Category: media

“‘This is probably naiveté on my part,’ Piers Handling confessed the other day. But ‘there was a kind of feeling of ‘you build it, they will come.” Especially after 10 years of raising almost $200-million and especially with the brand of the Toronto International Film Festival … People have come. But not, it seems, in the numbers TIFF CEO and director Handling … might have been hoping.”

“Only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional.”

“In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.”

“CBC/Radio-Canada will eliminate hundreds of jobs, cancel some programs and boost ads as part of cost-cutting measures to cope with planned budget cuts outlined in the recent federal budget.”

“The National Film Board will cut 61 jobs and close its viewing rooms in Montreal and Toronto to comply with a $6.68 million cut over three years imposed in Thursday’s federal budget.”

“Realistic epics have all but disappeared in Titanic‘s wake. Fantasy has become a requirement to justify moviemaking of that size … American Pie was in the vanguard of a movement that has brought The Hangover, Old School, and practically the entirety of Judd Apatow’s film career.”

“The strongest trend in TV productions today is peer-to-peer recommendations. And that reflected a broader trend entrenched by social networks that values advice handed out by one’s peers above that of experts.”

In a series of documentaries – most recently, a film recounting the 2009 rescue of Eritrean boat people by the Italian navy, which promptly dumped them in Libya – documentarian Andrea Segre and journalist Stefano Liberti are hoping to change their country’s harsh treatment of African refugees.

“‘It’s such an ingrained part of fantasy and science fiction that I’m a little surprised when those kind of characters don’t speak in British accents,’ says [critic] Matt Zoller Seitz, who suggests one reasonable explanation.