Category: media

“The audience is encouraged to yell out possible settings, actor names and even car models — anything that might help identify the film.”

A deep (very, very deep) dive into the writing, making, directing, editing and producing of “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” a film that bombed at the box office but (despite its lack of streaming or even a DVD) became a cult classic.

“Whereas in Spain, Germany and the UK the proportion of domestically produced movies varies between 10% and 20%, in Italy last year it was 31%.”

“Ballet took £2.1 million, classical music £900,000, popular music £500,000 and comedy £100,000. The other two non-theatrical categories were film documentaries, which generated £2.2 million, and museum exhibitions, which took £900,000.”

“If you look at shows that appear to lack diversity, they actually look dated because “America doesn’t look like that anymore.”

“Serkis, whose resume includes playing some of the least likely critical favorites of all time – Gollum, King Kong, and Godzilla – seems like an ideal spokesman for motion-capture if it wants high-brow cred. … [Yet] the singular focus on him in some ways clashes with the collaborative, chameleonic spirit of motion-capture, a field that has a long and glorious tradition of eschewing thespian concerns entirely.”

“Television has been growing here like kudzu in recent years, but this time around it seems to have finally blocked out the light for much of anything else to be noticed.”

The Odessa International Film Festival “almost didn’t happen [this year], after the annexation of Crimea in March, and the events of 2 May, when 43 pro-Russian activists died in Odessa in a fire started in unclear circumstances. The festival was, however, eventually given the go-ahead, albeit on a drastically reduced budget, and helped by a crowdfunding campaign.”

“The show is exactly what the title says. A narrator … gets very, very drunk, on camera. As she downs her whiskeys or fancy cocktails, she delivers a historical account … It is ridiculous – and very funny. The surprising part is that it’s also a perversely effective way to deliver historical information.”

There is “an expanding cadre of high-level physicists, engineers and other scientists, including many former NASA employees, who have left careers in aerospace and academia to work in the movie business. Demand for their services has grown as animated movies, once created by hand, push the boundaries of what can be created on a computer screen.”