Willa Paskin: “Where Vine has fetishized brevity and Snapchat ephemerality, Facebook Live encourages video-creators to go long, more than five minutes and up to 90, and caches its videos. … The formal innovations of Facebook Live are length and durability, along with the ‘live’ aspect. And yet so far very few Facebook Live videos have figured out how to capitalize on any of this at all.”
Category: media
The Lonely Island: How Andy Samberg And His Bros Changed Comedy, Online And On TV
“1. Cut a hole in a box.
The Lonely Island disrupted the distribution and aesthetic of filmed comedy.”
Seth Meyers And The Staff Of ‘Saturday Night Live’ Pick The Greatest Lonely Island Digital Short Of All Time
“In March of [Andy] Samberg’s final season, Seth Meyers, SNL‘s head writer at the time, had an idea: a bracket, voted on by the staff of the show, to determine the greatest digital short of all time.” As it turned out, one of the most popular of them all (over 150 million online views) didn’t even make it past the first round of voting. (And “Andy Popping Into Frame” didn’t even make the ballot, so feh!)
A New Canon: The 50 Greatest Films By Black Directors
“It’s time to fight the canons that be. Slate asked more than 20 prominent filmmakers, critics, and scholars – including Ava DuVernay, Robert Townsend, Charles Burnett, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Wesley Morris, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. – for their favorite movies by filmmakers of color and used their picks to shape our list of the 50 greatest films by black directors.”
So Little Changed So Much: What Soviet Censors Did To The First Film Hitchcock Worked On
“Hitchcock remembered that his early work had taught him to ‘change the way audiences read an action or an expression by changing the intertitle’.” Anna Aslanyan explains how that concept reached an apotheosis in the Soviet release of the 1922 British silent Three Live Ghosts.
Do Canadian Content Rules Make Any Sense In The New Media Landscape?
“Even the most ardent cultural nationalists know there’s a problem. On television, regulations requiring that about half the programming day be devoted to Canadian shows were created for linear schedules; they make little sense in an on-demand environment. Also, unregulated foreign services – that would be Netflix – face no such requirements. Nor does Netflix contribute to the Canadian programming funds underwritten by the cable and satellite companies.”
What Film Was Stanley Kubrick Planning When He Died? ‘Pinocchio’
“Emilio D’Alessandro, Kubrick’s trusted personal assistant and friend for more than 30 years, told the Guardian that the director wanted to tell the story of Pinocchio and to shoot a movie about Monte Cassino, one of the most bitter and bloody battles of the second world war.”
Fighting Through The ‘Traditional’ Noise To Get Unconventional Characters In Movies
Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast and Maleficent writer Linda Woolverton on working at Disney: “I wasn’t wanted. … And I was a girl. They were, like: Who the hell are you?”
Why The U.S. Needs That Remake Of Roots [VIDEO]
Blame 40 years of relentless pop culture parodies.
Tacoma Supporters Raise $7 Million To Save, Buy Their Public Radio Station
“It took 17,000 supporters of the Tacoma-based public radio station less than five months to donate the money. A fund-topping $500,000 matching contribution came from a collection of businesses and individuals.”