“Independent U.S. comedy — especially the out-and-out gut-busters that skew toward the male audience that flocks to Baron Cohen — is having a trickier time generating global laughs (the less said about The Brothers Grimsby, the better).”
Category: media
Mila Kunis Writes A Scorching Letter About Hollywood’s Sexism
Kunis, an actor who’s married to another actor (Ashton Kutcher), is scathing to the (male) producer who told her if she wouldn’t pose semi-nude, she’d “never work in this town again.”
How Video Games Desensitize People To Violence
“Young children have unprecedented access to violent movies, games and sports events at an early age, and learning brutality is the norm. The media dwells upon real-life killers, describing every detail of their crime during prime-time TV. The current conditions easily set up children to begin thinking like soldiers and even justify killing. But are we in fact suppressing critical functions of the brain? Are we engendering future generations who will accept violence and ignore the voice of reason, creating a world where violence will become the comfortable norm?”
Chinese Conglomerate Pays $1 Billion For Dick Clark Productions
“Dalian Wanda, a real estate and entertainment corporation owned by a billionaire who has aggressively pursued US film companies in recent years, … already owns AMC Theaters, which it bought in July for $650m, and the production company Legendary Entertainment, which it bought in January for $3.5bn.”
Report: Diversity On American TV Hits All-Time High In 2016/17
The newest installment of the advocacy organization’s “Where We Are on TV” report found that 4.8% of all broadcast series-regular characters expected to appear in the coming season are LGBTQ — the highest percentage in study’s 21-year history. Black characters accounted for 20% of all broadcast series regulars, and characters with disabilities for 1.7% — both also all-time highs. Across broadcast, cable and streaming, the number of transgender series regulars more than doubled from seven last season to 16 this season.
Criterion Collection Launches Streaming Service To Show The Good Stuff Netflix Doesn’t
FilmStruck, a joint venture of Criterion and the cable channel Turner Classic movies, will concentrate on foreign and independent features and documentaries as well as titles from the two partners’ libraries. “It won’t be a clearing house; the keyword here is ‘curation,’ with new titles rotated in and out each week.”
Where That Strange Katharine Hepburn-Old Hollywood Accent Came From, And The (Very Strict) Woman Who Spread It
“The accent we’re talking about here is among the weirdest ways of speaking in the history of the English language. … Its popularity, though, in pop culture [of its era] can be tied to one American woman, and a very strange set of books.”
Wall Street Journal To Cut Arts Coverage
Editor in chief Gerard Baker announced the changes to staff in a memo Wednesday. As a result, the paper will feature fewer pages with less space dedicated to coverage of arts, culture and New York news.
Death Of Vine’s Six-Second Videos Is The Death Of An Art Form
“Like flash fiction before it, best represented by the apocryphal Ernest Hemingway six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” the original six-second limitations on the app’s videos forced users to craft concise narratives that capture a slice of life or create a bit of movie magic in a mere moment. It became flash film.”
Why Is The Quality Of Canadian TV So Bad?
“What’s exceptionally frustrating, especially in the matter of television in Canadian culture, is the lack of emphasis on quality. Said it before and saying it again: We make an awful lot of TV in this country and we are, frankly, accepting of a great deal of mediocrity. Money is thrown at all manner of drivel.”