Category: media

“Perel, a famed Belgian cross-cultural psychologist and educator who has written numerous books and given countless talks on the subject of relationships and sexuality, conducts these sessions based on a structural conceit: couples who apply and get accepted are given only one session. There’s a functional purpose to the one-and-done format. The scarcity raises the stakes for the people going into them, incentivizing a need to get as much on the table as soon as they can. The result, when documented, is a concentrated capsule of human drama.” – Vulture

Some film critics now differentiate themselves from amateurs through the practice of Extreme Film Criticism. In it, critics subject themselves to physical, film-related challenges that bear little resemblance to long-form criticism of decades past but would nonetheless intimidate most amateurs. Then they write about it. Landing somewhere between product placement and a fraternity hazing ritual, these pieces constitute a response to major shifts in the landscape of both the news media and the film industry, with serious implications for the life expectancy of criticism as a form, and perhaps for the individual critics themselves. – Los Angeles Review of Books

Top-line figures obscure “hidden secrets” plaguing the film industry. Chief among these is the fact that the average occupancy rate of theaters across the country has hit a new five-year low, at a time when the movie-going of audiences in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities — previously hailed as the driving force of future box office growth — has stagnated. -Variety

Despite a plethora of diverse films competing for Oscar love this year, the Academy largely maintained its traditional point of view, handing out the most nominations to four very male, very white films. The best-picture category can have as many as 10 or as few as five nominees, depending on how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spreads its support. This year there were nine. – The New York Times

While the digital technology that helped create realistic fur in both films is “advancing all the time,” it can’t rescue a flawed approach to a project. “The techniques [you use] can’t do it. All movies are fake. There’s nothing real in them, and the illusion of that world that you’re building is created by the sum total of everything – not just one item in that.” – Variety

When it came to de-aging De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino for The Irishman, the $140 million Netflix production opted for a specific kind of fountain of youth, created from artificial-intelligence software, first-of-its-kind motion-capture technology, and an experimental three-camera rigging system that rendered the Oscar-winning trio of septuagenarian actors as eerily smooth-skinned incarnations of their younger selves. – New York Magazine

In overruling the lower court’s injunction barring Netflix from continuing to stream The First Temptation of Christ, Supreme Federal Court President José Antonio Dias Toffoli said, “One cannot suppose that a humorous satire has the ability to weaken the values of the Christian faith, whose existence is traced back more than two thousand years.” – Yahoo! (AFP)