Category: media

“The auteur is in talks to develop a reboot of the 1986 drama with 20th Century Fox, the studio that released that film. Cronenberg would write and possibly direct the new movie.” Last year, his operatic version of the story, with music by Howard Shore, was not a success.

“[A] small toast might be in order to the film-makers who have bucked all sense of the predictable. These are the directors who have, at different points of their career, and sometimes back-to-back, produced both giddy cinematic highs and frankly unspeakable lows.” Here’s to Robert Wise, Spike Lee, Gus van Sant …

Using inexpensive digital cameras and editing software, a number of independent director-producers are working outside the limits of Chinese law, “provid[ing] unusual ground-level views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream, government-sanctioned films.”

Coverage will include original Bay Area content focusing on topics “increasingly underserved by commercial media outlets,” the group said, including government and public policy, education, the arts and cultural affairs, the environment, food and wine, and “neighborhood news.”

“Miramax has never appeared to be a priority for Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger, nor does it fit his strategy to focus on Disney’s “branded” mass entertainment that can be exploited across the Burbank studio’s various businesses including theme parks, television and consumer products.”

“‘I’m playing the role of a little old lady,’ [the venerable filmmaker] says in the opening sequence of her new film, ‘pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story. And yet, it’s others I’m interested in; others I like to film.’ She’s walking backwards along a beach as she speaks.”

This is not a quip. For $1,450 and one weekend, “students of the Rogue Film School will experience ‘the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully’, while learning [from Herzog] skills which include ‘the neutralisation of bureaucracy’.”

“[O]ne element of the government’s yearlong effort to garner trust among Hispanics, an ethnic group that has been historically wary of the decennial census process,” is getting a very popular telenovela to introduce a character who works for the Census Bureau. “The message is the same one Census Bureau officials are trying to emphasize at nearly every turn: Do not be afraid to be counted.”

“In recent years, the increasing frankness of breast cancer PSAs has been a bright spot of adult sensibility in what is Americans’ generally neurotic relationship to the female anatomy.” New public-service spots, most notably one called “Save the Boobs,” “leverage male lechery to an astonishing degree.”

“Boston public broadcaster WGBH made a bid yesterday to buy classical radio station WCRB, a move that could directly challenge rival Boston public radio station WBUR” by allowing WGBH to consolidate its classical programming on the new station and devote its flagship station to news and talk, like WBUR.