Dear Guild member, Interstate General Media today threatened to liquidate or sell the assets the company, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com, as of January 18, 2013 if it does not reach tentative agreements with all of its unions, including the Newspaper Guild. As you know, our contract expires in October 2013 while the other ten union contracts expired in October 2012. Last summer, IGM ownership asked that the Guild volunteer to take pay cuts a year ahead of our contract expiration in order to help the company which was hemorrhaging money. The company seeks […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The high cost of mounting a feature film demands that filmmakers keep an eye on telling stories that will attract an audience. If you’re going to spend a $100 million on a film, you better make sure the characters you’re introducing appeal to a wide variety of people. In contrast, tonight Andrew’s Video Vault will be showing three micro-budgeted films whose low-stake economics allowed their filmmakers to stick stubbornly to their own quietly insane vision, regardless of how potentially off-putting or extreme. Two of the films come out of New York City’s much-storied Times […]

  Shirley MacLaine has lived a lot in her 78 years. She also famously insists that she’s lived centuries more in past lives. But MacLaine hasn’t given a thought to retiring. Why should she? Her deliciously nasty turn as an old woman a small town loves to hate in Bernie, opposite Jack Black, earned rave reviews. Now, she’s got a juicy co-starring role in the hugely popular Emmy-winning Masterpiece series Downton Abbey as Lady Cora’s mother Martha Levinson, who arrives from New York to upset the household. In the January/February issue, on newsstands now, The Saturday Evening Post contributor Jeanne […]

Our new Favorite Song Of All Time, For Right Now At Least.

  PRESS RELEASE: New York, NY–January 8, 2013–In the early morning hours of Tuesday the 8th January, Iso/Columbia Records released a new single by David Bowie titled ‘Where Are We Now?’ exclusively launching in the iTunes Store in 119 countries. David Bowie’s first new album in ten years and his 30th studio recording, THE NEXT DAY is also available as a pre-order on iTunes with a wide release scheduled for March. January the 8th is of course David Bowie’s birthday, a timely moment for such a treasure to appear as if out of nowhere. Throwing shadows and avoiding the industry […]

FRESH AIR This month marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln issued on Jan. 1, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. The document declares that all those held as slaves within any state, or part of a state, in rebellion “shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.” Historian Bruce Levine explores the destruction of the old South and the reunified country that emerged from the Civil War in his new book, The Fall of the House of Dixie. He says one result of the document was a flood of black men from the South […]

Yes, that’s the Inquirer building, er, Bart Blatstein’s casino. RELATED: Black and White and Dead All Over is an in-depth look at the newspaper industry as it struggles to remain financially viable and to keep the presses rolling. Through the voices of prominent journalists including Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and David Carr of the New York Times, we reveal an industry in the midst of a financial death spiral, as readers abandon print for online news sources. We see publishers and editors desperately trying to create a sustainable business model for their dying papers. Our film examines the […]

This man is a walking argument for gun control. SALON: RealClearPolitics has more of a transcript, but here are five of Jones’ craziest highlights. 1. Bloomberg, AP, Reuters, you name it — brag that they’re going to get our guns as well. They’ve taken everybody’s guns, but the Swiss and the American people and when they get our guns, they can have their world tyranny while the government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in U.S. skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota. 2. The Second Amendment isn’t there for duck hunting. […]

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILLY POST: As you may have heard, on Friday the House of Representatives finally, a full two months after the fact, voted to greenlight nearly $10 billion in relief funds for victims of Superstorm Sandy. (Note that Katrina funds were approved 10 days after the fact.) More specifically, the House voted to extend the debt ceiling on FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program by $10 billion, the first installment of projected $60.4 billion relief package. And not a moment too soon. The fund, which is the primary disburser of federal relief money to individual disaster victims, […]

Broad & Spruce, 12:42 PM by JEFF FUSCO

Django Django: Hand of Man on Nowness.com. Directed by Bafta Award winning director John Maclean, the brother of Django drummer/producer Dave Maclean and former Beta Band-mate. “Filmed on black and white super-8 stock,” says Maclean. “The end of great things. The party was the last day in our friend’s building which will inevitably be knocked down to make way for more dodgy flats with tiny triangle balconies – art, film and music studios destroyed to make way for fast-buck housing developers pricing the working classes and the artists out of central London. The end of film developers and Kodak film […]