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Tag: film

Columns

One Dinner Too Far: Posh and The Riot Club
January 20, 2015
How are we to understand the violence inherent to the possession of wealth? In the mid-seventeenth century the revolutionary Digger Gerard Winstanley called the possession of immense private property the “kingly power” of men over men, the “great red dragon, the god of ...

Hollybaba’s Blockbusters
November 25, 2014
If movies can tell us anything about the internal lives of typical film industry executives, it’s that they like to feel like the most important people in any room, like they’re doing everyone else a favor by granting a meeting. So it takes truly special circumstances to ...

Nightcrawler: Flourishing in the Dark
November 13, 2014
Nightcrawler, a new thriller with a sense of humor by Dan Gilroy, is a recession-era American Psycho. It’s a story that grasps the misery of low wages and lower cunning. Or perhaps it could be described as the Hunger Games of capitalist exploitation, couched in a critique of ...

The Zombie Movie Without Zombies
October 30, 2014
As unlikely as a “zombie apocalypse” remains, earnest discussion of how to prepare for such an event is a long-standing cultural standby. Amid a bloom of supernatural-orientated dramas culled from comics and B-Movies of the 50s, the zombie genre stands out as the most ...

The Lives of Ours: Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour
October 14, 2014
What do an Iraqi doctor-politician, a reformed jihadist who was once Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, and Edward Snowden all have in common? Right now, someone somewhere is saying about all three: They belong in a cage. But not Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker behind a ...

“Payment on an Unpaid Basis”
October 01, 2014
“Payment is on an unpaid basis,” is a sentence that should not exist. It’s a linguistic offense, but also a legal one: zero dollars an hour is well below the minimum wage in all fifty states. Unless the employee is a child working fourteen hours a day on a farm, an ...

Hollywood Hijinks and the Films of Empire
July 01, 2014
As far as international incidents caused by stupid movies go, the North Korean declaration that The Interview, a new film by James Franco and Seth Rogen, is “an act of war” is probably the most newsworthy since The Innocence of Muslims kicked off anti-American riots in the ...

Citizen Koch and the Oligarchic Slide
June 02, 2014
It takes about $99,000 to buy a Democratic congressman. That’s one of the grim factoids we learn in Citizen Koch, the new documentary from directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. That particular insight comes from James Bopp, who would know pay from payola; the conservative boffin ...

Scab Cinema and Pseudo-Reality TV
May 29, 2014
When critics talk about movies or TV shows, they mostly treat them as self-contained texts to be described, interpreted, and “read.” This way of thinking similarly dominates the way most of the audience thinks about the work. If anyone talks about the production side, it is ...

Hollywood’s Love Affair with Surveillance
May 12, 2014
One of the valences of the NSA leaks has been opinionators wringing their hands over the lack of anger and shock. Where’s the anger? The protests? Why are the people so complacent in the face of these revelations? Well, one reason might be that they’re not all that ...

When Separating Art from the Artist Doesn’t Work
February 06, 2014
By now, the lines have been drawn. A disturbing number of responses to Dylan Farrow’s February 1 New York Times blog concerning the alleged sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father, Woody Allen, have run the gamut of rape culture apologias. Her memories ...