Category: media

According to the Blockbuster Alaska Facebook page, the franchise’s last two locations in the state will shut their College and Debarr locations, located in Fairbanks and Anchorage respectively, on July 16, and will reopen the next day to sell off their inventory through August.

“I’m not going to say that the tide has changed, no. But … I think people who have been in power, who have mostly been white men, and people who are white, they listen now. They not only listen and are open, they make the effort for change. I do feel that has changed. I can feel it now because of the way I can push: ‘Hey, what about this? Hey, what about that?’ Trust me, I’m relentless.

The Federal Communications Commission has begun the process of loosening requirements for children’s TV programming, arguing that the old rules aren’t needed in the era of kids-focused apps and streaming services.

“Why Truthbrary? Well, as the website, which seems to have been set up last year explains, it’s a rejection of ‘THE MAINSTREME MEDIA + THE LIEbrary OF FALSE INFORMATION THEY TRY TO PUSH INTO THE PUBLICS MIND’S.'” The television project to which Truthbrary is a companion, Who Is America?, features Baron Cohen posing as an arch-conservative “citizen journalist” and includes interviews with, among others, Sarah Palin, Roy Moore, and Dick Cheney, all unsuspecting.

Not much has yet been publicly revealed about Who Is America?, which premieres next week in Britain and the US, except that Cohen posed as a right-wing “citizen journalist” named Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr, PhD, who convinced Palin and Moore to be interviewed on camera and even got Dick Cheney to autograph a “waterboard kit.” In fact, since Palin found out she’d been duped and called Baron Cohen “evil, exploitative and sick,” Baron Cohen has issued a response, in character as Ruddick, which has been reproduced here.

Netflix’s narrow edge over HBO in total noms (112 vs. 108) is rich with symbolism at a moment when the entertainment industry’s old guard is scrambling to reorient a big part of its business operations to reflect the Netflix effect — i.e. making a boatload of original programming available via commercial-free streaming in a 24/7 on-demand format. It’s an incredible feat, pulled off in what feels like a blink of an eye for many industry veterans.

Netflix had the most nominees by platform for the first time ever, beating HBO with a total of 112 nominations. That’s even as Game of Thrones, which was ineligible for last year’s awards, returned to dominate this year’s crop with 22 nominations, the most for a single show.

Within a day of the emergence of the last of the boys and their adult coach from the flooded cave near Chiang Rai, faith-based studio Pure Flix Entertainment (the God’s Not Dead franchise) announced plans for a film adaptation of the story under its mainstream imprint Pinnacle Peaks (Little Women). The next day, beginning with a furious tweet saying “I refuse to let Hollywood #whitewashout the Thai Cave rescue story!,” director John Chu (Now You See Me 2, Crazy Rich Asians) and Ivanhoe Pictures revealed they had secured rights to the story from the Thai navy and government.

Is this just a flash-in-the-pan fad during a stressful summer, or the sign of a real shift in audience taste? The first studio that dares take a documentary wide will find out, but I’d wager it’s the latter.