Category: media

David Rakoff: “Baron Cohen’s Brüno is a gay minstrel, in the most literal sense of the word. Just as the characters of the burnt-cork vaudevillians had, bound up ineluctably with their dark complexions, traits like being shiftless, lazy, and ‘a-feared of spooks’ as their eyes bugged out in Neanderthal, superstitious terror, Brüno’s homosexuality comes bundled up with a lot of unattractive software.”

Dennis Lim: “Lost amid the dutiful hand-wringing about the movie’s capacity to offend is the rather remarkable fact that it takes on, with unprecedented purpose and directness, some of the most vexing and enduring bugbears surrounding on-screen homosexuality. Herewith, a few old themes and taboos that Brüno has its way with and that, if we’re lucky, will never be the same again.”

“As more movies play in digital 3-D, there’s evidence that audiences are becoming less interested in the ballyhooed format that many in Hollywood have predicted will stem the long-term erosion of theater attendance. … There’s certainly no sure evidence that films are consistently doing better as a result of 3-D.”

“Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread – ‘vignettes’ in the industry vernacular – that can be presented separately online.”

“The music won’t stop for Internet radio after a group of webcasters struck an agreement with SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalties for musicians and record companies, over payments for playing music online. … Tuesday’s settlement allows webcasters to avoid per-song royalty payments that were set in 2007 by a special federal court and that many Internet radio providers said would force them out of business.”

“The interplanetary internet now has its first permanent node in space, aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web … [and] could one day allow data to flow between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts automatically, creating what is being dubbed the ‘interplanetary internet’.”

“We’ve seen the gangster movie as psychological study, love story, social commentary and family drama. It has come in guises as various as the European art film … and the lurid exploitation quickie.” Herewith, “a baker’s dozen of variations on the gangster theme” – gangster as monarch, gangster as comic relief, gangster lovers, ghetto gangstas, yakuza, singing child gangsters …

“Twitter has gained academic respectability with inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary. The social networking tool, which has 1.8 million users, will be listed in the 30th anniversary edition to be published later this year. The website, which allows users to send brief online updates to their friends and family, will [appear] as both a noun and a verb.”

“The problems with our growing fixation on box office figures–they don’t account for costs of the film, they don’t include home-entertainment revenue, etc.–have been chronicled in the past. But as long as we continue to indulge this obsession, shouldn’t journalists at least factor in inflation, instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist?”

“If you want the human embodiment of Hollywood predictability, you can’t do better than Wycliffe A. Hill. A profoundly obscure writer of silent five-reelers, Hill is also the unheralded inventor of something more enduring: the attempt to engineer movies that will bring “the most satisfaction to the largest number of people–the mob, in other words.”