Category: media

On Body and Soul, a movie about strangers sharing dreams, won the Golden Frog (yes, frog) at the Camerimage Fest. But “before announcing the top prize winners, juror Stephen Goldblatt said the body felt they had to make a statement decrying what he called the ‘high degree of gratuitous, misogynistic and voyeuristic’ violence seen in many of this year’s Camerimage films.”

Lee’s movie She’s Gotta Have It is now a Netflix series, which, in 30-minute episodes, has changed the main character and given her many more facets. Also … “with television came a writer’s room, one that Mr. Lee filled with African-American female artists and writers.” That didn’t hurt.

The director of Blanchett’s Manifesto (an art installation … or a movie?): “The political landscape has shifted towards populism and against ‘elitism.’ … ‘Every populist wants to cut down cultural budgets and educational budgets for a good reason: because they need stupid minds to be manipulated and to become sheep of consumerism.'”

A religious power couple in Atlanta run TickBox TV, and they’re being sued for that because TickBox is a device that allows people to obtain unlicensed (aka stolen) content via technology that scrapes other streaming devices. “Set-top box piracy also tends to attract older users and families, intellectual property experts said. It even looks more legitimate than typical infringing sites, with a user interface that resembles Netflix or Hulu.”

“All the old habitats, including Mr. Carson’s pantry, the servants’ dining room and Lady Mary’s bedroom (faintly scandalous with its memory of Kemal Pamuk’s coital demise) are painstakingly recreated, right down to the forks and spoons arranged just so on the Crawley dinner table. Behind the green baize door lies the servants’ quarters just as you left them, along with Mr. Carson’s old desk, complete with period-era bills and correspondence.”

“Comcast is interested in the same set of assets that Disney approached Fox about earlier this year, sources said. Also of interest to Comcast is acquiring the international assets of Fox, given that the Philadelphia-based company is heavily concentrated in the U.S.” (includes video)

Russian Orthodox extremists have demonstrated, made death threats, and even committed arson to protest Matilda, a romantic period film about a ballerina with whom the young Nicholas II had an affair before he married. (The last tsar, now considered a saint and martyr, would of course never have done such a thing.) So director Alexei Uchitel announced that he’s expanding it into a four-part miniseries.

“Under pressure from advertising holding companies who have come to see it as too expensive, Cannes Lions owner Ascential unveiled a sweeping revamp of its flagship festival today, introducing dozens of changes aimed at simplifying and modernizing the event as well as, critically, keeping costs down for attendees.”

“During a daily meeting attended by roughly a dozen editors, a staff member proposed publicizing the two-part investigative series that had precipitated the ban. But Lewis D’Vorkin, the recently installed editor in chief of The Times, flatly rejected the idea, according to several employees with knowledge of the discussion. Later, some journalists received messages by email and Slack warning them against retweeting any praise of Times stories.”