Category: media

“At the halfway mark in the 10-day gathering, the vast majority of more than 140 films that showed up in search of American distribution” had yet to find it, “according to a count by the Indiewire news service.”

“Actress Jane Fonda, one of the principal voices criticizing the Toronto International Film Festival’s special spotlight on Tel Aviv, stepped back last night from her position. … The Fonda statement comes amid a flurry of pro- and anti-Israeli statements.”

“Former and current staffers talk of an air of crisis inside the nation’s largest public television station, which has been battered from several directions at once.” The troubles include a Department of Justice investigation, which is said to have “put a choke hold on key sources of funding.”

“In the past few years the critics at The New York Times have reviewed more than 600 movies annually, sometimes 20 in a given week, a trend showing few signs of reversal. Is all this plenty a good thing?”

“The report found that documentarians, while they generally aspire to act honorably, often operate under ad hoc ethical codes. The craft tends to see itself as being bound less by the need to be accurate and fair than by a desire for social justice, to level the playing field between those who are perceived to be powerful and those who are not.”

Lebanon, an Israeli film about the 1982 invasion shot largely from inside a tank, received the Golden Lion from a jury headed by director Ang Lee. Iranian film artist Shirin Neshat was named best director for her Women Without Men, and Turkish-German director Fatih Akin took the Special Jury Prize.

“Whether you’re a film festival director, a college president or a secretary of state, you know that you’ve landed in Media Hell when Noam Chomsky, Jane Fonda and Harry Belafonte start signing open letters complaining about your policies.”

Farhad Manjoo: “I don’t mean the name won’t stick around or that people will stop buying Apple’s devices. Rather, the sun is setting on what the iPod once was – a device you bought to play digital music. Nobody knows when Apple will add Internet connectivity to the Nano, but you’d be a fool to bet against it happening in the next three years. And with that, the floodgates.”

The “question is whether the Toronto festival’s first couple of days might help propel a clutch of female directors to the front of Hollywood’s award race. Something like that happened in 2003, when a Toronto screening of ‘Lost in Translation’ put Sofia Coppola on the path to a best-director Oscar nomination.”

“Disney announced today that it has begun production on the first Pooh feature film in decades, due for release in spring 2011. Writers have gone back to the original AA Milne books and, specifically, five unfilmed Pooh stories to be knitted together for the new film.”