Category: media

“India’s film censorship organisation is in crisis after the resignation of its chair, Leela Samson, amid complaints of ‘interference, coercion and corruption’, and more than half its board members.”

“Independent film used to define the cutting edge in entertainment, but the indie crowd has lately ceded ground to television … The festival, fiercely proud of its heritage as America’s foremost showcase for independent cinema, is working to hold on to that identity. At the same time, it is tentatively embracing an art form, television, in which innovation and energy abound.”

“Collecting sounds is important. The experience of listening to them is as close to time travel as we’ve ever come. From the rare or iconic to the ephemeral and everyday, recordings give a living picture of the world changing around us. … This is urgent: these recordings go back to the late-19th century, and many of the formats on which the sounds were originally captured … are disappearing.”

At the Television Critics Association press conference for the new ABC series about an Asian-American family, the first question wasn’t about creating the show or issues of assimilation or any such thing. It was about chopsticks.

“Video games are more prone than other media to obsolescence. With each new generation of hardware and software, scores of titles are made unplayable. Music has suffered similarly, of course: vinyl morphed into cassette into CD into digital audio. But music, like films and books, is easily transferred to new formats. Video games, which rely not only on audiovisual reproduction but also on a computer’s ability to understand and execute their coded rules and instructions, require more profound reconstruction.”

“Russia has introduced new rules regarding the issuing of exhibition licenses for films, decreeing that films ‘defiling the national culture, posing a threat to national unity and undermining the foundations of the constitutional order’ will not be allowed to be screened in cinemas.” As it happens, more than a few people in Russia (including the culture minister) think that description could apply to Leviathan, which has already won a Golden Globe

“While Charlie Hebdo returned to Parisian newsstands with a defiant image of a contrite Mohammad emblazoned on its cover, Timbuktu, a much-praised, Oscar-nominated movie by the internationally known Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, was unceremoniously yanked out of a theater in the Paris suburb Villiers-sur-Marne.”

“‘Whereas it typically takes 39 to 52 weeks for theatrical movies to premiere on subscription video services, Amazon Original Movies will premiere on Prime Instant Video in the U.S. just 4 to 8 weeks after their theatrical debut,’ the company said in a press release.”

“Bafta does not have a dazzling modern-day record in the field of independent voting. The shifting of its awards ceremony in 2001 to pre-empt the Oscars has done nothing to diminish the impression that it will always be a feeble facsimile of its US counterpart. The difference now is that, rather than mimicking the Oscar nominations, the Baftas mostly second-guess them.”