Category: media

“Last year, a record total of four women had films in competition; this year that number has reverted to Le Grand Zero.”

“Hourlong dramas accounted for 58% of time-shifted viewing, according to Nielsen’s Advertising & Audiences Report released Thursday. Comedies made up 16%, reality shows accounted for 14%, sports represented 8% and news, 4%.”

“Clearly, there is lots of dross on TV, just as there are great films such as The Artist still being made in Hollywood. But for creativity and originality, this is a golden age of high-end television.”

“The introduction of broadcast radio caused some in the newspaper industry to fear that newspapers would soon become a thing of the past. After all, who would read the news when you could just turn on the radio for real-time updates? Newspapers had even more to fear in 1938 when radio thought it might compete with them in the deadtree business as well.”

“So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)”

“One of the country’s most famous actresses, Morante, who could be described as a kind of Italian Catherine Deneuve, … is hoping to exploit the changing times in her country by playing her own part in promoting a different, more powerful role for women in cinema” after 20 years of media mogul Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga aesthetic (if that’s the word).

“The cuts appear grave: Less assistance to filmmakers; three to four fewer major projects per year; 73 jobs eliminated. And the Cinérobothèque in Montreal and the Mediatheque in Toronto – popular storefront attractions that offer personal stations for watching 10,000 NFB titles and public screenings – will be closed by September. All this for an institution that last year alone garnered two Oscar nominations. Yet within the film board itself, there’s a sense of renewal.”

“Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism Monday, for essays and reviews that embodied what Pulitzer judges called ‘smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and big-screen box office’.”

“While the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s tussles with its government paymasters finally concluded last month after the federal budget outlined a specific financial commitment for the next three years, it suddenly has a clutch of new adversaries in the private sector who are pledging to fight its attempts to become more financially self-sufficient.”

Julia Roberts thinks so – as long as the audience could handle her accent.