Category: media

“Richard Driscoll’s Eldorado was pegged to become a cult classic – the first British film shot in 3D set to be released posthumously as the last ever movie starring David Carradine. But after it was funded with £1.5 million taken from the taxpayer it never saw the light of day.”

“Consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has predicted that global spending for media and entertainment will reach $2.2 trillion in 2017, compared with $1.6 trillion in 2012. The U.S. is expected to remain the largest media market, with spending increasing 4.8% annually to reach $632 billion in 2017, up from the nearly $500 billion spent last year.”

Members of the Writers Guild of America “evaluated hundreds of dramas, comedies, miniseries (six hours or more), daytime serials, animation, variety series, talk shows and kids’ programs to come up with an unprecedented, exhaustive list of TV’s top 101.” Leading the pack was a certain New Jersey family.

In JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal published in video, “the experimental portions of technical scientific papers, instead of being laid out in a couple of dense paragraphs, [are] videotaped and [move] from a necessary if clumsy part of the narrative to center stage.”

“Recently, a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and the MOMA, staged exhibitions featuring video games as art, throwing the topic into focus again.”

Andrew O’Hehir looks at a spate of new releases wherein Hollywood cinema (by no means for the first time) becomes “the space where the angry and confrontational politics of class conflict – which are almost entirely absent in the realm of, y’know, actual politics – can play out as dream or wish fulfillment, with no real-world consequences.”

“Ten years ago, [he] was on top of the world, touted as ‘the next Spielberg’ by Newsweek.” These days audiences are known to boo when they see his name in a movie trailer. Kyle Buchanan suggests that the turning point can be found in a weird little 2004 cable TV “pseudo-documentary”.

Paul Bettany: “As an actor, I have questions. I want to know what I’m doing. And he simply wouldn’t talk to me. You’re not allowed to talk about the film and there is no rehearsal. … He just stands there and says [mimics Danish accent]: ‘Louder! Louder! Do it louder!’ That’s the extent of your collaboration. You know what it’s like? It’s like he’s Jackson Pollock and you’re on the sidelines, mixing his colours.”

“Given the problems, it is remarkable that any feature films are being made at all. But a recent spate of ambitious productions has raised hopes that the moribund movie industry may be on the verge of a renaissance.”

“BoxOffice.com at one point projected very soft opening-weekend sales of about $24 million. Early on, several studios were so worried about the movie’s multiplex prospects that they passed on making it. Oops.”