Category: media

“Through The Eyes of Women, the three-day program that started Tuesday, includes 27 films, all by female directors, five of whom are from Gaza. Most of the rest hail from other Arab states, with eight from the West Bank.”

“If all goes according to plan, the city will be home to an enormous new soundstage complex sometime next year, located in almost 50 acres of buildings that formerly housed Ryerson Steel…. In theory, it could mean Chicago will be a draw for the kinds of movies that necessitate large-scale special effects.”

“The average person watched four hours and 49 minutes of television a day in the 2008 to 2009 season, an all-time high … The average household watched a whopping 8 hours and 21 minutes of television a day, according to the study. That’s up from just an hour and 50 minutes in 1991, the first year to be included in the study.”

With such films as Distruct 9, Disgrace (starring John Malkovich), Skin (with Sam Neill), and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus – and that’s just this fall – the U.S. film industry is finding South Africa a rich source of locations, stories, facilities and especially talent.

“Back in the 1960s and ’70s, Lahore buzzed with movie shoots, red-carpet premieres and box-office hits. … Today, Pakistani cinema has all but vanished, a victim of the VCR, cable television, President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization of Pakistani society, and finally DVD piracy.”

“Educators were thrilled that children were entering school with a grasp of letters, colors and elementary numbers. Later, the show was criticized as too winsome, leading children to expect that the elements of reading and math would bounce in bright colors across the classroom. Nowadays, teachers are probably just grateful if kindergartners aren’t texting in class.”

“It is a wonder that so many black actresses have waded through this stereotypical muck with their dignity intact. … Gabby Sidibe better enjoy her fame while she can because black actresses never have less than a hard row to hoe. Even if the inner life they bring to characters is as beautiful as they are physically, they have little chance.”

“On YouTube some videos have been downloaded tens of millions of times. There is a cat playing the piano , a music video set on treadmills at a gym, a cackling baby. At first there may not seem any rhyme or reason behind their appeal. Yet there are shared characteristics to some viral videos, and companies seeking to advertise their products are keen to decipher these.”

“Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel.”

“From Inuit fishermen in Canada … to Quechua salt-harvesters in Bolivia, they are grabbing whatever equipment they can find to make films of their own.  … [Absent are] the drama and momentum that western audiences expect. Here, time tends to be circular rather than linear … the idea being to keep the memory [of an event] alive, rather than turn it into entertainment.”