Category: media

Why Was Zhang Yimou’s Latest Film Pulled From The Berlin Film Festival?

“The phrase ‘technical reasons’ is both a euphemism and a reality for Chinese filmmakers, none of whom can ever be said to have completed their movie until regulators sign off on every detail. … In the case of One Second, it is possible that the subject matter, rooted in Mao Zedong’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, was the problem.” – Variety

How The Red Carpet Became Such A Thing

Although the red carpet has been a part of Hollywood premières since the silent era and a part of the Academy Awards since the early sixties, it became a beast unto itself in large part because of Joan Rivers, who began hosting her barbed red-carpet specials in the nineties, with her daughter, Melissa. The “Joan Rivers effect” made the whole enterprise funnier and—for the starlets on display—scarier. Soon the red carpet became its own cottage industry, with the E! network employing such dubious innovations as the “Glam Cam 360” and picking outfits apart on “Fashion Police.” – The New Yorker

The Video Game That Lets You Fight Back Against Jim Crow And The KKK

“[Video game company] Rockstar’s version of American history is not for the fainthearted. The developer took pains to make Red Dead Redemption 2 as historically accurate as possible. Someone at Rockstar was clearly paying attention in history class, because Red Dead Redemption 2 unflinchingly confronts America’s ugly racial history throughout the game.” – Slate

‘Melancholia: The Diamond’ – Lars Von Trier Wants To Recreate All His Films As Gemstones (With Virtual Reality Attached)

Yes, seriously: the Danish director “intend[s] to turn all 13 of the films he’s made so far into diamonds and to present them at art institutions across the globe. … A museum visitor is invited to wear a virtual reality helmet and step inside an enlarged rendition of the same double diamond, and to stand for a moment inside its silent, glittering core.” – The New York Times

How Today’s Journalism Looks Remarkably Like That Of Yesteryear

If you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly. A resurrected Franklin wouldn’t have a news job inside The Washington Post; he’d have an anonymous Twitter account with a huge following that he’d use to routinely troll political opponents, or a partisan vehicle built around himself like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, or an occasional columnist gig at a less partisan outlet like Politico, or a popular podcast where he’d shoot the political breeze with other Sons of Liberty, à la Chapo Trap House or Pod Save America. “Journalism dying, you say?” Ben Franklin v 2.0 might say. “It’s absolutely blooming, as it was in my day.” – Wired