Category: media

“A year after she and [director Mark] Cousins staged a celebration of independent cinema in an old bingo hall in her home town of Nairn, near Inverness, on Saturday the pair launched their latest adventure. On their journey across the Highlands back to Nairn the pair will screen Iranian, Icelandic and Hollywood road movies, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai version of Macbeth – Throne of Blood – in Cawdor, and a drama-documentary on the battle of Culloden in 1746 at Culloden battlefield.”

“After last year’s ceremony drew the smallest Emmy television audience ever, a survey of viewers revealed that many found the awards to be focused largely on television shows that mainstream audiences did not know and were not interested in. So the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has decided to prerecord and edit eight awards this year to allow for more time to celebrate shows that are popular with the public but might not be winning the hearts of Emmy voters.”

“Let’s Make A Deal, the 1960s and 1970s staple that featured audience members in wacky costumes taking a chance on what was behind door No. 3, will return to the CBS daytime schedule Oct. 5 with a new host but with many of the old games and structure.” The comedy/game show will replace the long-running soap opera The Guiding Light.

“After a period of pretty-pleasing Netflix to let me poke around its clandestine Chicago-area hub, and see what wonders await and how its ubiquitous red-enveloped packages are processed, I was given an address and a time to arrive and asked not to blab about it. … To get there, I was told to go to Carol Stream, to be there around sunrise. I imagined it was like coming upon Narnia — one stares at it awhile until the entrance becomes evident, which turned out to be sort of true.”

“Many of the new TV ads will resemble online ads — interactive and often shaped for individual members of the audience. They’ll also be harder to ignore. Typically, you can’t opt out of seeing them.”

“I guess the best way to answer that question is that coming out of the administration, we received full funding for public broadcasting, which is the first time in eight years,” PBS chief Paula Kerger said. “So I think that says something.”

“Funded by listeners and staffed by unpaid DJs, New Jersey’s WFMU is the longest running freeform radio station in the US and quite possibly the only place in the world where you will hear a programme dedicated to Andrew Lloyd Webber songs in languages other than English.”

“The news that the L.A. County Museum of Art’s director, Michael Govan, has decided to close down the museum’s expertly managed film program is so dismaying — and don’t believe for a moment that this hiatus is designed to refresh and strengthen film at LACMA. As Times’ movie critic Kenneth Turan observed in his angry, excellent article Thursday, that sounds like a slick rationale from a culturecrat in a smart suit.”

“A flood of post-apocalyptic stories is now headed toward movie theaters and TV screens. Previous waves of pop-culture disaster… have depicted calamity in stunning detail. Many of the new projects, however, actually skip the spectacle of doomsday. Instead, they’re more fixed on what goes down in the aftermath.”

“Auction houses are popular stops for aficionados, since they do all the quality control on their behalf – Christie’s averages two movie poster auctions a year in London. Its most recent was in March, where a poster for the 1954 Humphrey Bogart/Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina netted $15,480 (U.S.). Experts had expected it to go for between $4,000 and $7,000.”