Category: media

“Pee-wee might live in a world of adult longings and eroticism, but Pee-wee does not partake. It’s not that he’s queer or even asexual, but that – by being frozen in a state of stunted adolescence – he exists in a prepubescent universe where sexuality doesn’t quite exist yet.”

For this survey, Nielsen split up millennials into three categories to accurately capture how they operate: “Dependent Adults” (Stage 1), living in someone else’s home; “On Their Own” (Stage 2), living in their own home without kids; and “Starting a Family” (Stage 3), living in their own home with kids.

“4DX purports to further immerse you in your film experience with these physical effects. Why simply watch Superman get rained on when you can get uncomfortably wet at the same time? Why just commiserate with Batman when he’s punched in the back by an evil henchman, when you can get punched in the back by your very own chair? Genius!”

“We want to see them fight because, to an unusual degree even for comic books, the fights mean something. That is, they are about something – or some things. Namely: how to make a better world, with Superman operating through hope and inspiration, and Batman through fear and intimidation. As the villain Lex Luthor puts it in the new movie, it’s ‘god versus man, day versus night.'”

Dennis Lim: ” The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t.”

“Last week, state regulators announced that Chinese theater chains that generate at least two-thirds of their box office receipts from local Chinese films will be able to keep half of a five percent tax they usually pay on ticket sales.”

“The results are a devastating rebuke to the power of mainstream American critics at a time when many newspapers have already outsourced their reviews to wire services and the rise of bloggers has de-professionalized the practice of assessing a film’s attributes and demerits.”

“Why this apparently overwhelming, unquenchable urge to argue that box office receipts prove the irrelevance and impotence of criticism? Could it be that the movie business feels defensive, maybe even ashamed, of peddling so much profitable dreck, and—whatever the numbers may say—a critic’s reproaches still have the power to sting?”

But the real interesting thing is that it didn’t do this in its first week, making the argument that maybe, just maybe, everyone should start looking at TV show popularity data way farther out from release dates.

“Australia broadcasts this laid-back easiness but it is really a very conservative country. … Art takes off in those periods when you’re being stifled and oppressed. There is a sort of darkness that lurks [here] somewhere.”