Category: media

“AFI’s last televised Top 100 show lost more than $1 million, and the cable ratings for its Life Achievement Award are plunging. An ambitious, encyclopedic AFI directory of American movies still has four decades of films to catalog, and government support for the project has dried up. Unlike many other leading film festivals, AFI Fest, now in its 23rd year, is not interested in an onslaught of glitzy, star-filled premieres.”

“The European Parliament has given the green light for member states to cut persistent file-sharers off from the net. It has dropped an amendment to its Telcoms Package which would have made it hard for countries to cut off pirates without court authority.”

Strong women, for now anyway, are out. Two years ago, when the Jodie Foster vigilante thriller “The Brave One” failed at the box office, industry blogger Nikki Finke reported that a Warner Brothers production executive announced to staffers that the studio would no longer produce movies featuring female leads.

“Under the plan, new DVD releases would be available on a purchase-only basis for a few weeks, after which time companies such as Blockbuster Inc. and Netflix Inc. would be allowed to rent the DVDs to their customers.”

Films in the lineup of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival “may not seem outré to Western filmgoers, but they represent something of a cultural revolution for the region, where government censors citing cultural sensibilities cut sex scenes from the big screen, and multiplexes offer a steady diet of apolitical animated and action flicks.”

Director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) is in Tbilisi shooting a script about last year’s brief and nasty battle over South Ossetia. Andy Garcia is playing president Mikheil Saakashvili, whose government is enthusiastically supporting (and possibly funding) the project.

Dana Stevens: “Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark were powerful, unsettling, transformative movie experiences, even if their endings came uncomfortably close to making the case for virgin sacrifice. … [But] after the infantile bludgeoning that is Antichrist, I feel no need to keep accompanying von Trier’s career at all.”

“For years, parents have complained to the L.A. city attorney’s office and the Better Business Bureau about the unscrupulous practices of talent listing services and acting schools that charge exorbitant upfront fees — sometimes as high as $9,000 — on the promise of finding acting jobs for their children on popular TV shows.”

Indian Summer, about the relationship between India’s first prime minister and the wife of the last viceroy, was to have starred Cate Blanchett, Hugh Grant and Irrfan Khan. Universal Pictures says its concerns are over the film’s $40M budget; the director says that the Indian government demanded the removal of the protagonists’ love scenes

“A group of 140 directors, producers and writers said they would not show their films at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in November unless the government took action to improve funding for the industry. The dispute could deprive the festival, now in its 50th year, of 23 films – the bulk of Greek cinema’s output over the last 12 months.”