Category: media

“Her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell won Hilary Mantel the Man Booker prize – and now Wolf Hall and its follow-up Bring Up The Bodies are to be brought to television in a six-hour adaptation for BBC2 … by Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for the recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie.”

Maryam Keshavarz, director of Circcumstance: “There were screaming matches. One woman said: ‘This film is such bullshit – it doesn’t look like Iran, smell like Iran, taste like Iran.’ I didn’t even have a chance to reply when this woman in her 20s stood up and shouted at the older woman: ‘I just came from Iran and it’s people like you who are ruining our country because you deny the reality.'”

“It’s a simple formula for success: Critical acclaim leads to buzz, which leads to interest in your channel, which leads to demands for the cable or satellite company to carry it, which leads to profit. But now, with viewers and programmers running madly off in all directions, it is anybody’s guess how long the old formula will last.”

“Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, is straining to up its game.” Production values are improving from the quick-and-cheap status quo, and more directors are switching from video to film stock. But the “declarative dialogue, some of the riper acting from the bit-parters – they feel as though they’re hand-me-downs from older art forms, like oral storytelling.”

“Women are driving in Saudi Arabia. Not on the streets. That would be illegal. But on a recent episode of Hush Hush, a new comedy on Saudi state television, a lilac sedan comes to a halt and a woman climbs out of the driver’s seat.”

“Video games are often dismissed as toys, the preserve of children and nerdy, mostly male adults. Whereas other popular innovations have eventually won the critical respect accorded to more established forms – does anyone now consider cinema inferior to theatre? – games have made little headway.”

“You wouldn’t have put it past Raul Ruiz to direct a film from beyond the grave. The Chilean master was hard at work on a new feature, The Lines of Wellington, at the time of his death last August, aged 70. … Rather than abandon the project, … Ruiz’s editor and widow Valeria Sarmiento took over directorial duties.”

Despite its solid ratings, “The Tonight Show” hasn’t been a big moneymaker. That prompted the cuts Friday, which are expected to trim the program’s weekly budget by about $600,000, or 25 percent, to $1.7 million. That’s back to its levels of a few years ago.

“Presumably a few angry customers unable to get a love spell working have caused eBay strife over the years.”

Congress’s passage of the Community Radio Act in 2011 means that community radio stations could soon–in Richard Camp’s words–“mushroom,” which offers a lot of potential for Native American media on reservations, where there is usually little infrastructure and in many cases no electricity (certainly no wifi).