Category: media

“Portlandia was the moment something shifted and a new kind of person started showing up in Portland, who wasn’t the same kind of hearty doer, but more of a spectator who wants to be entertained by a city,” said Carye Bye, a former Portland-based artist who donated her hand-printed cards to Portlandia.

“Cuba has one of the lowest rates of internet usage in the Western Hemisphere, and access to media is strictly restricted – but that doesn’t stop Cubans from watching Game of Thrones. Their secret is El Paquete Semanal (‘The Weekly Packet’), a clandestine in-person file-sharing network that distributes hard drives and flash drives full of media.”

“The company may yet be able to reorganize and continue to produce TV shows and films under new ownership. Lantern Capital put in a ‘stalking horse’ bid, which provides a floor for a bankruptcy auction. … The company also announced that it has released its employees from their non-disclosure agreements, as part of an ongoing negotiation with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.”

Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.

One problem is simply the numbers in the U.S. – single digits for women directors, compared to women being 1/4 of directors in France, for instance. And then, of course, “sci-fi is still fiercely defended masculine territory. The word “science” doesn’t help, judging by men’s rights movement support for James Damore, the Google engineer fired for claiming the gender imbalance in the science and technology sectors was due to biological differences. Or for the Sad Puppies movement agitating for a return to pre-diversity science fiction. Or never-ending Gamergate nonsense, or whingeing about Star Wars being sullied by women or people of colour. Sci-fi is a cultural Custer’s Last Stand for bigotry.”

Are you writing a role for a woman on the phone, just holding out for info about her man? What about a hapless yet winsomely inspiring girl (the child kind, not the girlfriend kind)? Stop it. Do better. It’s (sobs) 2018.