Tom Shales, Washington Post TV columnist, hits on the reason why TV seems to have bottomed, or rather flattened out:

... the very concepts of "good" and "bad" in the arts and communications are now deemed obsolete. Movies and TV shows just "are" and have been fashioned for consumption by various essentially undemanding constituencies.

TV and ( Read more... )

If the name "Gary Kurtz" doesn't ring any bells off the top of your head, it ought to. He was George Lucas's producer for American Graffiti and Star Wars; he got The Dark Crystal into production; and in this remarkable interview at A Site Called Fred, he talks in great detail about his experiences with all of the above and more.

The interview is ( Read more... )

On the face of the evidence, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra is that composer's most widely-recorded and -performed piece. There's the Bevan/Mikashoff recording which I reviewed; the Kontarsky version issued through Deutsche Grammophon / Stockhausen Verlag; the Corver/Grotenhuis version (Stockhausen's alleged favorite, which is not in print); a ( Read more... )

It's not often I read something that has me screaming and thrashing around in annoyance and disgust, but Rudy Rucker's "Psipunk" thing did it for me. Go read it and then come back here.

Okay, we're back.

Ugh.

Let's leave off the fact that the whole n-punk thing has been wrung through more permutations than there have been cover versions of " ( Read more... )

Ebert's review of The Last Airbender (they hastily dropped the "Avatar" from the title after you-know-what) strikes blows both for both good animated features and against the misuse of 3D.

Other people have documented in great detail how M. Night botched the casting to make the movie more Peoria-friendly, and how he squirmed on the hook when ( Read more... )

I still can't talk publicly about the Potentially Great Thing that may or may not be happening - both because I'm not sure I can, and because I'm kinda anxious about jinxing a good thing. All I'll say s that if, if, this goes through, it'll mean I'll be getting paid cash moneys to do something fandom-related.

Again: if.

Some updates in the ( Read more... )

Attempts in Japan to overturn the dominance of newspapers via digital media have largely stiffed:

Ink Gushes in Japan’s Media Landscape (New York Times)

... it is not just the so-called citizen journalism sites that have failed here. No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news ( Read more... )

I mentioned earlier that Criterion has a BD of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in the works. Here's the skinny from The Digital Bits:

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence will include a new and restored high-definition master, The Oshima Gang (an original making-of featurette), new video interviews (with producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg ( Read more... )

Here's an exercise for the reader. Take the word "horror" in the linked article and swap it for the word "anime" or "manga.

nick_kaufmann: The Cult of Not Mattering: How Horror Fandom Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Horror has its share of detractors. More than its share, really. There are a lot of people out there who think it's trash, that it's lame and ( Read more... )

I tweeted about this earlier, but since both Twitter and Tweetdeck are being unreliable pieces of junk (trying to access the MT online editor in Chrome isn't much better; the rich-text editor doesn't even come up when I select it from the dropdown ostensibly because something refused to finish loading; the concept of a  "robust web application" ( Read more... )