Category: media

And the sequels inevitably lend themselves to newspaper leads like this: “It could be one of this summer’s hottest sequels: In a world threatened by powerful unseen forces, one man goes on a desperate mission to save the planet. Only the star is former Vice President Al Gore.”

That might be because Amazon is financing the film – which gives Leigh far more money than he usually has while secretively filming things like Happy Go Lucky or Mr. Turner. The film is about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, “the infamous killing of an estimated 18 protesters, and the wounding of about 700 others in St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August,” which “became known as Peterloo, in a bleak reference to the battle of Waterloo four years previously.”

There’s a wild story about how this was buried for decades, and also about “the route the footage took from building site to the Canadian national archives in Ottawa – transported by a Hercules military aircraft after civilian courier firms refused to deliver what they considered dangerously flammable material.”

“The splintering of traditional media, the hostility of contemporary politics, the ways in which modern technology pulls us together while at the same time driving us apart – if you look, you’ll find traces of it in McLuhan’s work, which explored subjects ranging from pop culture to mass media to the ways in which technology would affect our ways of communication, decades before cellphones or the Internet. He was an avatar of the future, ironic considering his own, pessimistic view of things”

If you limit the genre to “movies that deal explicitly with combat, or the American presence in Vietnam generally,” you get about two dozen movies (including post-’70s films). Yet, argues Clay Risen, expand those limits somewhat and “the genre spins off into dozens of subcategories, the shape of which say a lot about how America has viewed the war over the decades since it ended.” (Risen includes Rambo, Hair, MAS*H, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and even Love Story and Shampoo.)

This trend toward I.P.-­based movies has been profound. In 1996, of the top 20 grossing films, nine were live-­action movies based on wholly original screenplays. In 2016, just one of the top 20 grossing movies, ‘‘La La Land,’’ fit that bill. Just about everything else was part of the Marvel universe or the DC Comics universe or the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ universe or the ‘‘Star Wars’’ universe or the ‘‘Star Trek’’ universe or the fifth Jason Bourne film or the third ‘‘Kung Fu Panda’’ or a super-­high-­tech remake of ‘‘Jungle Book.’’ Just outside the top 20, there was a remake of ‘‘Ghostbusters’’ and yet another version of ‘‘Tarzan.’’

“He was sometimes a producer, more often a distributor and exhibitor. He decided to buy Mr. Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) after seeing only half of it and made it a cult hit. Before that, he invented the phenomenon of the midnight movie, with El Topo (1970), selling out the Elgin for six months, followed by Pink Flamingos … Now, at 82, [Ben] Barenholtz has directed his first dramatic film. ‘I’ll never be Kubrick,’ he said, smiling. ‘But I wasn’t afraid either.'”

“When television networks resort to adapting books that haven’t even been written yet,” – and that’s what the Game of Thrones folks are doing at this point – “it’s time to start looking for new source material. Luckily, salvation might be as close as their smartphones. As the supply of books and comics ripe for adaptation dwindles, TV producers are looking to podcasts for fresh material – and finding stories with audiences as loyal as any book club’s inner circle.”