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1 week ago | 
observer.co.uk | Stephen Armstrong |Xavier Greenwood
Donald Trump has extended the deadline by which TikTok must be sold by its Chinese owner ByteDance or be shut down in the US. So what? If this sounds familiar, it’s because he’s done this three times. Trump once fumed that the app was a national security threat and proposed a ban during his first term. Now he has repeatedly deferred enforcing one. This is the result of the president being betweena rock: unwilling to let the app go dark; anda hard place: unable to secure a sale. Rock.
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1 week ago | 
observer.co.uk | Stephen Armstrong
David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. David Zaslav is restructuring as viewing habits change and Hollywood takes on the challenge Hollywood’s identity crisis continues apace – and US TV is in trouble. The CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, David Zaslav, has announced he is hiving off the company’s sluggish but profitable linear TV and cable business into a separate publicly traded company Global Networks and keeping the glamorous Streaming & Studios operation for himself.
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1 week ago | 
observer.co.uk | Stephen Armstrong
With Venice centre stage, the upcoming wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez will be a pageant of excess Jeff Bezos’s first wedding, back in 1993, was at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach. Jeff and his first wife, MacKenzie Tuttle, were gawky and adorable. He was skinny, losing his hair, with glasses, a goofy grin and a honking laugh. She had a scruffy, lopsided pixie cut and slightly wonky teeth.
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2 weeks ago | 
independent.co.uk | Stephen Armstrong
In FocusDonald Trump’s presidency has ushered in a new cultural zeitgeist and it has left actors, singers and film execs reeling. Stephen Armstrong reports on the vibe shift to the right and how Trump has set a collision course with TinseltownIt’s hard being a liberal in Hollywood right now. They’re disorientated and confused.
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3 weeks ago | 
observer.co.uk | Stephen Armstrong
The retailer announces it is cutting a fifth of its workforce, including 150 jobs in Wakefield, but the chief executive strikes an optimistic note When Burberry was successful, it bottled the essence of Britishness. It is now a medium-sized player that has gone through successive changes of management, facing an increasingly volatile world while seeming uncertain of its identity. So still the essence of Britain.
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2 months ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Harvard has raised the stakes in its fightback against the US government. On Monday, the world’s richest university sued the Trump administration over its freezing of $2.3 billion in funding. The lawsuit claims the administration’s actions are unlawful, arbitrary and violate the university’s rights to free speech. This was followed yesterday by a joint statement signed by more than 170 university leaders who criticised the “political interference now endangering American higher education”.
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2 months ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Harvard has rejected Donald Trump’s demands for sweeping reforms aimed at purging “woke” ideology from America’s oldest and richest university. So what? It could hardly do otherwise. In a social media post on Wednesday Trump accused Harvard of hiring “Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’”. He added that Harvard “is a joke, teaches hate and stupidity and should no longer receive federal funds”.
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2 months ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
As reported here yesterday, young cinemagoers are being warned against bad behaviour in screenings of A Minecraft Movie. For Hollywood, the film is proving good as gold. Before its release last weekend, the industry was facing its worst March box office in decades and Warner Bros. studio bosses were rumoured to be facing the chop. Reviews of A Minecraft Movie were dreadful: “an expensively cheap, 100 per cent corporate mess”, “boring, bad and annoying”, “a hyperactive hot pink mess”.
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2 months ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
There is presumably a safe in Hollywood where they keep the spy/assassin/ordinary-man-taking-revenge script and it’s carved from ancient wood with names picked out in solid gold. Bourne. Taken. John Wick. Kill Bill. Point Blank. The Equalizer. And The Amateur? It won’t be joining them. It has a promising premise. Geeky CIA cryptographer Rami Malek’s wife is murdered in a London terrorist attack, and he goes postal.
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2 months ago | 
tortoisemedia.com | Stephen Armstrong
Based on the eponymous true-life podcast about Molly Kochan, Dying for Sex tells the story of a 42-year-old woman with incurable breast cancer who leaves her husband to embark on a quest into her own sexuality. The show is heartbreaking and hilarious – often in the same conversation. Michelle Williams delivers a tour de force as Molly, who deals with her childhood trauma while searching for her first ever orgasm.
