Category: media

Netflix now makes more television than any network in history. It plans to spend $8 billion on content this year.  TV has gone through major transformations in the past — cable and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox toppled the hegemony of the Big Three broadcast networks in the 1980s, for instance — but this leap dwarfs all others. Netflix doesn’t want to be a streaming, supersized clone of HBO or FX or NBC. It’s trying to change the way we watch television.

Even Hollywood agents whose clients desperately want to do deals with the streamer concede overload can be an issue. “The Achilles’ heel of Netflix is that a lot of the content feels very disposable,” one veteran talent rep tells me. “Creators and stars want to feel special, and they want to know the audience is responding to their work.” Netflix content, the agent argues, too often “doesn’t feel as special as it needs to feel.”

Over 25 years, “Vice had grown from a free magazine to a company with 3,000 employees spread across a cable network, more than a dozen websites, two shows on HBO, an ad agency, a film studio, a record label, and a bar in London. Vice had become the tenth-highest-valued private company in America” – largely thanks to co-founder Shane Smith’s gift – using persuasion, exaggeration, and sometimes outright deception – for convincing investors to hand over millions of dollars. Turns out, though, that Smith had expected to cash out well before now. Reeves Wiedeman reports how it went down.

The research was conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which released its findings Monday. Researchers studied the reviews of the 100 top-grossing films of 2017 that were posted on the aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. Of the 19,559 reviews studied, 77.8 were by male critics and 22.2 were by female critics. Stacy Smith, founder and director of the Inclusion Initiative, said film critics are “overwhelmingly white and male.”

Well, not all of them – East Los High, on Hulu, has had several discussions and storylines on the show, and then there’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and a few others. Perhaps things are changing though: “I’m not sad that Time’s Up is happening and that Me Too is happening, that we’re talking about consent. … It certainly was great in that it started a conversation about female sex and pleasure.”

“Mr. Lasseter said in November that he would take a ‘six-month sabbatical’ after unspecified ‘missteps’ that made some staff members feel ‘disrespected or uncomfortable.’ He made the announcement in a lengthy email to employees apologizing ‘to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug or any other gesture they felt crossed the line in any way, shape or form.'”

Production resources abound on the small island, which is connected by air to many major European cities. Malta is particularly known for its production water tank – one of the world’s largest – which many films use for shooting water and underwater scenes. Plus, a long history of filmmaking has endowed Malta with a deep and experienced crew base.

“Carne y Arena belongs to the same category of gallery-quality, conceptual installations as the Rain Room or the Museum of Ice Cream — but it’s a world apart from either. It’s an anti-spectacle: The piece can’t be shared on Instagram, even though it is more immersive, and more substantive, than anything else in its class.” Kriston Capps reports.