Category: media

“Moviegoers fed a strict Hollywood diet may find themselves squirming through, say, a film by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr less because of the subtitles than because of the long takes during which little is explained. The same may hold true for those who watch The Tree of Life and want Terrence Malick to connect the dots overtly among his characters, the dinosaurs and the trippy space images.”

“In anticipation of the 10th annual Lebowski Fest … in Louisville, Ky., we decided to pour ourselves a white Russian and peruse some of the scholarly papers the film has inspired.”

“Has the move toward free really made it impossible for the average creative type to make a living? Is digital convenience trumping good art?”

Ham radio “should be long since dead. It should have been replaced by the rise of the Internet or Facebook. … But in towns across the country, hundreds of groups … have soldiered on … And far from being made obsolete by the Web, hams have used it to create thousands of online message boards and specialty sites.”

“Message boards were key components of Web 1.0 – the Web before broadband, online video, social networking, advanced traffic analysis and the drive to monetize transformed it. … [The] boards were almost invisible to anyone intent on profiting off Web traffic – and so they’ve been nearly written out of the history of the Internet.”

“That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year. Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.”

“Americans who illegally download songs and movies may soon be in for a surprise: They will be warned to stop, and if they don’t, they could find their Internet access slowing to a crawl.”

“At the face-painting station, women are helping children get their blue-face on and grown men are painting each other, giggling. Some men choose to work alone, setting about their task with gravity. … Dazed, silent children in floppy Smurfgear – dragged along by gleeful blue 20- and 30-somethings – are consoled only by the promise of raffled-off chocolate.”

“In New Orleans, people from the post-Katrina world really startle [at the show] and say, ‘You people are grafting your politics onto what happened.’ But [what you see on the show] are their politics, the politics of citizens in New Orleans, the politics of the last five or six years in that city. The reporting is still very careful.”

Jason Zinoman: “Horror isn’t just for perverts and lowbrows anymore. Whether the undead pose a threat to serious art is unclear. What I’m more concerned about is the danger serious art poses to the undead.”