Category: media

“The romantic comedy has created, on top of everything else, a new genre: the obituary for the romantic comedy. … Because the truth is that [today’s] romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unseemly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic.”

“What actually gets people moving? Do grant-supported media projects incite change, or are they simply an expensive way of preaching to the choir? Ultimately, the answers may help determine which projects get financed, which formats are favored and how stories are structured.”

It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.

“A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster. … This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals – the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.”

On the Media‘s Bob Garfield talks with Daniel Alarcón (whom you might as well think of, for now, as the Latino Ira Glass) about his Spanish-language series, Radio Ambulante. (audio)

“Their crude variables and simplistic results reflect a larger problem video game research continues to face as it grows, one that makes rigorous experiments hard to recognize: Scientists don’t even know how video games’ real-world effects should be measured.”

“The emerging world enthusiasm for Hollywood films does not extend to comedies, or at least not relative to its love of action movies and animated films. In China, for example, U.S. comedies account for only 10% of box office spending, compared to 25% in the U.S.”

“In recent years, adult television viewers have reveled in an overflow of quality programs that critics have called a new golden age. So why shouldn’t preschoolers be equally spoiled?”

“I understand that the black audience is not monolithic. There are many different types of films that black people want and I’ve never had a feeling that all my films would appeal to all black people. Never, ever, ever.”

“Interactive fiction, which once went by the name ‘text adventure,’ is having a moment.”