Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group today announced an agreement to acquire Flixster, a highly popular movie discovery application company with over 25 million worldwide users per month. The acquisition also includes Rotten Tomatoes, a top website devoted to film reviews, information and news.

…

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group will utilize the powerful Flixster brand and technical expertise to launch a number of initiatives designed to grow digital content ownership, including the recently announced consumer application “Digital Everywhere.” This studio-agnostic application will be the ultimate destination for consumers to organize and access their entire digital library from anywhere on the device of their choice, as well as to share recommendations and discover new content.

“Studio-agnostic” my ass. Studios have never successfully launched a piece of tech to market that is good for consumers or that has any semblance of a manageable user-experience. Just look at the mess that is Blu-ray, which is more about bloat than experience, to see what happens when the studios embrace technology.

Consider this the end of Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes.

(via [TechCrunch](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/warner-bros-acquires- social-movie-site-flixster-and-rotten-tomatoes/))

INTERVIEWER > > I notice in your answers to my questions a kind of collage element. You will often paste in long quotations, and that is also true of your nonfiction and criticism. Can you explain your attraction to this technique? > MALCOLM > Well, the most obvious attraction of quotation is that it gives you a little vacation from writing—the other person is doing the work. All you have to do is type. But there is a reason beyond sloth for my liking of quotation at length. It permits you to show the thing itself rather than the pale, and never quite right, simulacrum that paraphrase is. > >

from The Paris Review No. 196

This interview by Katie Roiphe (available only in print) is full of interesting bits, but I especially like this flourish on the use of quotation. I like to share quotes here on the candler blog in part because it stands up to criticism better than paraphrase, but also because, on a certain level, I am lazy.

Why should I repeat what has been said better elsewhere? The idea is to continue and hopefully enhance the conversation.

The new 27-inch iMac gives you not just one but two Thunderbolt ports. So in an instant, iMac can go from a family computer to a filmmaker’s dream machine.

Apple PR knows exactly who they are going after. The addition of Thunderbolt should not be taken lightly; these are now totally pro machines.

While the timing was happenstance, all this breathless wedding coverage created an uncomfortable juxtaposition for the U.S. networks that’s difficult to ignore: Primary anchors covering a story on another continent that has zero impact on the lives of most Americans, even as a series of devastating tornados ripped through the South.

For the most part I have found all of the Prince William and Kate Middleton wedding coverage stateside to be a complete waste of space, whether on the side of gushy puffery or cynical repudiation. However, Brian Lowry over at Variety¹ has brilliantly written a piece on the media coverage here in the U.S. and pulls no punches. He also manages to sidestep the whining that has been unavoidable on Twitter and Facebook today. The media blitz isn’t just annoying, it’s inexcusable.

The idea, inspired by similar initiatives in France and Spain, would offer the pension to those who are aged over 65 and have published at least five books or invested more than 20 years in “literary creation”.

Imagine if the U.S. gave a fraction of the amount of respect to artists as other countries do.

Two articles crossed my path recently that offer a bleak outlook for life after college. The first is by indie powerhouse producer Ted Hope, [A “Career” In Indie Film? Better Have That Second Job Lined Up…](http://blogs.indiewire.c om/tedhope/archives/a_career_in_indie_film_better_have_that_second_job_lined_u p/) The other is from Malcolm Harris in the literary magazine n+1 and features an ominous (if Almodóvaran) headline, Bad Education. His piece is much colder than Hope’s, offering mostly statistical analyses pointing towards a coming implosion of the American higher-education system and admitting an overall erosion of its quality over the last four or so decades. Here’s the crux of it:

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

Over on Hope’s side, focusing mainly on how aspiring filmmakers should expect to get paid for anything but making films, he proffers these questions:

I think we would have more directors, producers, and writers creating more wonderful work, if we understood better how to earn a living doing one thing while we give our heart and mind to something else entirely. What are the jobs that lend themselves to a second profession on the side? How do people gain the skills that allow them to juggle to careers? What would such a practical curriculum look like?

I wrote about this two-years ago in the post Starting Out in Film, Now What?:

This may seem obvious, but a lot of film schools in the U.S. teach you the basics of many different fields instead of forcing you to master one. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s great to have a wide swath of knowledge as you start out in the world… If you want to find a job within the film industry you will have to hone your knowledge in on one specific aspect of the biz.

In theory, I agree with Hope, whose experience and insight is worth far more than mine. What he leaves out, however, is the cold hard fact that Harris shines a light on: that undergraduate film programs are, by and large, a scam. I believe in film education and I believe in the university model, but universities are now run like corporations and the money they are pulling in isn’t used to attract better faculty. It’s used to attract “better” students.

The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in [Marc] Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition.

In my four years at college, I saw all of the changes that Bousquet describes. Loft-style dorms with luxury amenities, the largest computer lab in the country at that time and a multi-million dollar apartment for the school’s president (2 miles away) were a few steps in the corporatized direction my alma mater took. Meanwhile, our film equipment barely changed from the day I entered to the day I left, even though the industry was shifting, rapidly, to HD tapeless workflows.

If, as Harris suggests, the university system is broken, then isn’t the film school model in just as much disarray? Film programs looks good in a brochure and often attract wealthy students. The university takes the gamble that most of film students will change direction at some point and move to a different discipline, thereby sparing a strain in resources. Also, a student who hits it big in the film industry offers something even better than a donation: celebrity. Having a film program today is simply good business.

But what of the education? It’s important to remember that most of the filmmakers studied in film schools came of age in a time when no such academic programs existed. The truth is that we don’t need film programs at all. Put another way, one can’t practice medicine without having gone to medical school. But to make a film? There is no board that can certify you, no credential that designates you. The study of film, then, must be, to borrow Harris’s phrase, a pursuit of “intellectual adventure.”

Which brings me back to Ted Hope’s point. Learning how to survive while doing something you love is tricky, perhaps harder than can fit in any curriculum. Go to any festival and you will see the filmmakers who sell themselves well enough to either get by or get beer money off of their work. This isn’t a measure of their artistry, but perhaps finding a way to turn film into a paycheck is an art all its own.

“It would be tough for anybody to walk into a Fincher movie,” Cronenweth said.

Interesting article by Peter Caranicas in Variety (headline links to Readability around paywall, for original click here) about Fincher reaching out to Jeff Cronenweth to replace his cinematographer for the second time in a decade. If you follow Fincher’s work, there are a lot of interesting bits here, like this one:

“It was pretty brutal to go into it that way,” [Cronenweth] said, and initially he was “a bit nervous” about how the digital cinematography would handle the snow, overcast skies, white fields and dark trees of Sweden’s wintry landscapes.

The concerns were unfounded. Shooting is now taking place with Red Epic cameras and “everything has been fine,” per Cronenweth. “If I had the opportunity I’d shoot film, but David hasn’t used film since ‘Panic Room’ and he’s never going back.”

…I suspect that we may be able to look back and see something shift right around now—see the point at which the way we read broke ranks with the way the news is made.

Poignant piece that applies not only to news but also to film.

Old hands in the film business point out that past changes in viewing technology did not bring the calamity that was sometimes predicted.

“I think it will do harm,” Sidney J. Sheinberg, who was president of MCA in Mr. Wasserman’s era, said of the new on-demand plan — yet Mr. Sheinberg also acknowledged that he had been wrong in seeing videocassettes as a threat, rather than a boon, to the studios in the early 1980s.

Interesting NYTimes article explains the current standoff between movie studios and theater owners over on-demand distribution. The trouble is that both sides completely miss the point of digital distribution and will eventually be outmoded by younger, more agile startups that can see what audiences want (e.g. Boxee Box, AppleTV, Vudu, Vimeo, YouTube, Netflix, etc.).

The tenuous relationship between studios and theaters is as old as cinema itself. At the end of the day, people will pay to go see a good movie, something theater owners have no say in. I love the theater experience and I can’t imagine a movie business without it. Still, when multibillion-dollar monopolies go to war with each other, it is the viewers who will suffer.

Text reformatting is all the rage these days, and I happen to be a big fan. Though I love good design, ultimately, like most readers, I just want to get at the content and read it however I want. This is why I added the “Readability” button you see at the top of every post. If you want to see this text just as text, so be it.

Instapaper is an app I use all the time for exactly this purpose. Readability offers a similar service (with a much nicer web interface) but for a monthly price which in turn pays publishers, i.e. me. [Flipboard}(http://flipboard.com/) entered the fray last year as an iPad exclusive app that scoured your Facebook and Twitter timelines for links to articles, reformatting them into a magazine-like interface for all to see. It’s free and it’s pretty amazing.

The New York Times, who just put up their own pay wall, sees an opportunity for monetization in the reformatted web space. Together with bit.ly, the company behind the popular URL shortening service, they have released News.me, a Flipboard alternative with a twist: it costs money and it will supposedly lead you to content you otherwise might not get to. Eventually, that is.

New.me is free for a week, after that it’s $.99/week or $35/year. But what does it do? Basically, it pulls links out of your Twitter feed, or the feeds of people you follow who are also using News.me, and arranges them in a more readable fashion, with pretty serif headlines. Click on a story and it folds out to show you the full text of the article. From there you can read it, send it to Instapaper, e-mail it or share it out to Facebook or Twitter. You can also mark things to read later, in which case they will be saved for offline viewing.

The question isn’t “What does News.me do?” but “What does News.me do differently?” Not much. The only ace in their hole over Flipboard or the slicker and more useful TweetMag is that popular links are supposedly moved to the top of your stream. From their FAQ:

By default, News.me filters your content so that you get only the best stories. This content is chosen based on a combination of popularity and what you have read or shared in the past.

This is very interesting. Since bit.ly collects massive amounts of data on every link they shorten, they are able to determine how many people are sharing links to the same place and how many people are clicking on it. This isn’t an exact measure of what will prove to be interesting to you as opposed to someone else, but it’s a start. The logic is that the more something is shared, the more likely it is to be interesting to anyone.

This type of automated curation could become very interesting depending on how much data bit.ly and the New York Times are able to garner from users of News.me. Today, TweetMag is a much better looking Twitter culling app and Flipboard more delightful to use. But that’s just today.