Category: media

‘Argo’ won for best film, best director (Ben Affleck), and best editing. Will it beat out ‘Lincoln’ in two weeks?

So if Netflix released 13 episodes of the first season of “House of Cards,” and 16 percent of people who are going to watch the whole thing have already watched it, but 23 percent (or something) are only halfway through but may finish it this weekend, what exactly is a spoiler?

Was a hip. hot advertising executive on a skateboard the reason that Chileans rejected PInochet? Um, not so much, say those who were there.

“Last week, Amazon patented a way to sell “used” e-books, music, videos, apps and other “digital objects.” The marketplace described in the patent would let such exchanges take place by cutting off the seller’s access to a piece of digital content once the buyer paid.”

“As Hollywood has gone global and mass-mass-market, different incentives for select television networks have helped to fill the void in quality entertainment. … Thus, television has seen a race to the top while Hollywood has experienced an ostensible race to the middle-bottom.”

Richard Brody: “It’s hard to understand why Griffith’s film merits anything but a place in the dustbin of history … [Yet it] wasn’t just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art – in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality.”

The director of War Witch, Canada’s nominee for the best foreign-language film Oscar, talks about the experience of filming in the Congo.

“Since March 21, 1994, when the first regular obituary segment was dropped into an Academy Awards show, a spot on the yearly scroll of recently deceased movie luminaries has become one of the evening’s most hotly contested honors. And as in most Oscar races it is the focus of sometimes ferocious campaigning.”

These are the conundrums that accompany the decades-long shift from “appointment viewing” to the on-demand kind — and they’re heightened by Netflix, which is plowing new ground by trying to make network-quality programming exclusively for the Web.

“If 75 percent of television is crap and 25 percent is great, these days that 25 percent includes more shows than ever before.”