Category: media

“What was once a treat for the paying moviegoer is now picked over by (or fed to) film bloggers and their readers, who obsessively analyze appearances months in advance. It makes for good cocktail chatter, but it’s no good for the movies themselves.”

“No surprise that first-rate nonfiction films such as Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and Amir Bar-Lev’s outstanding film The Tillman Story made the cut; ditto Alex Gibney’s stellar Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer … [and] Exit Through the Gift Shop, by the enigmatic graffiti artist Bansky.”

Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor, Crash, Sexy Beast): “Films made with American studio finance are given a 20% tax break. But if a British film has to go into partnership with, say, a French company, in order to get made, it immediately becomes ineligible for any tax breaks here. So you have to go abroad.”

“One of the biggest challenges for Blockbuster for the past few years has been public perception, and this is intended to remind people that we’re still in business and we have a unique offering.”

“Newly energized conservatives moved Thursday in the House of Representatives to limit payments to the public radio network, which they insist is a hotbed of left-wing political orthodoxy. They failed but will without question try again, as a Republican majority takes power next year.”

“We are indiscriminately supportive of all the contestants. We empathise with them in a way we never normally engage with actors or celebrities precisely because they are real and because – at the touch of an interactive red button or the dialling of a phone number – we can have a say in their future.”

When British filmmaker Mark Craig “got an answering machine in 1985, he wouldn’t erase. He’d just replace the tape and throw the old one into a shoebox. Twenty years later, he had amassed hours and hours of what was, effectively, an audio diary of his life.” So, naturally, he made it into a film.

“Frey and some associates are trying to build a mass-media idea factory for novels and films.”

“FCC chairman Julius Genachowski now finds himself caught between unfulfilled promises made to the tech community to keep the internet open, and a Republican Congress ready to portray any new rules on broadband ISPs as heavy-handed, economy-killing regulation.”

“Angelina Jolie has cut short the shooting of her first movie in Bosnia, her producer said, after rumors that it portrayed a relationship between a rapist and his victim sparked protests from women assaulted during the Bosnian War.”