Category: media

“Every year since 1988, when the Library of Congress passed the National Film Preservation Act, which established the National Film Preservation Board, films have been selected for the honor. To qualify, titles must be at least 10 years old and must have had some form of theatrical release. With the addition of this year’s selections, the registry now boasts a total of 550 films.”

India, a Brazilian prime-time soap opera “that showcases Indian mores in a story of forbidden love between a low-caste Dalit man and an upper-caste woman,” created a sensation when it aired in Brazil last year. Now one of Univision’s Spanish-language networks bringing the series to the U.S.

“Studios are finally and fully conceding that moviegoers, armed with Facebook and other networking tools and concerned about escalating ticket prices, are holding them to higher standards. The product has to be good.”

“The good news about this situation is that we do indeed watch – more than ever. The tricky part, for the TV industry, is that this “time-shifting” creates a major challenge: how to sell a spread-out audience to advertisers, who still provide most of the revenue that underwrites all this programming.”

“Experts say that after a decade of reality television, the film business is finally catching up. Audiences and studio executives now not only tolerate a dose of real life in their feature films, they expect it.”

“Viral videos get all the attention, feeding into their viral-ness and giving them even more hits. But what about the other end of the scale? More than 35 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute. Nobody’s watching some of it, not even the people who star in it.”

“With TV networks and viewers alike fretting about commercials — you’re not watching enough of them or you’re forced to watch too many — companies are desperate to find that ad campaign that makes you stop and gawk.”

A New York film production company has sued its former president, claiming “gross lapses in judgment” cost the company millions of dollars in lost revenue and a producer credit on the movie “Black Swan.”

“For a long time most commercial entertainments not set in the distant past or in some science-fiction superhero fantasyland have taken place in a realm of generic ease and relative affluence. Right at the moment, though, we may be feeling a little grumpy, and otherwise inoffensive movies can look more clueless than playful in their genial assumptions of material comfort and financial security.”

Six of the top ten programs were sports.