Category: media

Canada’s national broadcaster has new hits but producers say the network is only interested in safe, warm and fuzzy…

Brad Bourland “has ranked the greatest films of the 20th century. Sure, the American Film Institute and endless others have generated Top 10 or 100 Greatest lists. But Mr. Bourland goes them — well, one better isn’t even close. He has ranked the 20th century’s 9,200 greatest movies, watching more than 7,000 of them in the process. (He plans to reach 10,000 from readers suggesting titles he has overlooked.”

There is “a renaissance of sorts for the network TV sitcom, which not too long ago was pronounced terminally ill. On studio lots, where dozens of new shows are being fretted about and fought over ahead of the networks’ scheduling decisions in May, the number of sitcoms in development has spiked.”

“After Mark Fiore received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning — and after he mentioned his app’s rejection in an article published on niemanlab.org on Thursday — he was encouraged by Apple to resubmit it. Mr. Fiore did so on Friday morning and is awaiting a response.”

“Figures released by the British Video Association found sales of Blu-ray were up 50% in value year-on-year hitting 2.7 million units for the first three months of the year. A total of 15.6 million units of Blu-ray discs have been sold since its launch in October 2006.”

Vladimir Nabokov. Kasimir Malevich. Winston Churchill. Aldous Huxley. Theodor Adorno. Georges Bataille. Jean-Paul Sartre. All of these gentlemen wrote screenplays (and not only on spec) that never made it to the screen. And what were they about?

The art-house directors whose movies will compete at next month’s Cannes Film Festival “have their adoring hardcore cineaste fans but most could stroll unmolested through any multiplex in the English speaking world.” Not so the Hollywood behemoths who will be in attendance as well.

It’s the little things, like the exorbitant cost of outfitting a home for 3-D viewing and our habit of doing lots of other stuff while we watch TV. “And it’s not just multi-taskers: Does the average American family really want to sit in their living rooms watching ‘American Idol’ wearing dark glasses?”

“[A] contractor cleaning out an old New Hampshire barn destined for demolition found seven reels of nitrate film inside, including the only known copy of a 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln.”

Tribeca Enterprises “has taken a 50 percent interest in the Loop-based two-year digital media vocational school Flashpoint: The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences,” which “will be known as the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy as it opens a virtual pipeline between the 75,000-square-foot Clark Street facility and Tribeca’s New York headquarters.”