Category: media

Since acquiring AMC Entertainment, the second-largest cinema chain in the US, for $2.6bn in 2012, Wang Jianlin, who is worth an estimated $32.5bn and has ties to the communist Chinese government, has been aggressively staking his claim on the industry. So far, he’s snapped up Europe’s biggest cinema group, Odeon and UCI, purchased the US production house Legendary Entertainment (the company behind the Dark Knight trilogy and Jurassic World), and boasted that he intends to soon buy one of the six major US studios.

As you probably noticed for the first time while watching TV late at night, actors in the Hollywood films of the ’30s and ’40s did not speak the way actors do now. That wasn’t because you were stoned; the elocution style really was different – for public figures in real life as well as in fiction films. (Think of FDR’s speeches.) Linguist John McWhorter explains why. (podcast)

“Netflix is promising two big highlights for 2016 [sic]. For viewers, there’ll be 1,000 hours of original new shows, part of a planned $6 billion in spending on content. And for investors there’ll be serious profits for the first time in the company’s history.”

“Biopics! Coming-of-age tales! Socially conscious historical dramas! You might even call them ‘Oscar bait’ – but should you? Below, Vulture editors Mark Harris and Kyle Buchanan debate the utility of the term.”

“The trend is evident in such acclaimed serials as Girls, Unreal, and Transparent in the U.S. Meanwhile in the U.K., period pieces Call the Midwife and Victoria, Blighty’s biggest new drama this fall, have put women to the fore in two different centuries. The fashion for female leads is just as clear in comedy.”

“One thing is for sure: looking back, the 90s was a golden age. The amount of black cinema breaking through at that time is astonishing. … A new generation of black film-makers is starting to respond to this reality, down the road those 90s pioneers paved.”

“The union said that it has tried for more than 19 months to negotiate a new deal with prominent employers in the video game industry and that performers have been governed by a two-decade old contract still in place.”

“RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, … said she had received a letter out of the blue from NatWest saying that it was pulling the plug on the broadcaster’s accounts from mid-December. ‘We have recently undertaken a review of your banking arrangements with us and reached the conclusion that we will no longer provide these facilities,’ it said.”

“The colossal body counts of action blockbusters are incapable of rousing our concern. The vivisections of the torture porn genre we can endure with nary a wince or grimace. We’re unmoved by bloody fisticuffs, unruffled by cities levelled en masse, forever unperturbed by peeled-eyeball gorings. Violence, in the movies at least, has a tough go of actually bothering us. So what about it does?”

“Bollywood is known for its sumptuous costumes, elaborate dances, and catchy songs. Mark Bennington was interested in something else: What did the Indian acting community look like off the screen?”