Category: media

“In the face of multiplex cinemas with dozens of screens and high street food and drink franchises, operated by the likes of Cineworld, Odeon and Vue, the smaller, independent cinema is not only surviving, but thriving.”

“Depictions or suggestions of tobacco use in top-grossing movies rose 72 percent from 2010 to 2016, according to the report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase was especially large among top-grossing movies with R ratings, which saw a 90 percent rise in tobacco-use imagery, though researchers noted with special concern that movies rated PG-13 also saw a sizable increase: 43 percent.”

Oh, dear – this isn’t going to be pretty, even if it is good. “If the … project does become Tarantino’s next film, it becomes unique in that it will be his first movie to be based on true events.”

“Exodus to Shanghai is a film that claims to tell the story of Ho Feng-Shan, Chinese consul for Vienna, a rescuer of Jews in prewar Austria. While indeed based on true events, it may be the first Holocaust film that heavily features martial-arts-action scenes. The cast includes German actors, as well as Romanians, some Asians, and two young blond models. It was completed in Israel and sponsored by the Fashion TV channel. Sounds delusional? Not in the eyes of the filmmakers.”

The fraudulent letter-writing campaign wasn’t a small-time operation. Thousands of form letters had been filed online, fraudulently signed under the names of real people, from Utah to Maine. “Whoever set this up got a large cloud service to a rate-limited public FCC API that doesn’t allow many submissions. They had to spin up a huge number of servers to make it work.”

“Smoking used to be significant, especially on film and TV. It is now even more so. At first, it was a prop; famously, or so it was said, a way of giving actors something to do with their hands. I prefer to think that it is a way of expressing, or evading, some deep inner turbulence. It signifies nonchalance and its opposite, while providing for the camera and our gaze a curling backdrop of smoke with which the cinematographer can make play.”

“Media attention to rape in film is targeted mostly at how audiences perceive the scenes and lamenting the studios’ sheer mass of sexual violence on screen. Many articles ask the question: Are these scenes gratuitous? But rarely do we think about the filmmakers, actors and crew who make on-screen rapes happen, like MacNair. How do they feel? Are they tired of rape scenes? Or what if portraying rape could actually be a positive thing?”

Last year Univision bought up what was left of Gawker‘s network of sites and renamed it Gizmodo Media Group, into which it merged the Fusion.net site. But Univision also owns the Fusion television network (the Hispanic media giant’s first push into English-language broadcasting), so that channel is going to the Fusion.net address, while Fusion’s online journalism is moving to a new site called Splinter. Editor-in-chief Dodai Stewart says about the name, “Our aim is to do the kind of news coverage and commentary that gets under your skin.”

The surreal “Gangnam Style” video became so popular that it “broke” YouTube’s play counter, exceeding the maximum possible number of views (2,147,483,647), and forcing the company to rewrite its code. But the song has now been overtaken by another music video.

“The refrain is always the same: Who cares if the fifth Transformers is drawing little enthusiasm in the United States when it’s doing well in China? But that defense is becoming more specious, as international audiences are also seemingly growing tired of the endless assembly line of action films, while the biggest box-office story of 2017 is the success of smaller-budgeted original films.”