Category: media

“Actors are now taking a more active role in bringing to life their characters in video game spin-offs. This growing trend is a sign that the world of video gaming is starting to enter the mainstream.”

As Chinese authorities continue their furious protests over the Aug. 8 appearance of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer at the Melbourne International Film Festival (where a documentary on her is being shown), three more Chinese-language films have been removed from the festival program. Two films had been withdrawn already, including one by Venice Film Festival winner Jia Zhangke.

“When you consider the concept of vampirism, it is inherently part of a Western culture. And also Catholicism is also part of the Western tradition that comes into Korea. So you can say also that my film [Thirst] is about things that are coming from the outside entering in, such as this virus that enters into the priest, changing him [into a vampire]. So we’re looking at things from the exterior entering into the interior and whether our inside can accept this thing that has entered from the outside or whether it will reject it.”

“You’ll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that ‘we had to burn the village to save it.’ … If I am being a little tough on the museum, and I know I am, it’s because their reasons for doing what they’ve just done seem especially specious. LACMA’s thinking may seem just fine in the abstract but it doesn’t hold up under any kind of examination.”

“Most filmgoers focus on the acting, dialogue, costumes, even the soundtrack, before noticing the many sounds also required to create and sustain a mood. Yet, says [sound designer Jane Tattersall], it’s those background details that can make or break the moment. If she gets them right, her skill is essentially unnoticed; if she gets them wrong, she ruins many months, maybe years, of others’ hard work.”

“David Cronenberg’s next film looks set to be an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis, about a multibillionaire fund manager who spends a long day trying to get across Manhattan in a swanky stretch limo and ends up losing everything.”

“Worried you’ll blink and miss a crucial piece of the action? Then you can relax. While watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important. And because we tend to watch films in a similar way, moviegoers often blink in unison, researchers find.”

“Cinéphiles everywhere greeted with alarm the news this February that Cahiers du Cinéma, the most venerable film magazine in the world, had been sold to the English art publisher Phaidon. … No other magazine has proved so extravagantly, and for so long, that film criticism can be vital to filmmaking. Last week’s announcement that Phaidon had appointed Stéphane Delorme as the new editor quieted anxieties.”

“For four decades, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has fed film aficionados a steady diet of movie classics – retrospectives that included works from Roman Polanski, Cary Grant, Ernst Lubitsch and, in a current series, James Mason. But the museum’s weekend film program was losing both money and its audience, and LACMA said Tuesday that it was pulling the plug on its cinematic centerpiece.”

“Imagine a world in which 85 percent of the people are male and 80 percent are white. A world in which women and members of other races are a token presence, with most assuming passive, subsidiary roles. Corporate America, circa 1950? Try the present-day world of video games.”