daily basis. It could just be a bump in the road, of course, but some in Toronto fear that the slump may not be temporary.