by Greg Jericho.

This week Rupert Murdoch has decided to take to Twitter to let us know all about his views on movie piracy.

His tweets have provided some nice nuggets of amusement that have been akin to your father telling you he’s heard about this thing called the information superhighway and wanting to know if you have heard of The Google.

The context for his tweets has been the bill before the US congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). You know the act will do absolutely nothing to actually stop online piracy because of the standard rule that the more explicit an act’s title, the less likely it will achieve those aims.

The notional target of SOPA is file-sharing, but its current wording is so broad (and I advise you read Bernard Keane in Crikey for greater detail) that if passed the US government could do such things as shut down YouTube if it contained “pirated video”; or force Google to not link to sites that may allow one to download illegal content. (I should say the US government could “try to shut down” – because they won’t succeed). In protest against the bill, today at 4.00pm Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours.

Read the rest of this article from ABC.net

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by Jay Stone.

The movie year is almost over, and the numbers are pretty dismal: a 4.9-per-cent drop in the North American box office, making it the worst year since 1995. This is an industry that is accustomed to automatic growth, just as it used to be with the stock market. Just imagine how you’d feel if you put all your RRSP money into Mars Needs Moms (budget: $150 million, sales: $39 million).

The reasons people have come up with are the usual suspects. One of those suspects is the Internet – a handy phenomenon that’s also blamed for destroying newspapers, the music business, book publishing and human interaction, but has done wonders for the fast-growing sector of informing acquaintances of your every stray thought as it occurs. The other suspect is that movie studios aren’t making movies people want to see.

Read the rest of this article from Vancouver Sun.

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by Maggie Langrick.

Today’s hyper-connected youth audience is a fragmented, distracted bunch whose attention is tough to capture and tougher to hold.

But the very way in which they consume their entertainment – grazing on social media, YouTube, and traditional media content all at once – creates exciting new opportunities and some profound challenges for filmmakers. That was the message at a Whistler Summit industry session Thursday afternoon.

Some of the country’s top creative minds in interactive digital media participating in an “interactive narrative framework masterclass,” talked about varied projects, but their message was consistent: Multi-platforming is the future of audience engagement.

“Teenagers today have a very diverse media diet,” said Matt Toner, president of Zeros 2 Heroes Media. “They’re watching something on television, they’ve got their mobile phone there, they’ve got the computer open – That’s become their way of understanding story.”

Read the rest of this article from Vancouver Sun.

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by Theresa Smith.

Two of the films which open this week – Apollo 18 and Paranormal Activity 3 – play on the concept of found footage.

That’s a film-making term which describes a method of compiling films entirely or partly from footage presented as left behind by missing or dead protagonists.

While the style goes back a while, it was The Blair Witch Project in 1999 which brought the genre to mainstream attention.

That 1999 horror film pieced together “found amateur footage” by three student filmmakers who disappeared while hiking into the Black Hills in Maryland.

The Blair Witch Project is considered by many to be the first widely released film marketed online in a campaign that made out that the footage was real.

There were several other films post BWP, but the next most successful commercial was Paranormal Activity in 2007.

Read the rest of this article from ToNight.

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by Ben East.

Stroll into the cavernous Turbine Hall, the huge space in London’s Tate Modern reserved for some of the most grand artistic statements of our times, and you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a cinema. The film which lights up this darkened room might not win any Oscars for its creator, the artist Tacita Dean, but in its own way it’s far more important than the latest blockbuster. The 11-minute short, projected on to a 13 metre-high monolith, is a homage to the dying art of making movies using 35mm analogue film, as digital becomes the medium of choice.

Dean’s piece is called, simply, Film. It’s an apt title, as this is probably the most literal of all the Tate artworks which have attracted more than 26 million people to see the likes of Olafur Eliasson’s giant disc of yellow light or Ai Weiwei’s porcelain sunflower seeds. In Film, the viewer not only sees the sprocket holes which are a visual shorthand for a reel, but the imperfections of the analogue filmmaking process itself.

Naturally, there is no digital post-production – because part of Dean’s argument is that the limitations of the analogue form, of cutting and splicing film together, encourages a much greater sense of creativity, immediacy and urgency. And although she’s been keen not to be cast as an anti-digital stick-in-the-mud, Dean is convinced that the ever-diminishing levels of film stock and the closure of labs that print film points towards only one outcome. Extinction.

Read the rest of this article from The National.

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by Deborah Kim.

In September, producer Katayoun Shahabi, directors Naser Saffarian, Hadi Afarideh, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Shahnam Bazdar and documentarian Mohsen Shahrnazdar were thrown into jail for work they did with BBC.

Earlier this month, director Jafar Panahi was put under house arrest, and actress Marzieh Vafamehr was sentenced to 90 lashes for a film she did in Australia that questions some of Iran‘s policies. Now several Hollywood organizations are taking a stand in support of the filmmakers.

Read the rest of this article from The Celebrity Cafe.

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from Voxy.

Film New Zealand and Park Road Post Production are upping their presence in the American home of film-making, Los Angeles.

Park Road Post, a post production facility, is part of the creative cluster of companies offering premier film-making and talent at Miramar in Wellington.

The two organisations are partners in a new initiative that will see Vicki Jackways, Head of Marketing at Park Road Post Production working for Film New Zealand as well when she goes to Los Angeles on a semi-permanent basis from 2012.

Read the rest of this article from Voxy.

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by Charlotte Higgins.

Glasgow in the chill air of autumn may not be your idea of a dead ringer for northern California. But the makers of Cloud Atlas, the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, disagree.

This weekend film crews begin shooting San Francisco-set scenes in the city with Oscar-winner Halle Berry; the film also stars Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon and Ben Whishaw, and is co-directed by the Matrix trilogy’s Wachowski brothers and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer.

It is only weeks since Glasgow was the location for another high-profile shoot, as scenes from World War Z, a zombie film starring Brad Pitt, were shot around the city’s grandiose George Square, doubling as Philadelphia. Unlikely as it may seem, Glasgow appears to have become the latest favourite location for Hollywood producers.

Read the rest of this article from The Guardian.

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by Julie Maas.

The Denver Film Society and Denver Museum of Nature and Science are kicking off an amazing five-week film series for all the sci-fi buffs out there by matching superior film-making with scientific discussions.

Which got us thinking: The greatest sci-fi films ever are great and all, but what about the not-so-great ones? Sometimes, filmmakers are so unsuccessful in their delivery it turns out unintentionally successful — so today, in honor of the greatest films in sci-fi history, here are some of the worst.

Read the rest of this article from Denver Westworld.

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by Min Lee.

Stan Lee wants to see the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men weaving between skyscrapers in Shanghai and battling enemies on the Great Wall.

The comic book legend has announced a joint venture with a Hong Kong investment company that aims to roll out a new superhero franchise targeted at Chinese and foreign audiences.

Lee’s POW! Entertainment said in a statement issued on its website this week that the new company, Magic Storm Entertainment, will announce its first film project later this summer.

“I have been eagerly awaiting this great opportunity — a chance to combine the best of American superhero epics with the best of Chinese and Asian classical filmmaking for a motion picture that would be excitedly received worldwide,” Lee said in the statement.

Read the rest of this article from Associated Press.

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