Category: media

“Quentin Tarantino has been accused of nepotism after he presented friends with several major awards at the Venice Film Festival, where he led the jury.”

“The survey found 26 percent of Americans said they read a newspaper in print the day before, compared to 38 percent in 2006. However, 17 percent of Americans said they read something on a newspaper’s website the day before, up from 9 percent two years earlier.”

A.O. Scott: “The salient question is this: Will any of the movies surfacing this fall provoke the kind of conversation that television series routinely do, breaking beyond niches into something larger? … Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of The Sopranos or The Wire?”

“Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, a comic drama about a bad-boy actor who’s stumbling through a life of Hollywood excess until his adolescent daughter turns up, won the top prize Saturday at the Venice Film Festival.”

“Jacobi, the actor who made his name in television in the title role of the groundbreaking BBC series … has returned to Robert Graves’s saga of ancient Rome for a new serialisation on BBC Radio 4 in November.”

“Aside from the cost of buying 3D sets at a time the technology is just becoming available, the glasses required to watch them are a major hindrance. Fifty-seven per cent of people surveyed cited the glasses as a reason they were not likely to buy a set. Nearly nine in 10 people worry that it will constrain them from multitasking while the TV is on, the survey said.”

“The Paley Center for Media — formed in March to explore opportunities to create an awards alternative to the Emmys, reportedly encompassing all dayparts and genres — has scheduled its first awards program for May 2012 in New York City, the organization announced on Wednesday.”

“CEO Eric Schmidt said the service, which will allow full Internet browsing via the television, would be free, and Google would work with a variety of program makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.”

“But surely the reason that the alcohol, the sexism, the insecurity, the duplicity, the bare-faced lying and the status anxiety at work have taken such hold on the public imagination is because they so perfectly match our own experiences. Has anything really changed?”

“In this Baghdad version of Punk’d, famous Iraqis – actors, singers and sports figures – are … [stopped] at a routine checkpoint. Hidden cameras then capture the reaction as soldiers accuse the passenger of carrying a homemade bomb. … But this is Iraq, not MTV. Here, it gets ugly fast.”