Category: media

Wow: “Spurred in part by allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men across the country, three former teenage employees of a youth symphony orchestra in Utah County say one of its longtime leaders either sexually abused them or inappropriately touched them years apart.”

First, MoviePass changed its plan so that new subscribers are limited to 4 movies a month instead of one movie per day. Then, on Friday, the day that Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War came out, the “Netflix for movie theatres” changed again – so that you can’t use MoviePass to see the same movie more than once. People were furious. What did the CEO tell The Hollywood Reporter? “Anyone with an issue should call customer service.”

Just stop already. “Each joke is played with a knowing wink, with countless call-backs to episodes of yore. It’s reminiscent of a breaking of the fourth wall, but done in a fashion so grand and garish it becomes spectacle viewing. It also reminds viewers of the more cynical purpose behind the series returning to television: not because there’s more of a story to be told, but because there’s more money to be made by manipulating our desire to derive comfort from the familiar.”

The Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling agreed that the studios were giving preference to their own theaters, which was a violation of antitrust laws. Targeted were Metro, Warners, Paramount, RKO and 20th Century Fox, which were ordered to get rid of their theater holdings. Also affected were “the little three defendants, United Artists, Universal and Columbia,” according to Variety at the time.

“The Deminer” – a documentary about a Kurdish Peshmerga officer who disarms mines – “makes for nervous viewing. Each of the four detonations we see ratchets up the sense of inevitability. It’s not quite a snuff movie, though haunted by a similar balefulness. What moral responsibilities do documentary-makers have when their subject is a danger to himself?”

“Independent broadcaster KCETLink Media Group (KCET), based in Burbank, and PBS SoCal (KOCE) in Costa Mesa, unveiled Wednesday a plan for ‘a merger of equals.’ They aim to become a powerful new hub for original public media content and innovation that serves 18-plus million people in Southern California.”

“After kicking things off with stirring origin movies like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, the series has gradually started to examine the shaky underpinnings of its heroic Avengers, and is now laying the groundwork for their calamitous upending.”

“Brace yourselves for a wave of Godard nostalgia. It’s 50 years since Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and co. closed down the 1968 Cannes film festival in solidarity with student protests in Paris. … Those were the days, eh? When cinema was radical and part of the revolutionary struggle. Nobody embodied that more than Godard. He is cinema’s Picasso and its Che Guevara. He is the auteur wannabe auteurs want to be and remains the most dazzling, inventive, stylish, insouciantly brilliant yet confrontationally political film-maker the medium has ever seen. But by the time of Cannes 1968, Godard was also closing the curtain on his own auteur status.” And, argues Steve Rose, we should do the same thing.

The investigation did not find “systemic discrimination” that was known to, and tolerated by, senior management. The investigation also largely absolved Laura R. Walker, the president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, who acknowledged last year that she had “prioritized growth, and content and programming, over investment in some of the processes and people.”