Category: media

The new hit movie American Dreams in China tells “the story of three friends who launch an online English instruction school for Chinese students.” The film, writes David Weigel, “is an oddly fascinating tribute to the three Cs: capitalism, China, and copyright theft.”

“On the big family films there seems to be a lower proportion of people opting to choose 3D. There were very successful films like Madagascar 3 and Brave, and only about a third of their total revenue came from 3D ticket sales.”

“Microsoft is promising new experiences with the Xbox One, which will require a constant Internet connection, because hundreds of thousands of machines in the cloud will enhance an individual console’s computational power. But players seem to be hearing only what is being taken away by Microsoft’s online monitoring of their gaming: the ability to resell or give away your games to whomever you choose, whenever you choose.”

“A deep financing crisis forcing layoffs and other cutbacks this week, some public television employees believe that format — and a general unwillingness to embrace the digital realities facing journalism — may be jeopardizing the program’s future.”

“The show brings up countless grisly detective show tropes, only to explicitly shatter them.”

The new Oscars prez will be in place “to finish a $300 million movie museum whose 200 or so employees will line up with an existing academy staff about 260; to sort out contract renewals for two top executives; and to wrestle anew with perennial questions about the sustainability of the academy’s crown jewel and primary source of income, the annual Oscar ceremony.”

The NSA and Hollywood “have been feeling each other up at arm’s length for decades, but after the 9/11 era, the romance became official.”

Blackadder, the (hilarious) British series, “can be viewed as a kind of satire of school history books and the weird mishmash of fact and exaggeration that is left in many people’s heads a couple of decades after their last history lesson.”

“People really got smart about this and realized that the material should dictate the medium, not the other way around. That all of our shows here would not make good movies.”

“There was none of the extra cash that fueled competitive commerce, gut calls, or real movies, the extra spec script purchase, the pitch culture, the grease that fueled the Old Abnormal: the way things had always been done. We were running on empty, searching for sources of new revenue.”