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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Crime, Celebrity, and Kissing On Screen: A Q&A on The King of Bollywood

Anupama Chopra knows first-hand about Bollywood, India’s burgeoning film industry. As a former film writer for India Today magazine and the wife of famed Indian writer/director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, she’s spent more than 15 years watching from the inside as the industry weathered widespread social change, rapid expansion, and economic globalization. Her new book, King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan . . .



And Today Is…

August 31 is the day in 1897 when Thomas Edison patented the first movie projector, the Kinetoscope. Who knows whether High School Musical 2 was the future he envisioned.



The FREAKest Links: Two’s A Crowd Edition

Fortune Small Business reports that a feud is brewing between two companies that provide inflatable torsos to serve as movie extras in crowd scenes. Industry leader Inflatable Crowd is being sued by competitor Crowd in a Box over patent infringement, while the defendant’s owner claims he came up with the idea on his own. (Hat tip: the Wall Street Journal‘s . . .



The Sopranos Leads Al Gore to Expand His Carbon Footprint

Newspapers have historically been vocal advocates for good environmental policy. So when millions of people start to consume them electronically, on computer screens, instead of on paper that comes from trees and must be thrown away, wouldn’t you think that newspapers would stand up and cheer? Well, not necessarily, since newspapers still make a lot more money selling ads on . . .



The Happiest Feet of All

Quite by accident, I’ve blogged three times on this site about Happy Feet: 1. Whether Savion Glover, the human tap dancer behind Mumble’s moves, got sufficient credit; 2 When Glover himself took in a showing of the film, with his own child in tow; and 3. Whether the success of films like Happy Feet have raised awareness of global warming. . . .



Are Children Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm?

Even though Americans may be less concerned with global warming than people in many other countries, it is amazing how the subject has recently become so omnipresent. The media is brimming with global warming stories every day, from a variety of angles: environmental, economic, political, etc. How did this happen? How has such a sweeping, complex, controversial issue become such . . .



DisLocation: A new film by Sudhir Venkatesh

Sudhir Venkatesh, the amazing sociologist who was my co-author on the gangs research that we write about in Freakonomics, has a great new documentary. It will be showing on WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate at Thursday, Nov. 17th, 9pm Friday, Nov. 18th, 10pm. If you don’t live in Chicago, you are out of luck, at least for now. I have seen . . .