Category: media

From “Empire” to ”Atlanta” to “The Get Down,” hip-hop has been the subject of some of the most inventive television of the last few years. Documentaries have been preserving the music through a historical lens, but it’s also being celebrated — and reimagined — through an artistic one.

“For fans of the book and the film, it may feel self-evident that Call Me by Your Name is not a story of predation: It’s a story of first love and lust told from the perspective of a particularly mature teenager on the cusp of adulthood; the relationship is consensual; even Elio’s parents seem to approve; and, in any case, this is a fictional depiction, not an ethical endorsement. But the age gap will give pause to more people than right-wing trolls – it did to my progressive companion at an early screening – and it does the film no favors to pretend it’s not a question worth exploring.” So Slate‘s Jeffrey Bloomer explores it.

Just after the new movie’s British release, Sony UK tweeted a promo making the film look like a heterosexual teen romance. (After a proper roasting on social media, it was deleted.) “The tweet served as a reminder of an awkwardness that lingers in mainstream spaces. In trying to position the film as a romance intended for a wide audience, Sony believed that fooling straight viewers was the way to go.” And this was hardly the first time.

“There seems to have been an immediate need to memorialize it, even as its consequences are still playing out. And these depictions are still rolling in – while South Park and Saturday Night Live were able to recreate the moment almost immediately, shows with longer production timelines are only now getting around to it. But why are we even still interested in reliving the election?” Rachel Withers offers some ideas.

A brief history of Total Request Live, which saved MTV, midwifed the boom in boy bands, and filled the busiest crossroads in New York with screaming teenage girls.

In light of Spacey’s ongoing abuse scandal, Sony decided that it couldn’t promote Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World – a biopic about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III and the refusal of his billionaire grandfather to pay ransom for him – with Spacey in the role of the senior Getty. (Still less could they promote the film for Oscars, and it had been expected to be a contender.) So they’re re-shooting all of Spacey’s scenes with the actor Scott originally wanted for the role anyway – Christopher Plummer.

The standard metric at Rotten Tomatoes, of course, is the “Tomatometer” score, the percentage of reviews by critics that are positive. But with its Best Superhero Movies of All Time rankings that the site started earlier this year, Rotten Tomatoes provides weighted scores that adjust for the total number of reviews each film has received.

What has changed, then, is not much the opportunity to see good films but the way they are packaged. In brief, we have gone from a time in the Sixties when the emphasis was placed on making a more or less agreed-upon canon available to the novice film buff, to a smorgasbord of “edgy” hors d’oeuvres and a neglect of the meat-and-potatoes classics.

Disney’s change of course came after a number of news outlets, including The New York Times and the A.V. Club, said they were boycotting advance screenings of Disney films in solidarity. The company also faced pressure from several high-profile Hollywood figures, including Ava DuVernay, who directed “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is to be released by Disney on March 9.

“The production company that made The Cosby Show has sued the BBC over a documentary the British network aired about the rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Carsey-Werner, the production company that is the plaintiff in the case, says that the documentary is infringing its copyright because it uses eight audiovisual clips and two musical cues from The Cosby Show.”