Category: media

Richard Brody: “Kubrick’s movie, which I hadn’t seen since college and always recalled with slight derision for its dated paranoid bombast, came to immediate life … It was the music that effected this change, starting with the excerpt from Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Employed as an overture, it immediately sets a very high bar for the artistic originality required for the movie not to wither and shrink from the screen in full public view.”

“[It’s] the purest hit you can get: mainlining movies straight into your brain, unfiltered by environmental factors. … There is no friend or partner with whom to confer, no vexing stranger munching popcorn, no professional-critic colleague sighing extravagantly at the boring bits. Unlike at home, there is none of your own clobber around you; unlike on the tube, you’re in this for the duration.”

“About 40 states offer some sort of incentive to lure Hollywood productions to their precincts. But some have begun to wonder if they’re getting their money’s worth.”

“It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission. The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”

“China’s richest man plans to spend 50 billion yuan ($8.2 billion US) to build the country’s version of Hollywood in the northeastern city of Qingdao.”

The weekend broadcasts of All Things Considered will now be based at the NPR West facility in greater Los Angeles. “NPR officials have billed it as a rare chance for a legacy radio program, previously based in Washington with the rest of the public radio organization, to rethink what it is and does – and let listeners decide if the changes sound good.”

“The Emmy win could boost Netflix’s prestige in Hollywood as an outlet for high-quality original series and further encourage writers, producers and actors to consider Netflix projects at a time when competition for talent among TV networks is as fierce as ever.”

“Fine films heighten experience. They conjure with sound and light–cinematographers were originally called lighting cameramen–and banish humdrum in the editing. Movies manipulate reality the way high-energy physicists manipulate matter, compressing it into hot plasma.”

Solomon Northup’s life, and most of his story, is heavily documented. But “scholars have been trying to untangle the literal truth of Mr. Northup’s account from the conventions of the antislavery literary genre” for decades.