Category: media

“It would be more expensive and it would close a few doors, and yes, some potential for exploitation drama would be sacrificed. But it would also prevent the baby of a perfectly good game show or documentary show from being thrown out with the bathwater of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills.”

“Executives at Starz apparently concluded that they would lose even more money by giving consumers a reason to subscribe to Netflix instead of the cable channel.”

“Some of the most high-profile movies about Iran in the past few years have all been directed or co-directed by women, including Shirin Neshat’s video-art shorts and feature Women Without Men, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis. And the Iranian New Wave that’s livened up world cinema over the past 20 years has been notable for a string of strong feminist films, some of them directed by men.”

European producers hope they now “can get big, international movies off the ground without looking to the Hollywood studios. The belief is that the European market is large enough for them to recoup their costs regardless of what happens to the films in the US.”

“Taken together, the summers of 2010 and 2011 combined for the smallest domestic audiences since the summers of 1997-98. Since peaking at a modern high of 653 million tickets sold in summer 2002, domestic attendance has wavered generally downward, dipping to 551 million in summer 2010 and sliding again this summer to 543 million.”

The two-hour Video Music Awards “telecast — which featured Lady Gaga dressed as her male alter ego, many camera shots of a bored-looking Justin Bieber, and Beyonce upstaging everything by announcing her pregnancy during the pre-show — nabbed 12.4 million viewers,MTV’s largest audience ever.”

News of Beyonce’s pregnancy breaks record for most tweets per second. “Users on the microblogging site posted 8,868 tweets per second when the singer showed off her baby bump after her performance at the event. The previous record was 7,196 after Japan’s win over the US in the women’s World Cup final in July.”

“The beleaguered online giant will launch its first-ever slate of original series beginning in October. While Yahoo isn’t about to overtake Fox or CBS as those nets launch their fall schedules, the company will mix some traditional TV programming tactics with its own new-media savvy.”

“Hello? There is something very troubling about the cancelling of shows that cover the arts in Canada, on a channel that’s supposed to be devoted to the arts. Not entertainment, mark you, but the arts.”

“So has Toronto become the most important film festival in the world, thus cementing the American factor as more important than winning a prize at some arty, old European shindig?”