Category: media

Payne and his colleagues did create a color version of the famously black-and-white 2013 release – but only because his contract with the studio required one, mainly for overseas television; Payne publicly said he hoped no one would ever see it. Now a premium cable/satellite service is presenting it – as a “world premiere”, no less – in the U.S.

“Digital presentations of content in general make it a lot easier to deliver things in lots and lots of different ways. It’s good to have flexibility, but it also means there might be a point where it becomes almost impossible to make your vision available to people without agreeing in advance to make it customizable to the point where it ceases to be art at all.”

“[Stephen Margolis] has spoken for the first time about the row that led to it being withdrawn from a north London theatre, and said he felt ‘sick to my teeth’ when the theatre’s director demanded to scrutinise the list of films to be shown.”

“Although there has always been a range of possibilities and venues within the arts — from community theater to Broadway, from art-house films to summer blockbusters, from the Cinema Bar to the Fabulous Forum — modern technology has brought entertainment more than ever into line with this existential state of affairs. We now live in the age of the microaudience.”

“HBO’s success in the 21st century is all about its own shows, not the movies that come on in between. Similarly, Netflix subscriptions have surged as the company gains a name for itself as a producer of its own great shows, and it plans to start making even more. To make HBO money, it seems, Netflix will keep trying to become more like HBO.”

“Of course, no parent walked out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with their wound-up eight-year-old and thought, ‘That really captured our collective fear of being mugged by teenagers. Radical!’ But viewed today, it’s striking how much the [1990 film] encapsulated contemporary attitudes about delinquency and violence, and showed weird prescience about the decade to come.”

“As opposed to being completely first person or being interactive in a video game fashion, it’s as if somebody could essentially step into the movie and have the ability to look 360 degrees all the way around to see the action.”

“A north London theatre has refused to host the UK Jewish Film Festival while it is sponsored by the Israeli Embassy amid the ongoing crisis in Gaza. The Tricycle Theatre … said it would not accept any funding from ‘any party to the current conflict’. It has offered to use its own resources instead.” Festival management calls the condition “unacceptable” and says it will move.

“In a sense, Altman radically democratized movies, upending the Hollywood hierarchy of star over supporting player, story over atmosphere, emotion over all. … His films were raucous parties, too: he would assemble crowds of actors, give them the hint of a story, encourage them to improvise in Babels of overlapping dialogue and let the canny chaos spill onto the screen.”

“On Tuesday, USC’s Annenberg school released a study that found just 26% of speaking roles in film went to minorities last year. The study, which analyzed 3,932 characters, revealed that Latinos had only 4.9% of those parts, even though they represent 16.3% of the population.”