Category: media

Dziga Vertov “began as a poet and medical student who admired Walt Whitman and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He ended up forever changing documentary film, creating works that still fascinate with their radical ideas about how cinema can transform perception and effect social change.”

“Even though DVD sales and rentals are slowing, there is no evidence that consumers are abandoning physical discs for watching movies, even as the choices for viewing are expanding.”

“When it comes to the big screen, however, On the Road has faced a Kerouac curse. Past efforts by Hollywood to adapt the author’s work have been failures. Now, somewhat quietly, On the Road has finally been made into a movie. The $25 million production, shot in San Francisco, Montreal and other locales, is scheduled for release this fall.”

“Typical: you wait a lifetime for a big-screen beat generation movie and then three roll off the rank at once. Hard on the heels of last year’s Howl and Walter Salles’s yet-to-be-released On the Road comes Big Sur, an adaptation of the Jack Kerouac novel by writer-director Michael Polish.”

“Morgan Spurlock paid for The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, his $1.5 million documentary about product placement, by selling sponsorships to the very companies he was profiling.”

“Many critics have described her heavily auto-tuned track as the worst ever but it’s helped her YouTube channel reach 112 million views. Just over half a million more than Bieber’s channel on the video sharing website. But both performers are way ahead of the competition.”

“Starting on Monday the ratings board plans to begin introducing computers to the job of deciding whether a game is appropriate for Everyone, for Teens or for Mature gamers (meaning older than 16). To do this the organization has written a program designed to replicate the ingrained cultural norms and predilections of the everyday American consumer, at least when it comes to what is appropriate for children and what isn’t.”

“Soap opera ratings have falling for decades and have been in particularly troubling shape over the past 15 years at least. Meanwhile, formats like reality television shows have shown growing viability, sometimes on particularly lean budgets.”

“With its newly insatiable appetite for entertainment, its rapidly expanding movie industry and its insistence on censorship, mainland China has become, for better and worse, the dominant force in Asian films.”

“What happened after the Brooklyn filmmaker Caveh Zahedi submitted his film to the biennial offers an object lesson in the risks built into the event, and more generally into efforts to cultivate a contemporary art scene in places like the United Arab Emirates.”