Category: media

“Even before any tickets had been sold, Ghostbusters was already surely the most argued-about movie of the year, attacked by angry male fans on the internet and hailed as a new milestone in Hollywood diversity. Wesley Morris, critic at large for The New York Times, joins its chief film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott to survey the state of the debate now that people have actually seen the movie.”

“Leslie Jones, one of the most visible and accessible stars in the all-female remake of the Ghostbusters movie, said that she would leave Twitter after becoming the target of online trolls who sent her a stream of pornography, racist speech and hateful memes. … ‘Ok I have been called Apes,’ she wrote on Twitter, ‘even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out.'”

“This Is A Generic Presidential Campaign Ad,” assembled entirely from stock footage by the stock-footage company Dissolve, lays out all the messaging elements for (the generic) Candidate (slogan: “For an American America”). (video)

“The director’s 18th-century epic is legendary for the hardships imposed upon its cast, with 150 takes for a single shot not uncommon. But, four decades on, the film’s stars remain united in praise of this beautiful, slow-burning masterpiece.”

“For a long time, people didn’t know how to approach the story. When Patty and I had our creative conversations about the character, we realized that Diana can still be a normal woman, one with very high values, but still a woman. She can be sensitive. She is smart and independent and emotional. She can be confused. She can lose her confidence. She can have confidence. She is everything. She has a human heart.”

These 25 nominations were surprising – in a good way, for once.

“The writer is tasked not only with verbally transmitting image and movement, but also capturing something of the mood or fantasy evoked onscreen, and grappling with medium-specific gestures so minor they’re almost implied; here, the challenge is to convey but not overwork such moments, keeping both effect and subtlety intact, as if handing over a moth without dissolving its wings.”

The Washington Post critic follows the game through DC monuments and museums in a vain effort to get to level five, and finally concludes it’s not worth the effort.

“A cartoon firebrand delivers his Ramadan message: ‘Ramadan is the month where sins are forgiven and hearts are filled with – love.’ This outburst of goodwill is met with confusion from the audience of masked men and veiled women, which only heightens as he continues: ‘there is no difference between Arabs and Westerners except in piety.’ Rescuing the situation, the sidekick hands the preacher a sesame biscuit. ‘Better?’ ‘Fucking better,’ replies the preacher – and with hunger banished, he launches into calls for bombs and destruction. ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry,’ the clip concludes, parodying an American ad for the Snickers candy-bar.”

“China’s official censorship guidelines technically prohibit movies that ‘promote cults or superstition’ … and the country’s regulators occasionally have been known to use this obscure provision as rationale for banning films that feature ghosts or supernatural beings in a semi-realistic way (Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest suffered such a fate in 2006).”