Category: media

“Fueled by $202 million in worldwide ticket sales during the New Year holiday weekend, the James Cameron sci-fi epic has earned $1.02 billion just 18 days after opening.”

“A generation of young people is growing up with no concept of life without a screen and a keypad. At home, at school, on the bus, in the street – wherever they are, they’re plugged in and hooked up. With its instant links and global reach, the web is a miracle – but also a trap.”

“Many questions remain for cable TV viewers nationwide even after Fox and Time Warner Cable settled their noisy spat with a New Year’s Day agreement.”

“Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies.”

“For artists of all kinds (with musicians on the front lines) a 21st-century habitat of possibilities and pressures is taking shape — one that demands skills their predecessors forgot or never needed. The art they make can be created, as well as disseminated, faster and more cheaply. But it will also face exponentially more rivals for attention, and many more temptations toward superficiality and sellouts.”

The Hollywood Reporter catalogues the US television industry’s top ten blunders this decade, from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? overload and moving Jay Leno to primetime to the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” (“The biggest problem was that it looked intentional”) and the calamitous writers’ strike.

“The formula’s popularity stems from the permission it gives viewers to experience the rush violence provides without feeling guilty about it. … The trick … is to have audience members thinking, and sometimes shouting, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ in response to actions they would never countenance, never mind perform, in real life.”

“A large-scale study by the University of San Diego and other research universities revealed what some of us have long suspected: We’re reading far more words than we used to as we adopt new technologies.”

“Thriller,” the 1983 Michael Jackson video, “is among the 25 motion pictures that have been selected this year for preservation by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.” The other films include “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Pillow Talk” (1959) and “The Muppet Movie” (1979).

“Among them: audiences don’t flock to see just any superhero … torture-porn is over, with the Saw franchise finally hitting a wall; and people seem more interested in seeing stars … on tabloid television shows than on the big screen.” Most of all, “[m]oviegoers decided that relatable, nonthinking comedies … are the perfect balm for the recession.”