movies

Spielberg on the theater experience

There’s nothing like going to a big dark theater with people you’ve never met before, and having the experience wash over you.

Steven Spielberg, quoted in Chaim Gartenberg’s coverage of his speech at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards. Amusingly, according to Gartenberg, Spielberg has nothing against the streaming industry, he just really loves the theater experience and worries about what might happen to it. Still, it’s hard not to imagine the filmmaker being a little bit swayed by the talk of Hollywood irrelevance in the face of Netflix.

Brick

I just popped in The Constant Gardener (trailer) and discovered the preview for Brick. And even though I want to see almost every movie previewed for me, I really want to see this movie. The Constant Gardener, by the way, is good too. brick, movie, movies, preview, the constant gardener, trailer » about 100 words

Criticism of Modern Movies

We’ve all heard it before, but we just can’t get it out of our heads. Today’s movies make us feel dumb. Paulina Borsook joins the chorus and condemns contemporary cinema by praising movies of the 60s and 70s:

They were movies made for adults, even if they had been mainstream movies and/or nominally rated PG. They made presumptions about the intelligence of their audience, didn’t need things to be boldly spelled out, and they were predicated on the assumption that their audience was capable of making inferences. No semaphoring! No high-concept! Satire as opposed to scatology! Shades of gray in motive and character! Minimum numbers of car crashes! No fish out of water! No hilarious mixups!

Interestingly, she also found praise for The Interpreter:

The female characters didn’t simper, and didn’t seem like 30 going on 13 (hey, wasn’t there…). They were about themselves, subject rather than object.

The male characters had interior lives that made them seem human, creatures capable of emotional nuance.

So what else does she recommend? She’s made a list. Interestingly, all of this appears at GreenCine.com, a Netflix competitor I’d not heard of before it got a recommendation at O’Grady’s PowerPage.

Bad Movie, Verboten Subject?

I’m embarrassed to be in the middle of Fantasy Mission Force, a kung fu movie that demonstrates a brand of Asian humor that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate. I’m watching it because I’m a sucker for Jackie Chan flicks and Netflix makes it too easy to queue up bad movies. David Chute wrote the […] » about 400 words

Stay Free!: Copyright Activists

The are few things as joyus as the excitement of discovery, so it was a great pleasure to learn that Stay Free! Magazine has a new blog: Stay Free! Daily. The blog has a number of stories about intellectual freedom and copyright oppression that resonated with me. Take a look at Silent Disobedience, Christo’s policy […] » about 500 words