Category: media

“On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably.”

“How does one eulogize a superstar who, even without the various accusations of pedophilia, was something of a freak? Or was, as several talking heads put it, ‘a troubled individual.’ … It all made the standard news loop eulogy a little … complicated.”

Presumably in response to the MP expenses scandal, “The BBC is to … publish an exact breakdown of pay, by name, of the top 50 earners in BBC management and the [50] top decision makers – a group that he said has yet to be defined precisely – within the organisation.”

“The gloves are coming off in the intensifying battle between newspaper publishers and Google. In a keynote speech at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event Tuesday, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton raised the rhetoric a notch, calling the Internet search giant a vampire ‘sucking the blood’ out of the newspaper business, and promised that new developments would level the playing field.”

“Having 10 best picture nominees is going [to] allow academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” said the Academy’s president. Having ten nominees in the category was the standard between 1932 and 1943.

“First there’s the number of people who watch the Oscars themselves. The Academy’s thinking: The more blockbuster films that are nominated, the more people will watch.” Then there’s the box office: “Best picture nominees simply make more money. So the more best picture nominees, the more films moviegoers think they’re supposed to see to stay hip with the cultural conversation.” And think of what all the extra ad revenue will do for journalism …

“The film’s fiery conclusion, with the Italian-American Sal’s Famous Pizzeria going up in flames after the police murder of Radio Raheem, was the perfect denouement, a catharsis for every slight at the hands of white people. […] Watching it this time around, I found myself wishing to the very end of the film that the inevitable wouldn’t happen, that Sal’s pizzeria would not go up in flames at the hands of a black mob.”

“[W]hen it comes to his female characters, it’s as though Lee can’t decide whether to worship them or punish them. […] Lee’s latent misogyny stings because, from the very beginning, his was the voice of the black hipster intellectual … You expect a little more enlightenment from him than you would from, say, Ice Cube or from Tyler Perry with his scheming evil buppies.”

“It might seem like trying to turn board games into event movies is the height of creative laziness. Actually, Land of the Lost is the height of creative laziness. But there might be some rationality to the board game idea.”

“Rachel from Friends, as seemingly inoffensive as any sitcom character can be, has cost the latest box set of the series a PG rating under new, tighter age guidelines announced yesterday. … Although the [British Board of Film Classification] described the revised guidelines last night as ‘a tweak’, nonetheless they will subtly alter the nation’s viewing habits. They always do.”