Category: media

John McCarthy, who was held in Lebanon for five years by Islamic Jihad, “has called the violent depiction of captivity in the award-winning drama Homeland ‘grotesque’ and accused the producers of using ‘titillation’ to manipulate viewers,” serving them torture as entertainment.

David Denby: “There’s a certain grandeur, a certain ambition [that] has just gone out of studio filmmaking. And they openly say they’re only interested in spectacles made from comic books and games, or maybe young-adult fictions and genre films. “

“This week, TLC ordered more episodes of the series, as well as three holiday specials to be shown around Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s a move that will surely draw more ire from critics, and just as likely be welcomed by viewers, who have found that they cannot look away.”

“A three-month strike at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios ended Friday, just in time to accommodate the shoot of helmer Paul Haggis’ romantic drama Third Person.”

And around the dramatic chart, some history of Polaroid as well.

“When a machine called the Imagica EX scans across each frame of a film’s negative, it creates a digitally encoded replica that consists of 4,000 (actually, 4,096) pixels on each horizontal line. Multiplied by the 2,160 pixels on each vertical line, this makes for a total of 8.8 million pixels per frame.” That’s four times as much detail as on an HD broadcast or Blu-ray disc.

“There’s no point in pretending that movies play the same dominant role in our culture that they once did or that art-house movies of the sort the New York Film Festival so lovingly curates have any impact at all on the American cultural mainstream.”

“The law bars registered sex offenders from representing minors working in the entertainment business. It requires criminal background checks for managers, publicists, photographers and others with unsupervised access to young performers.”

“Noah, a $125 million epic … starring Russell Crowe and directed by Darren Aronofsky, is one of a boatload of religious films in the works from major movie studios. … With floods, plagues, burning bushes and parting seas, Bible movies make great vehicles for big-budget special effects.” What’s more, the source material is both familiar and in the public domain.

“The findings of the studies, shared with The New York Times, revealed vast shifts in the way people watched the Games this year compared with the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 and in Beijing in 2008, and they offered insight into how television will further evolve into a multiplatform experience.”