Category: media

“Although film has savored the antihero for close to a century, only recently has TV embraced these contradictory and complex protagonists. It remains the almost-exclusive domain of cable, with a few notable exceptions, such as ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes,’ both of which celebrated characters with dark sides and both of which recently ended their network runs.”

“A few years ago, game publishers were regularly releasing video games adapted from movies and tied to their opening in theaters. The games were routinely knocked by players and critics alike for their poor quality,” and now “consumers are saving their money for the highest-quality titles. As a result, publishers have cut back on production….”

“Among the states that began underwriting film and television production with heavy subsidies over the past half-decade — 44 states had some sort of incentives by last year, 28 of them involving tax credits — at least a handful are giving new scrutiny to a question that was politely overlooked in the early excitement: What kind of films are taxpayers paying for?”

“The approval … came in spite of strong objections from the Hollywood lobbyists who have mounted a vigorous campaign to block the exchange.” The victory may “be short-lived: the MPAA and other opponents could still block the exchange if they can convince the US Congress to pass a measure banning the contracts.”

“The case for nominating programs as opposed to single episodes goes as follows: Comedies are generally gang-written. … For everyone but the chosen series, moreover, there’s really no nice way of saying what results like last year’s imply: The fourth-best episode of ‘Mad Men’ is more deserving than the best of ‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Damages’ or ‘Big Love,’ to name a few.”

“Vulture [blog] has learned that Sam Raimi has been offered the director’s chair for Disney’s Oz, the Great and Powerful, a prequel to the 1939 MGM classic The Wizard of Oz.” The man behind the Evil Dead and Spider-Man films reportedly received the offer from Disney Studios on Friday, though it’s unclear whether he has accepted.

“Since [2002], the Bachelor franchise, which features 26 fresh characters every season, has become a rigorous farm team for a modern-day vaudeville circuit that features hundreds of reality-show vets … [N]early all of the Bachelor alumni try to extend the characters they developed in concert with ABC’s producers to do commercials, paid appearances and, of course, other reality shows.”

“Unplugged, the Japanese distributor of [Oscar-winning documentary] The Cove, said three cinemas had cancelled screenings amid fears they would be disrupted by ultra-nationalists, who have denounced the film as ‘anti-Japanese’.”

“From 1895 to the early 1950s, all commercially available 35mm film, stills, negatives and even X-rays were made out of cellulose nitrate: a fragile, combustible, unstable, highly-flammable substance that was also used in explosives.” But “[a]ccording to the eminent curators at the British Film Institute (BFI), cellulose nitrate film is the most vivid film stock ever created.”

“‘It will be a romance but not in the typical sense,’ Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, the director of Dear Friend Hitler, told The Times. He added that the film ‘aims to capture the personality of Adolf Hitler. … As a leader he was successful. I want to show why did he lose as a human being? What were the problems, what were the issues, what were his intentions?'”