Category: media

“While the statistics about roles for women over 40 are dismal at best, cinema has featured some unconventional, intelligent, and downright badass parts for world-wise women in film.”

“Binge-watching isn’t just the new sex — it’s the new workout, the new book club, the new cocktail hour. Where once most new shows premiered in the fall, now they drop all the time, some in complete seasons. Announcements of new programming from clever upstarts Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Acorn feel like pop-culture air-raid sirens: ‘Citizens, seek shelter: ‘The Man in the High Castle’ is descending.’ Of course, we want to see it, but, oh, my God, who has the time?”

“The challenges are daunting, the statistics are depressing, but rather than sit around complaining, the idea behind Film Fatales is that we can change things. And I think real progress will take this bottom-up, grass-roots approach as well as a top-down approach.”

“The characters matter. As we become the story’s protagonist, the companions represent the other players. In a way, they bring a sense of humanity into the plot. Their personalities may attract or repel us, their motivations may or may not align with our own. They become our point of reference, our guides, our rivals or friends. They give us decisions to make and show us the consequences. Sometimes, through them we see our community. Sometimes, they are extensions of ourselves.”

“Midcareer actors took note of Bryan Cranston’s transition from the goofy sitcom dad on Malcolm in the Middle to the megalomaniac drug lord in Breaking Bad (and the four Emmys it earned him).” Now, for instance, Katie “Dawson’s Creek” Holmes is playing a scheming sports agent, controversial comic Sarah Silverman a sad and struggling 1950s lesbian, Patrick “Capt. Picard” Stewart a skirt-chasing, coke-snorting TV pundit.

“Where a debate between two urbane intellectuals ought to have ushered in a golden age of elevated, rational discussion, it instead – due to the personal enmity to which the combatants gave voice – sparked the worst aspects of modern media, a debased version of political talk, the gladiatorial mudslinging that prevails in broadcasting today.”

“Distinctions between television companies and streaming companies miss the point: Pretty much everybody you’ve seen here in the last couple of weeks are both.”

“Sesame’s migration to cable begs to be understood as a failure in public funding, and it is in part. In a kinder society, PBS would have more funding, and it could rush in to support a struggling flagship. But what changed Sesame Workshop’s financial situation wasn’t a PBS funding cut but the media environment itself. The same economics that have hurt musicians—the transition from physical ownership to digital ownership to streaming—are what threatened Sesame Workshop’s budget and sent it running to HBO. In a world with less media ownership, even widely beloved, publicly funded media need a premium patron.”

Scott Timberg: “You don’t have to be a hardcore Proustian – someone who sees life as shaped by the passage of time and delights in the pleasure of anticipation – to want this stuff to come out a little at a time. (Though it sure helps.)”