Category: media

“This month, the adorable, historic Phoenix cinema in East Finchley, now in its 100th year, … is finally to receive the careful restoration it has always deserved and should be open again in September. The 13-week closure will allow for £1m of building work to refurbish its Edwardian features and all the art deco flourishes hidden inside.”

“Nearby our camp was a cave high up in the mountainside – if one squinted one could see the malevolent glint of a TV screen in the cave mouth. This is the infamous Cursed TV of Paro – a family bought it when television was first introduced to Bhutan in 1999, but within months of the purchase half the family members had died. They sold it to another family … “

“The Writers Guild of America, West, is leading an effort to convince the massive database — used by virtually everyone in Hollywood and far beyond — to permit people to remove their birth dates from the site.” Other Hollywood unions “have reached out to the site to see about taking down the birth dates of people who are not movie stars.”

“The surfeit of sequels for a studio that had produced only one –‘Toy Story 2’– since its first movie premiered 15 years ago, marks an important turning point for Pixar” and “shows how the … digital animation pioneer, which has held itself aloof from the grubby realities of Hollywood, is [no] longer immune from the economic laws of the entertainment marketplace.”

“The National Assn. of Theater Owners took out full-page ads in the trade papers warning studios that they need to consult with exhibitors about any [moves] to dramatically shorten the windows between when a movie is released in theaters and when it is shown in homes.”

The director of Rebel Without a Cause spent the last seven years of his life (re-)developing, (re-)shooting and (re-)editing this experimental, multiple-image project. “Now a new finished print of the film is being prepared by Ray’s widow, Susan, for a premiere at the Venice International Film Festival next year to celebrate the centenary of her husband’s birth.”

The Toronto International Film Festival “announced a $9.5 million [Cdn] boost through several gifts, bringing the total to $171 million [Cdn]. That’s still $25 million short of its $196 million campaign goal, but the way TIFF does the math, it has now raised 90 per cent of the money required for the building itself. The raising of extra money needed to complete its operating and endowment needs will be dealt with after the building opens.”

“On a blustery January morning, Michel Laprise found himself in a private conference room within Microsoft Corp.’s labyrinthine campus here, surrounded by 15 of the company’s sharpest analytical thinkers. Laprise started his presentation by dumping a pail full of sand on top of the conference table” and used only “three rocks, a small wooden elephant and a flashlight.”

A 3-D Chinese “mash-up of ‘Avatar,’ ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ … is the vision of a film-obsessed real estate magnate, Jon Jiang,” and “the boldest effort yet by businessmen here to establish China as a global moviemaking powerhouse, one that can create big-budget English-language spectacles to rival those of Hollywood.”

“Going far beyond the temporary shock effects of conventional scary-movie scores, the composer summons what Edmund Burke defined as terror–something deeper than horror…. That Herrmann used only strings, normally a Hollywood marker for schmaltzy romance, is even more startling.”