Category: media

“Ten years after a Rio de Janeiro slum called Cidade de Deus (City of God) burst into the world’s consciousness with the hit film of the same name, very little has changed for the residents and the actors have enjoyed mixed fortunes.”

“Over the weekend, the worldwide total for his zombie tentpole World War Z grew to $502.6 million, surpassing the $497.3 million earned by historical epic Troy.”

“With just three weeks until summer moviegoing peters out after Labor Day weekend, observers already are calling summer 2013 the best ever at the domestic box office.”

“In general, filmgoers in North America — having sampled three-dimensional viewing in films as breathtaking as “Avatar” and “Life of Pi,” — are drifting back to conventional theaters.”

“Socialbots are tapping into an ever-expanding universe of social media. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million. Some researchers estimate that only 35 percent of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. In fact, more than half of Internet traffic already comes from nonhuman sources like bots or other types of algorithms.”

“Netflix knows what you watched, searched for, rated and even scrolled past, and they know when and where, including on which device, you saw it. That data is factored into several algorithms to determine what you might want to see next, the engineers explain.”

Xinhua found the Andy Borowitz New Yorker column about Jeff Bezos having bought The Washington Post by mistake (he clicked the wrong button), translated it into Chinese and ran it as an actual news story. This was far from the first time Chinese state media believed what looked to Americans like obvious satire.

“About 14.6% of illegal copies of this Monday’s “Under the Dome” were downloaded in New York, L.A. and Dallas, up from 10.9% for last week’s episode, according to the blog site TorrentFreak. In Gotham, the rate of illegal downloads of “Under the Dome” more than doubled (from 1.3% of all U.S. downloads last week to 3% for Monday’s ep).”

“That authenticity is driving a distinct emerging culture. One that stars people like Riff Raff and Tyler, the Creator, and an army of kids whose names you’ve never heard of but who can still generate hundreds of thousands of likes and re-Vines, and even large scale in-person meetups. It’s the triumph of the loop, yes, but it’s also the triumph of youth.”

Too Much Johnson, a short silent movie “which the seminal filmmaker directed two years before coming to Hollywood to make his landmark 1941 drama Citizen Kane, … was recently found in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy.”