Category: media

Scott MacDonald on Beasts of the Southern Wild star Quvenzhané Wallis: “Though she’s nine now, she was a mere six when the film was shot. To put it another way, she was not quite seven, which is the year developmental psychologists like to refer to as the age of reason: when kids start making decisions based on logic and causality. I’m no psych expert, but it seems to me this might be the sensible cut-off point for acting plaudits.”

“It frees up the image in a way that I think is disruptive for some people — certainly off-putting — but once you actually get into it and sort of accept the images that you’re seeing [as] being very different, you absolutely embrace the world.”

Not a single show has cracked the Nielsen Top 30.

“Classic film noirs used their dark settings as direct reflections of their subject matter, as well as to create the sense of their heroes getting lost. They tapped into our natural fears of the dark in the same way that horror movies do … But just as instinctual is the drive to seek warmth and shelter from the cold. … [The] danger isn’t unknown or theoretical; it’s bright, enveloping, bone-chilling.”

At least one critic thinks so. Stick figure Bill (not Mr. Bill from the old Saturday Night Live) “is the star of It’s Such a Beautiful Day,” the first feature by animator Don Hertzfeldt, who’s “known for making sick, hilarious shorts films about endless dental procedures and balloons that turn on toddlers.”

The wildly popular Magnificent Century, about the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, focuses on the Sultan’s harem and domestic intrigues (as soap operas tend to do). Incensed at the less-than-reverent portrayal of a national icon, a member of parliament has submitted legislation “aimed to forbid historical figures from being humiliated and to prevent the ‘perversion’ of the facts”.

As he tells Stephen Colbert, “I walk in the door, into a room with the writers and producers, and the first thing they say is ‘this isn’t some MTV bullshit’ … And then I was told not to change the jokes or improvise.” He promptly instructed his agent to “get me the **** out of this. These people are insane.”

“The new technologies – high-speed, high-definition, 3-D, etc. – used in many of this year’s blockbusters, are, I think, overloading my brain with so much information, forcing me to see in such a new way, that the mere act of watching them exhausts me.”

“If we can get Canadians to fall in love with Canadian filmmakers early we believe we can be the Oakland A’s to the New York Yankees of the big studios.”

“As the number of these government-approved indie films grows, a nascent Chinese industry — production houses and exhibitors — is emerging to support them.”