Category: media

Whose fault is that? Well … “Many Australian film-makers are locked out of cinemas. Australian producers too often lack the resources to compete with the massive marketing budgets of US films, while Hollywood cinema distributors dominate our screens. Like stocks in supermarkets, the bigger the marketing spend, the greater the shelf space accorded at the local multiplex.”

Remember cutting the cord? It might be time to retie the knot with some kind of bundle, because … whew: “An uncomfortable reality has set in: There’s too much. To Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Now, add WarnerMedia, Disney, and Apple as omnibus, general interest streaming destinations. Investors have poured a billion dollars into something called Quibi, which has an unfortunate name but exclusive Guillermo del Toro content. And the niche options continue to proliferate as well.”

But is there a future for mid-budget films? “Some industry observers believe the format has been consigned to the dustbin by a Hollywood obsessed with tentpole franchises.” The producers – who can claim The King’s Speech and Lion as well as the prestige TV series The Top of the Lake – say the future is fine.

Well, teenagers and other young people still make up most of the audiences for movies – “so it makes sense that cinema reflects problems that affect them – police racism and far-right violence, yes, but economic and environmental hostilities, too. In the tumult of 1968, there was talk of a ‘war against the young.’ Fifty years later, that just sounds like how it is – and a war creates war movies.”

Director John Carpenter, star Jamie Lee Curtis — who says the film was “the greatest experience I’ve ever had professionally” — and several co-stars talk about the making of the movie the effects the franchise (ten sequels and remakes) has had on the culture. (Curtis: “No one involved with the movie anticipated it would grow its own industry.”)

On 22 July 2011, the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik used a car bomb to kill eight people and injure 209 in downtown Oslo, then took a ferry to a youth camp on Utøya island, where he shot 102 people, 69 of whom died. Paul Greengrass’s 22 July is a docudrama depicting the attacks and Breivik’s trial; Erik Poppe, who wanted to keep Breivik off the screen entirely, made his Utøya – July 22 as “one long, seemingly unbroken take that follows one young girl on Utøya experiencing the attack in 90 minutes of real time.”

“Officially unveiled last month, StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative seeks to help people with opposing political views who don’t know each other have civil, personal conversations. Participants can record face-to-face conversations using the StoryCorps mobile app or by visiting a StoryCorps booth. … Facilitators will encourage participants to discuss questions that could help them find common ground.”

Says British Film Institute curator of silent film Bryony Dixon, “With nearly all of the people I’ve shown these films to there is an audible gasp when they see something from 120 years ago and they look new. That’s a very strange feeling. All of those things that tell you something is old have been stripped away.”

Over the last few years, there has been a rising fear of giant tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube, for a whole host of reasons. The fear often boils down to this: These companies host problematic content and then have algorithms to push that to an unprecedentedly large audience. Although it’s not often thought of in the same way, Netflix has a similar model and scale.

“Multiple ideas were pitched, but only one seemed to believably get Jimmy out of the jam they had written him into while also shoving him toward his shyster destiny. Here, in interviews with [co-showrunner Peter] Gould and the episode’s writer, Gordon Smith, we dug into how the writers solved that challenge and where it left our favorite ambulance-chaser.” (video)