Category: media

“PR has subverted much of our lives, making unconscious acolytes of those who once might have operated outside the pack. The drumbeat of crap movies with big promotional budgets, mostly from the United States, is incessant.”

Director Abdellatif Kechiche and his stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos were all smiles last spring when the Cannes jury gave the three of them together the Palme d’Or. A couple of months later, the actresses were telling the press that Kechiche was sadistic and the shooting a nightmare; the filmmaker accused the women of trying to besmirch the movie and destroy his career. With Blue now being released in the US and UK, they’ve changed their tune (a bit).

Andrew O’Hehir: “The Oscars are simultaneously a vapid, soul-sucking vacuum that takes up way too much bandwidth in our culture, and also a central cultural and political text that’s overloaded with all kinds of meanings.”

Coronation Street‘s Hayley Cropper, introduced as a bad joke in 1997, and her husband Roy “are one of the few outposts in soap you can turn to for moral virtue. Among the serial killers, pin-ups, playboys, alcoholics and adulterers of contemporary Corrie, the couple in the zip-up cardigan and the red anorak have become an unlikely symbol of purity.”

In a new memoir, longtime executive producer Rebecca Eaton shares some of the secrets of the flagship PBS series, including foibles of royalty (Princess Margaret was not amused by Upstairs, Downstairs), audiences (many think that all the shows come from the BBC), and herself (she turned down the chance to air Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot).

“Since its debut in August on a minor TV channel dedicated to educational programming, the Chinese Characters Dictation Competition” – inspired by America’s Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee – “has exploded in popularity. … The show has touched a nerve in China, where purists complain that smartphones are eroding language skills.”

The online video rental and streaming service has “announced a new subscriber milestone – 40 million worldwide – on the strength of exclusive TV shows like Orange Is the New Black.”

“AMC, which owns 400 cinemas in North America — and one in Manchester — is considering creating a “texting aisle” for those who feel compelled to message their friends through every twist and turn of the plot.”

“When you take technology and entertainment and slam them together for a highly demanding user base, you’re in the deep end of the deepest pool. The movie business is tough, but this is really hard.”

About 200 people attended the fake funeral, raising $17,000 for a local homeless initiative – and raising worries about thousands of fans trampling through a real graveyard to an empty gravesite (with an actual headstone).