Category: media

“In Doha, there was once a buzzing festival and schemes to nurture local talent, but now much of the the money in the Qatari film business goes to projects elsewhere.”

Columbia Pictures is producing the remake for release this coming holiday season, with stars Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Jamie Foxx. (includes trailer)

The youth-oriented channel BBC3 will be pulled from the airwaves, with programming available only online, as part of BBC Director General Tony Hall’s planned £100 million in budget cuts. “His decision also signals a reprieve for its sister channel, the arts and culture specialist BBC4, which has faced calls for it to be axed and merged into BBC2.”

No, you weren’t imagining the tension you saw during the Oscars telecast. “Long before each came away with an Academy Award, … director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley were embroiled in a bitter feud regarding credit for the film’s screenplay, a fight they kept quiet for the good of the campaign before it came to a head Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre.”

Just this past weekend, The New York Times ran an article on how Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning documentary about the massacres after Indonesia’s failed 1965 coup is having little visible effect in Indonesia itself. Here another author describes a screening in Yogyakarta and suggests that the film is having a quiet but powerful effect in the country.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, about the killing of half a million people following a failed 1965 coup against Suharto, has won a slew of awards and lots of attention seemingly everywhere but Indonesia, where even the Oscar nomination was largely ignored. (The massacres are still an extremely sensitive subject there.)

“Last week, Steven Soderbergh – retired from filmmaking, but still with many tricks up his sleeve – posted, on his Web site, a feature-length mashup version of Psycho that splices together the Hitchcock classic and Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake. … At the film’s violent junctures, … Soderbergh overlays the two versions, creating a disorienting blur of Hitchcock’s horror and its latter-day identical twin. (includes video excerpt)

The news quiz’s Official Judge and Scorekeeper will step down following a series of farewell shows this spring, when he turns 80. No replacement has yet been named. (Pssst! Corva Coleman!)

The 86th Academy Awards were seen by 43 million Americans Sunday, drawing the biggest audience of any entertainment program since the finale of hit sitcom “Friends” in May 2004, according to estimates by ratings service Nielsen.

Andrew O’Hehir: “The 2014 Oscars may be mercifully remembered for who won what, rather than for Ellen DeGeneres’ labored pizza-delivery gag or the star-studded selfie that allegedly ‘broke Twitter’ and may finally have convinced an entire generation of young Americans that social media is hopelessly lame.”