Category: media

“Within five years, television has changed from the prescribed, September-to-May schedule that has existed since the birth of the medium to a never-ending blitz of new shows that networks struggle to keep up with. And even though Netflix hasn’t toppled the similarly staid film calendar as quickly, it could mark the beginning of the end for movie theaters, if the company’s success so far with TV is anything to go by.”

Jelani Cobb: “Last month, HBO inspired an avalanche of criticism when it announced that it would produce a series called Confederate, which would explore a hypothetical world in which the South had won the Civil War. The events in Charlottesville illustrated a problem with that idea: only by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”

The Washington-based Smithsonian has decided to trim its fat by replacing its impressive facility with a restaurant. To little surprise, the decision to give priority to hot dogs over hot docs has not been popular in the educational-film world.

Actually, after adjusting for inflation, last weekend was even worse than that one. How is that possible? Blame a hurricane – and boxing.

They met at Sundance Theater Lab 10 years ago, and though they’ve been in high-profile projects since, it wasn’t until 2016 that both Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry broke out (which is why you might know them as Randall from “This Is Us” or Paper Boi from “Atlanta”). It’s been quite a ride.

This place has a great IMDb page: “Since doubling as the exterior of a Moscow airport in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, the distinctive orange-tiled walls and pillars of the Messedamm underpass have been seen in Joe Wright’s Hanna in 2011, 2015’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, last year’s Captain America: Civil War and Charlize Theron spy thriller Atomic Blonde, released earlier this month.”

The films, exploring police brutality against African Americans and a lot more, are mostly, but not entirely, documentaries. The director of the Ferguson documentary Whose Streets says, “It sometimes seems like all of our political actions are exhausted or have been compromised, and there’s a real pressing sense of the magnitude of the issues, with no clear path forward. … I think the way out of that is for us to look around, and in our backyard, and tackle problems in front of us, rather than being consumed in this massive huge story.”

365 days of movies for $9.95 a month? What? AMC is not OK with this, arguing that it will hurt movie theatres, movie studios, and even, perhaps, MoviePass itself. AMC: “From what we can tell, by definition and absent some other form of other compensation, MoviePass will be losing money on every subscriber seeing two movies or more in a month.” (But will subscribers, who are signing up in droves, care?)

Disney did what? Nye says “he was deprived of $9 million in profits from his show, ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy,’ which originally ran from 1993 to 1998 on PBS.” Disney, of course, says that’s malarkey.