Category: media

“Documentary seems, more than ever, like a catchall rubric, a label that can be affixed to heterogeneous, even contradictory products, ranging from the pranks of the elusive street artist Banksy … [to] Ken Burns’s meditation on the recent history of baseball” to Michael Moore’s polemics to – !?! – Jackass 3-D.

“In the last couple of years, however, a proliferation of new consumer-friendly devices like Apple TV, PlayStation 3 and Web-enabled televisions have finally started to push online viewing of movies into the mainstream. But although more people are turning to the Internet to watch movies, they have little interest in buying them.”

“Angelina Jolie has been given back a permit to film in Bosnia that was briefly withdrawn because of rumors that her movie featured a rape victim who falls in love with her assailant.”

“KCET has to act on its long-discussed and only fitfully realized plans to produce more programs. It has to create something new and lively. Otherwise its dramatic decision to chuck PBS will result only in shifting its audience to competitors, led by Orange County-based KOCE, which will continue to carry PBS’ national programs.”

“Unable to strike a new deal, the signals of News Corp.’s Fox television stations in New York and Philadelphia disappeared from roughly 3 million Cablevision Systems Corp. homes at midnight on the East Coast.”

It’s the “new Hollywood Economics: If you want to make a drama, whether it’s a biopic or a crime thriller, your budget ceiling, with rare exception, is going to be $40 million.”

“Once the province of reruns and sports, basic-cable networks will spend an estimated $23 billion on 1,462 original programs (including reality shows and specials), compared with $14 billion on 863 shows in 2005.”

“Africa United tells the story of three Rwandan children who travel across Africa in the hope of taking part in the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg, but board the wrong bus and end up in a children’s refugee camp in Congo.” Yet the film’s makers “claim it’s an uplifting tale that will correct the “perceived stereotype that Africa is just about safaris or pestilence or death’.”

“[A]fter word began to circulate that the film [Jolie has written and is directing] would depict not only the rape of a Bosnian Muslim woman by a Serb but also a romance between the two, a backlash erupted.”

“[Sociologist Brian] Uzzi’s answer should strike fear into studio executives’ hearts: He found virtually no relationship between levels of pre-release buzz and the ad budget of the movie or the presence of highly paid actors, even if millions of dollars were spent.”