Category: media

What gives? Faith and religion used to be the kiss of box office death. Now, as many other box office certainties fall, the film “I Can Only Imagine” has picked up pretty solid box office numbers, coming in second only to “Black Panther” and “Tomb Raider” in its first week of release. “Other recent successes include Heaven Is for Real, the story of a boy who briefly dies, which grossed $91m in the US. Fireproof, about a porn-addicted fireman, made $33m from a $500,000 budget. God’s Not Dead, which follows a college student whose faith is challenged by a philosophy professor, made twice that.”

Robbie’s plan is to emphasize diverse Australian talent. She said, “I’m taking a lot of meetings with the lesser-known talent at the moment, the indie film-makers, first- and second-time film-makers, mainly women. … I’m in a lovely position where I can actually help get things greenlit, so I want to work with people who we haven’t seen yet.”

In her speech before presenting the Best Director Oscar this year, Emma Stone said, “It is the director whose indelible touch is reflected on every frame.” However, writes Ryan Gilbey, “the assumption that the director is present in every frame becomes problematic once that same director turns out to be a liability. … If the value of a movie can be attributed to a single film-maker, it becomes that much harder to argue that extracurricular misjudgments – and even crimes – can be expunged from what is on screen.”

In the first generations of television, reflecting the idea(l) of the “classless” American society, the families in sitcoms tended to be solidly middle-class: Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, I Love Lucy, etc. Even the Addams family and the Munsters were middle-class, if not wealthy. (The only real exceptions were The Honeymooners and the stereotyped “ethnic” comedies The Goldbergs, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and The Beverly Hillbillies, on which everyone but the Clampetts was rich.) Sascha Cohen offers a reevaluation of how things changed after Norman Lear created All in the Family.

“To some cynical journalists or techno-skeptics, this maneuvering might seem like Facebook just being Facebook—that the Cambridge scandal is merely the latest in a litany of privacy intrusions; that Facebook’s de facto response is, as Dance noted, disingenuous. But this scandal really is different, and everyone in Silicon Valley knows it. Since the story broke a significant investor and entrepreneur, who has worked in tech for over two decades, recalled to me that the incident reminded him of what happened to Microsoft in the 1990s, when years of pugilistic corporate behavior caught up to the company in the form of significant antitrust regulation.”

“‘To see what is in front of one’s nose,’ George Orwell said, ‘needs a constant struggle.’ … What about the hidden truths, the buried drives and desires? The things that lie beyond distant doorways, behind the curtains of dreams, deep in the sea-bottoms of memory? Who’s going to see all that while you’re busy looking just past the Orwellian tip of your nose? Over the past half century, no one has taken a harder, clearer look behind those doors, beyond those curtains, and into those deep oceans than David Lynch.”

In the wake of the last Florida school shooting, and as a lead-up to this weekend’s March for Our Lives, here’s a conversation with Villanova University research psychologist Patrick Markey, co-author of Mortal Kombat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.

Receiving bankruptcy protection means that secured creditors will get paid before any women suing the Weinstein Co. (Bob Weinstein is listed as an unsecured creditor, per Variety.) Civil lawsuits already filed by Harvey Weinstein’s accusers against the company will be halted, and they can’t bring new legal claims. But there could be other legal recourse for such accusers.

“In this episode of Watch Smarter, Slate‘s video series about hidden tropes in pop culture and beyond, we trace the surprising history of cartoon sounds we all know but have never quite understood. Our story begins with live orchestras in the 1920s and ends, more or less, inside a coke bottle.”