Columns
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Load & Play
12 O’Clock Boys Oscilloscope Laboratories — Aug. 5 Lotfy Nathan’s debut documentary gets up close and unsentimental with preteen Pug, whose only dream is to join the title crew of Baltimore’s weekend motorbike and four-wheeler riders. It’s a physically dangerous spectacle and a law-baiting traffic hazard for the city, but in Nathan’s NFL Films-style super-slow-mo it’s also a majestic procession and one-day release from systemic economic inequity and urban racial division. 12 O’Clock Boys sets four years of Pug’s life against the danger and thrill of his stunting idols’ most questionably liberating processions. — Vadim Rizov Under the Skin Lions […]
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The Last Mile
In the battle between big telecoms and tech companies over the issue of net neutrality, independent filmmakers are inevitably going to be collateral damage. While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hasn’t yet gone forward with plans to allow Internet Service Providers to charge websites for faster service, the current proposals suggest that challenging times are ahead for media makers and companies who use the Web, with potentially higher costs and increased barriers to entry. As Jamie Wilkinson, CEO of digital distribution platform VHX questions, “As the market gets more crowded, will the prices be driven up?” Without the deep pockets […]
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Maine Course
Ready for a big change, back in 1997, I packed up my L.A. apartment, loaded the cat into a pet carrier and hopped on a flight to the East Coast. It was May, and I was joining the team at the Maine Photographic Workshops for the summer to help edit a new publication devoted to toy camera photography. The Workshops were a major advocate of the Diana and the Holga, cheap plastic cameras used by amateurs and pros alike to create unpredictable, often stunning, black-and-white photos. In the tiny plane between Boston and Portland, I tried to ignore my BlackBerry’s […]
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Dispatches from Cannes and LAFF
Cannes Film Festival 2014 by Aaron Hillis Ken Loach. Olivier Assayas. Atom Egoyan. The Dardenne Brothers. The world’s most prestigious film festival may have asked the first-ever female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion, for 1993’s The Piano) to head up the jury, but Cannes’ main competition was disappointingly chock-full of the usual suspects, i.e., older, white male auteurs on a return visit. At least this year’s top honor went to Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose three-hour-plus drama Winter Sleep will be released stateside in time for awards season. The characteristically Chekhovian, uncharacteristically talky epic stars Haluk Bilginer as a […]
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Rewriting with Rapid Prototyping
In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be in Australia traveling the country with a small plush connected toy named Lyka. A robot scientist with a big heart, Lyka is from another planet decimated by climate change. Sent to Earth in a last desperate attempt to save her home, she relies on students to help her travel the globe. Together, the students and Lyka explore Earth as they search for insight that prevents her planet from dying. At its core, Lyka’s Adventure mixes purposeful storytelling and play. The project strives to teach 21st-century skills by utilizing collaborative problem solving, rapid prototyping, […]
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Why Too Many Movies Aren’t Necessarily a Problem
There are too many movies, so says The New York Times, Salon.com and The Wrap. And that’s a bad thing. It’s that old law of supply and demand at work, they argue, with an abundance of titles over-saturating the marketplace and sabotaging the sustainability of the art film business. But some distribution professionals respond with a contrary and more nuanced view. There may be a lot of movies being made in the new millennium, but the ever-expanding entertainment universe is here to sort things out. “It’s like saying there are too many books or too many paintings or too much […]
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Medium Matters
At the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, held in late March in Seattle, many of the conversations and panel discussions revolved around the disciplinary status of cinema, film, media, and screen studies. The cluster of terms jostling for territory in the conference’s program guide points to the crisis of identity sparked by the sweeping expansion of digital media, the emergence of the digital humanities, and the waning of actual film materials – 16mm film stock, film cameras, film editing systems – in “film” schools. “Film has died,” asserts the New School’s McKenzie Wark. “It’s decomposing. But […]
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Gaming the System
Like their counterparts in film and music, game designers love a good award show. This year the International Games Festival awards were swept by a game that had critics raving all year and will surely go down in history as the first game to make suspense and heartache out of pushing papers and cross-checking documents. Lucas Pope, who left blockbuster studio Naughty Dog to go it alone, calls Papers, Please, his first commercially released game, a “dystopian document thriller.” On first glance, documents may seem like an odd center for a thriller of any kind, but then again in this […]
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Editor’s Letter
As we shake off what has been a wretched New York winter, we’re delighted to have Jenny Slate, the brilliant actress, comedian and — for fans of subversive squeaky-voiced animation — the co-creator of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On grace our Spring cover. We picked Slate for our list in 2011, and at that time, one of her accomplishments was starring in a high-wire-act of a short, Obvious Child, by the young director Gillian Robespierre. Now that short has been expanded — brilliantly — into a feature that makes fantastic use of Slate’s ferocious stand-up chops. Made independently, produced […]
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Super 8
1. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace A former associate editor at n+1 whose politicized beat has included everything from localized Occupy movements to contemporary classical music, Nikil Saval turns his attention to office life in his first book. From the origins of corporate discontent in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” through Frederick “Speedy” Taylor’s turn-of-the-century efficiency innovations up to (inevitably) “The Office,” Saval takes on the white-collar workplace from a variety of angles: the changing workspaces themselves, the demographic makeup of the people within them and their pop culture representations. 2. Kimono Kimono scrapes selected information from websites directly, […]
