“In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display–at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids.”
Tag: 01.01.07
Regan Vs. Rupert: Old-Style Hollywood Spectacle?
“When it comes to spectacle, Hollywood enjoys nothing better than a nasty legal battle between two determined and egotistical adversaries: Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford, in a courtroom.” The participants in past high-profile lawsuits have “cringed to hear their private comments and inner thoughts offered up for public consumption. And so may it go if the headline-making book publisher Judith Regan proceeds with a lawsuit her lawyers have threatened against the News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, the publishing house that fired her in December after the O. J. Simpson book and television project imploded.”
France’s Museum Imperialism
“Questions are being raised about plans to create a satellite of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and to establish an outpost of the Georges Pompidou Center in Shanghai. Critics have accused President Jacques Chirac of using the country’s museums to promote France’s political and commercial interests abroad.”
What Opera Looks/Sounds Like In A Movie Theatre
The Metropolitan Opera’s first broadcast to movie theatres goes off. Mostly. “According to the Met, the broadcasts aired successfully to nearly 30,000 people around the world except in Burbank and in Jacksonville, Fla., where nothing showed up on the screen.”
Should ENB Dancer Be Fired For Her Politics?
The English National Ballet is being pressured to fire one of its leading ballerinas. “Simone Clarke, 36, who will take the lead in the ENB’s production of Giselle at the London Coliseum next week, said she had been called a ‘racist and a fascist’ since her decision to join the British National Party 18 months ago became public.”