Category: media

Graphic Violence In Video Games – What’s The Moral Relationship To The Real World?

Virtual sexual violence and virtual murder are alike in that they don’t involve real victims, and both would be uncontroversially wrong if done in real life. This creates what philosopher Morgan Luck called ‘the gamer’s dilemma’: how can we be so sanguine about virtual bloodletting, but react with appalled horror to the idea of simulated paedophilia or sexual violence?

As The Podcast Boom Continues, Can Audio-Only Fiction Catch On?

“Gimlet Media, the podcasting startup based in Brooklyn, tapped the valve of radio drama in 2016 with Homecoming, the fictional thriller podcast brought to life by Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer.” And more high-profile fiction podcasts are coming, with the likes of Kristen Wiig, Ethan Hawke, John Cameron Mitchell, Glenn Close, Cynthia Erivo, and Patti LuPone involved. But there’s one problem: “a vast majority of the audience is not listening in a concentrated way, like they would at home while watching a Netflix drama. Successful podcasts need to reach audience that is not 100% ‘with it’ the whole time, who get distracted. And that’s a real challenge when you’re dealing with fiction.”

At Cannes: Big Movies Do Fine, But Indie Film Market Declines

Whichever way the 2018 Cannes Film Market is taken, heartening signs of continued market traction have to be placed in a context of a longer-term attrition in the independent theatrical market affecting both many mid-sized English-language movies and arthouse titles alike. The bottom hasn’t fallen out of either market. But their theatrical space, in domestic and international, looks decidedly smaller.

‘The Sound Of Music’ – The First Critic-Proof Movie Musical?

As beloved as the film was and is, The Sound of Music was not rapturously received by the critics back in 1965: Joan Didion despised “its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind,” and Pauline Kael called it a “sugar-coated lie that … makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless.” Pamela Hutchinson explores how the critics lost that particular argument, paving the way for everything from Mamma Mia! to The Last Showman.

Uh-Oh – There’s More Grey Gardens Footage On The Way

In 1972, three years before Albert and David Maysles made their now-famous documentary about “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin) and their rapidly decaying Long Island mansion, Lee Radziwill (Jackie’s sister) hired the Maysles brothers to visit the Beale homestead, where “they shot an hour of Big Edie and Little Edie squabbling with each other and the health officials threatening eviction.” That footage is now coming out in a documentary titled That Summer.

Cannes Crowns A Winner. But Can The Festival Stay Relevant?

The Grand Prix went to Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” an American racial drama that just about pops with relevance. From the lofty heights at the top of the carpet, Cannes carried on business as usual. Yet that didn’t stop a great many people, throughout the festival, from asking: Has Cannes lost its luster, its excitement, its relevance? Has its status as the world’s most prestigious and sexy and important film festival been dimmed? Has it been undermined by a perfect storm of elements, from the rise of Netflix to the power of awards season? To put it in the most blunt terms possible: Are the great films now playing somewhere else?

Is The Wildly Popular MoviePass About To Go Bust?

Eight months after slashing its price and expanding membership past 2 million users, MoviePass is now at risk of going bust. The parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc., which now owns 92 percent of MoviePass, said last week that it had just $15.5 million in cash at the end of April and $27.9 million on deposit with merchant processors. MoviePass has been burning through $21.7 million per month.

Oh My Gosh, Cannes, You *Can* Have A Future, But Quit With The Snooty Rulemaking

And it’s not just the rejection of Netflix and streaming that’s the problem, but the truth – in hard numbers – that “non-English-language film culture has experienced a serious slippage in currency. … For half a century or more, starting after World War II, what we referred to in America as ‘foreign films’ (a parochial term, to be sure, since they’re not foreign in other places) found a way to be part of the conversation. They were movies that periodically produced lines around the block. With rare exceptions, that’s no longer the case.”