Category: media

“This summer, movies such as ‘Bruno’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ have had unexpected tumbles at the box office — just within their opening weekends — while ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ survived blistering critical reaction to become a blockbuster. Box-office watchers say the dramatic swings might be caused by Twitter and other social networking sites that can blast instant raves — or pans — to hundreds of people just minutes after the credits roll.”

“‘Hello, I am Mona Lisa. It’s nice to meet you,’ she says in a Chinese Central Television video taken at a show called the World Classic Multimedia Interactive Arts Exhibition in Beijing. … [T]his Mona Lisa is a digital re-creation courtesy of the Alive Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, and is traveling to China on a three-city tour, along with a collection of other walking, talking masterworks from throughout the ages.”

“[A]ccording to a source close to the Sinatra family, Frank’s daughter and the film’s executive producer, Tina Sinatra, is worried that [Martin] Scorsese’s vision might ultimately taint her father’s legacy. ‘Marty wants it to be hard-hitting and showcase the violent, sexually charged, hard-drinking Frank, but Tina wants to show the softer side of her dad and let the focus be on the music’.”

“The Pythons will meet again to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the creation of the troupe on Oct. 15 at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City. While the event will feature no cows being flung by catapult … the reunion will involve the complete troupe” – including, we are told, the late Graham Chapman. The gathering is to launch the new documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).

“By trying to keep their product from Redbox for as long as possible, the studios are doing what all businesses do when threatened by dramatic change — they’re trying to hang on to their business model for as long as possible. But after you get past all the legal mumbo jumbo, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The DVD market is undergoing a seismic shift where many of the same people who once wanted to buy every DVD in sight are now far more eager to rent movies, and rent them cheaply at that.”

It’s not that the big movie studios dislike the sort of centralized control that China embraces and that the World Trade Organization ruled against last week. “They just want to be the ones holding the power.” But the way they’re exercising that power is getting in their own way. “When Hollywood tries to preserve last century’s business models and ‘release windows’ that restrict availability, it risks missing the opportunity that new technologies present to increase consumption.”

For network television, “things could get a lot worse before they get better. Some observers are even beginning to question whether there will ever be a turnaround, predicting that [the] business model which has sustained broadcasters for close to 60 years has begun an irreversible decline. … ‘It’s the beginning of a structural tailspin… the total collapse of the network television model,’ [author-critic-NPR co-host Bob] Garfield predicts.”

“An absurdist sensibility drives The Backyardigans, which chronicles the derring-do of five chewy-looking swashbucklers – Tyrone, Tasha, Pablo, Austin and Uniqua – in a range of David Hockney hues. With each episode devoted not just to a separate quest but also to a different musical genre – 80 so far, including Irish jig, King Oliver jazz, funk, bossa nova, township jive, Kenyan high life, tarantella, psychedelic soul, countrypolitan – the show blows you away with its artistic exactitude.”

“They’ve written e-mails. They’ve organized a petition. They even got the attention of director Martin Scorsese, who has sent a letter to LACMA protesting the decision to shutter the museum’s weekend film program.” The group “Save Film at LACMA said that the museum has corresponded with them, but that ‘so far we’ve seen form letters and boilerplates filled with double-speak’.”

It’s the fifth-straight monthly decline for the gaming biz. Year-to-date sales are down 14% to $8.2 billion.