Category: media

“Saadi, a former professional footballer of sorts … has decided to invest in Hollywood movies, kicking off with a cool $100m investment in a movie fund, whose first production will be a remake of a German thriller called Isolation.“

“The studio on Thursday will unveil its refurbished New York street movie sets that burned down in a fire nearly two years ago, which comes as welcome news to the local production community at a time when Los Angeles is struggling to keep movie and TV shoots from leaving the state.”

“Unusually for a midnight-movie favorite, The Room contains no flesh-eating ghouls, no polygamous devil cults and no time-traveling transvestites. It is essentially a domestic drama … The actual film, though, is like a Koch snowflake of badness, wherein any scene has an infinite number of things wrong with it … But The Room rises above garden-variety awful for a number of reasons.”

“It belongs to Howard University’s theater department, which has spent years trying to figure out what happened to the Oscar that disappeared decades ago…. Howard archivists say there’s no official record that the university ever received the award,” the first given to an African American, yet “former students vividly recall seeing it.”

“The acclaimed film-maker had been held in Tehran’s Evin prison after voicing support for an opposition candidate in last year’s disputed election. He was released on a bail of $200,000 (£140,000), it was reported. … He had been on hunger strike for a week to protest against his detention.”

“More than one in 10 (13%) telly addict Britons would rather give up their partner than their TV, a new survey has found. Over half (51%) admitted watching television was an integral part of their lives, one they simply could not live without.”

“In 2006, cable TV companies had 68.5 million video customers. The number fell to 63.3 million in 2009, according to research firm In-Stat.”

“In a major blow to the brothers, whose own movie studio Weinstein Co. is facing financial problems, their negotiations with Miramax owner Walt Disney Co. broke down Friday, the same day that the Burbank media giant hoped final deal points would be worked out and long-running talks would come to a conclusion.”

“If this festival were characterized by unlikely absences and a scattered quiet, it probably didn’t matter. The crop of films was as strong as ever, and it came not only from old-school fixtures such as France and Iran (the latter of which saw the premiere of Abbas Kiarostami’s acclaimed “Certified Copy”) but also from such newer powers as Korea.”

“Instantaneous media are simultaneously building buzz and spoiling reality TV. The intentionally raw medium relies heavily on spontaneity, or at least something resembling spontaneity, and doesn’t pack the same punch without Never Before Seen Footage or the Most Shocking Elimination Ever.”