Category: media

“When so many are navel-gazing and tweeting about what happened two seconds ago — drawn to fantasy, comic books and sarcasm — there’s something brave and chastening about summoning history to shed dramatic light on current concerns.”

Thom Beers’s work “is the reason that viewers who have never worked a day away from an Aeron chair may know the dimensions and weight of a crab pot or the freezing point of synthetic transmission fluid.”

“Based on the character created by English crime novelist Lee Child, Jack Reacher was to be celebrated Saturday in Pittsburgh, where much of the movie was shot. The film, scheduled to open Dec. 21, includes scenes of sniper violence.”

“The 48 fps version of The Hobbit is weird, that’s true. It’s distracting as hell, yes yes yes. Yet it’s also something that you’ve never seen before, and is, in its way, amazing. Taken all together, and without the prejudice of film-buffery, Jackson’s experiment is not a flop. It’s a strange, unsettling success.”

“What do mainstream movies mean any more? Big studios have cut back on output and refined business models to appeal to the taste for the spectacular, the special event, the blowout. In the process, they have largely left the task of creating serious drama to cable television.”

The estate claimed that the merchandising of all sorts of doodads “has offended and distressed Tolkien’s devoted fans, harming Tolkien’s legacy and reputation.”

“Web shows with names like Treintañeros (Thirtysomethings), Asqueadas (The Disgusted Ones) and Parados (The Jobless Ones) are finding dark humor in the economic distress of Spain’s so-called lost generation, while offering an antidote to the sanitized view of the crisis often presented on mainstream Spanish TV.”

Beasts of the Southern Wild star Quvenzhané Wallis, aged six at the time of filming, is widely expected to land an Oscar nomination. Some observers find this ridiculous, seeing her performance as “the result of first-time director Benh Zeitlin’s superb handling of a sweet young child.” Don’t believe them.

“Stateside B.O. hit $10.03 billion through Sunday, the fastest ascension to eight figures in history. By comparison, last year’s totals reached $9.49 billion by this time, while in 2009 — a benchmark year at the domestic box office with $10.6 billion total — B.O. stood at $9.84 billion through Dec. 13.”

Andrew O’Hehir: “With an impressive number of high-quality and high-visibility movies in the mix, movies that offer markedly different worldviews, interpretations of human experience and dramatized real-world events, the Academy Award struggle of 2013 ought to be a heated cultural imbroglio with all sorts of ideological overtones, one that lays bare some of the fault lines in American society.”