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May 29, 2006

NYT Linkfest

I'm putting the finishing touches on an academic article on new media, and this New York Times article on MTV's plans to develop broadcasting material for PDAs, cell phones, and video iPods, in shrt for the mobile screens that are becoming more commonplace. As the article points out, most of the shows are designed with the format in mind, running no more than three minutes, with lots of close-ups and static scenes. While the mobile video phenomenon is still in its earliest stages, one model speculates that the market for mobile TV will approach $27 billion by 2010. I'm not sure I have much more to say about the article right now--I'd rather expend that energy in my academic article, but it's a pretty useful treatment of how visual entertainment is rapidly changing.

While I'm in the neighborhood, The Times also has an article on the history of The Internet Movie Database, which is probably my favorite website.

Finally, Andy pointed me to yet another Times article on the need for a film that will give science or scientists that same type of appeal that the Godfather films gave crime and that The West Wing gave politics. I'd like to believe that film will be called An Inconvenient Truth. But what I really want to mention about the article is its passing mention of Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador's The Mist in the Palm Trees, which recently played at Tribeca and has now spiralled to the top of my film wish list. Here's the Times' description:

Directed by Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero, "Mist" is a presented as fictional documentary about a Spanish photographer and physicist, one Santiago Bergson. In it, the dead Bergson muses on his atomized life and lack of memory as old photographs and grainy home film clips shuffle past, over and over again, arcing from his childhood in Asturia, in northern Spain, to the cataclysmic climax of the Manhattan Project. In one much-repeated grainy clip, a man in a suit leaps headfirst over a row of chairs on the lawn and lands in a somersault.
I'll be fascinated to see how Salvador and Molinero convey the idea of a "quantum film," but as of right now, this sounds really cool.

Posted by chuck at May 29, 2006 11:51 AM

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