Category: media

Melissa Rayworth on portraying the British prime minister in a Chinese government biopic of Deng Xiaoping: “They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back. … How do you portray a world leader when the people who hired you see her as nothing more than a parody?”

“For quality binge-watching, you have to go solo and go hard. Getting strung out on the tension of a long-arc narrative is private. And if we’re talking about the postholiday dead of winter, go drama and (for the most part) go cable. You can sit through days, weeks even, of CSIs and Grey’s Anatomys, but it’s the more cryptic, complicated, grisly stuff that makes for the most immersive experience.”

This year’s Golden Globes featured a highly tame host, a mix of famous and unknown winners – and a lot of swearing from Meryl Streep.

Ticket sales and attendance were way, way down. And that may not change. “It’s not cyclical. This is a technological shift on a generational scale, and the long-term technology is distribution on the web — and that’s not ten years, that’s forever.”

“Nothing inspired more envy and admiration than last year’s trailer for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s 1:39 with cuts on every beat of an updated version of Led Zepplin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ — some 170 fugue state-inducing edits. It’s all the more impressive when you know it might have started as a four-hour version of the unfinished movie, replete with visible green screens.”

Imagine a world where Crash didn’t beat Brokeback Mountain and where Dances With Wolves never got the best picture award. Fantasy? No, just the Golden Globes, where comedy isn’t a dirty word and campaigning doesn’t dominate voting.

Lindsey Doran, producer of “The Firm” and “Sense and Sensibility,” and former president of United Artists Pictures, knows what audiences want. That’s because she measures it. (Least shocking discovery: “Male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.”)

While Harry Potter was cleaning up at the People’s Choice Awards, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards tipped different movies and actors – and helped them speed farther down the road to the Oscars.

Video may soon account for 90 percent of web traffic. “Netflix, which got its start in 1998 mailing DVDs to subscribers in its trademark red envelopes, streamed 2 billion videos in the fourth quarter of 2011. Hulu now boasts 30 million monthly users. And YouTube attracts about 800 million viewers a month.”

“Reaction continued to be divided across Britain’s film world yesterday in the wake of comments by prime minister David Cameron, ahead of a visit to Pinewood studios, in which he suggested that lottery funding of cinema projects would be aimed towards ‘commercial’ projects.”