Category: media

A Univision spokesman said Wednesday that customers in 37 markets, including New York and Los Angeles, home to large Hispanic communities, have lost access to Univision, the most popular Spanish-language network.

They were known by several names – leader ladies, girl heads, China girls, lady wedges – and they weren’t meant to be seen by audiences. They were used for a sort of quality control.

“The ban was introduced in September 2016, as a response to the escalation of cross-border tensions between Pakistan and India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. … Indian films account for around 70% of Pakistan’s box office, something the Ministry of Information statement seemed to acknowledge, saying that lifting the ban would help the ‘revival of the Pakistani film industry’.”

“There are risks in speaking out. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a unified liberal elite – if there were, people like Casey Affleck and Mel Gibson wouldn’t receive award nominations. (Or it means that the liberal elite is open-minded and forgiving, but that’s for another column.) But this year’s speeches have been overwhelmingly liberal. That may turn off some viewers, or make people with other opinions feel silenced. It may affect Hollywood’s bottom line: Based on box-office figures from the week before and the week of the Oscar nominations, none of the contenders I checked – Hidden Figures, La La Land, Moonlight, Fences, Lion and Jackie – showed an Oscar bump, an immediate post-nomination surge.”

“At this year’s festival, things were different from the word go. Netflix wasn’t just in Park City to buy: It was making a full show of force, starting with the first movie in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. That film was I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, the writing and directing debut of actor Macon Blair; Blair had pitched Netflix on the concept at Sundance 2016, and they financed the movie from the ground up.”

“According to an analysis of race, gender, age, and equity across 1,000 films released between 2007 and 2016, the majority of women spearheading these productions are from a narrow pipeline, and they rarely released more than one film in the nine years analyzed.”

“Today, the lighthearted, humorous romance, once primarily associated with the multiplex, thrives more in indie cinema and on television, particularly on cable and streaming platforms. It explores love from specific perspectives … and often with an honesty that eschews fairy-tale endings. While it hasn’t entirely abandoned certain tropes, more often than not, the modern rom-com deconstructs them. In other words, a type of storytelling that once remained unsubverted is now constantly being subverted.”

“People like hard games because they do not placate them with explicit rewards for trivial actions.” For the experience to be meaningful, the challenge cannot be illusory.