Category: media

“Picture what Pixar and DreamWorks are doing, but on a fraction of the budget, using a scrappy team and a startup mentality, and a decidedly Latin American flavor.” And soccer, of course.

“Anytime a film costs $10 million to make and ticket sales approach $100 million, Hollywood pays attention. But jaws really drop when a movie starring actors in their 70s and aimed at people over 50 pulls off that trick. Wait. Stop. Older people will go to the movies if we give them something to watch besides superheroes and special effects?”

“I’ve said before that fortunately or unfortunately, I’m unable to be a real storyteller. I’m sure that we can never be the witness of a story from its beginning to its end … all films start before we get into them and they end after we leave them.”

The director, attacking the British Board of Film Classification over its restrictions on a certain term in Loach’s The Angels’ Share (set in working-class Glasgow): “We were allowed seven c**ts … but only two of them could be aggressive c**ts.”

Over the past 16 months or so, the satellite channel has revived The South Bank Show and aired live performances from English National Opera and the Royal Albert Hall as well as Simon Callow’s one-man show Being Shakespeare. “Coming up are Shakespeare plays from The Globe, without fear of getting rained on.” The channel has even engaged the likes of Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm to do literary adaptations.

“The Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal … effectively let[ting] stand a jury’s $675,000 damages award against Joel Tenenbaum, a former Boston University student who admitted to downloading some 30 songs on the unlicensed file-sharing service Kazaa.”

For all the high-profile success of shows about urban grit (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire), serial killers (Dexter), and vampires (True Blood), “there is no guarantee the mass audiences that tune into broadcast networks – or their advertisers – will be as enthusiastic.”

“Tugg [is] a new service that combines crowd-funding, like Kickstarter, with the build-your-own-entertainment model of video-on-demand – but in a movie theater. With relationships with movie theaters all across the country and a library of more than 400 feature-length films, including new independent films, classic Hollywood and foreign movies, dramas, documentaries, and genre pictures, Tugg allows film lovers or people with a common interest in a particular subject matter to create a screening at a local theater at a time and date of their choosing.”

“Grand Illusion repeatedly shows such examples of the potential for human feelings to bridge national boundaries. It is also a stunning example of Renoir’s skillful melding of realism and glittering artifice.”

“I have learned to adore the midnight show as a moviegoing experience. It has become the one lure that draws me unhesitatingly back to the theater. It’s not just a raucous party to be endured. It’s the one way in which movie theaters can still reliably fulfill their most sacred function.”