Over the past year, various reckonings—from continued collective and individual action around #metoo to protests against institutions accepting donations from the Sackler family, Warren B. Kanders and oil giants like BP—that media and arts institutions have gone through have brought the weaponization of cultural capital via art-world philanthropy onto the front pages of newspapers. Meanwhile, in the U.S. documentary film field, the way we’re talking about who holds power and how it’s dispensed has remained narrowly focused. Film festivals have jumped into this fray with public forums, panels and talks at which emboldened filmmakers and a new crop of festival […]
The times, they keep a-changin’. In its immediate aftermath, the story out of Sundance 2019 was its bounteous acquisition market and record-setting sales numbers—from New Line’s $15 million purchase of Blinded by the Light to Amazon Studios’ $27 million splurge on Late Night and Brittany Runs a Marathon. By the summer, a different narrative began to emerge. While these top acquisition titles earned millions of dollars at the box office, they all still under-performed in theatrical release. Then, Amazon Studios’ veteran head of theatrical distribution Bob Berney left the company, a departure that potentially signaled shifting priorities at what had […]
Bong Joon-ho’s class warfare thriller Parasite has already entered the food film canon, and its signature entrée sits in the dead center of the highbrow-lowbrow matrix. Jjapaguri (translated as “ram-don” in the subtitles) is a mashed-up concoction of two different types of instant noodles: jjapaghetti (an abridged version of the Chinese-Korean black bean noodle dish, jjajangmyun) and Neoguri (a brand of packaged spicy seafood udon). The dish is prepared in just under eight minutes in Parasite, as the wealthy Park matriarch, on the way home from a cancelled family camping trip, calls in an order to her new housekeeper. Against […]
Pedro Costa will not separate films from how they are made. We cannot escape that “how” from what we are seeing on screen, so we must make films the hard way. It is not enough for us to get them made: We must know our technicians closely, see that they are compensated fairly, ensure that our project is optimized for our tools and that those tools only operate at their zenith. Ease, Costa warns, is the sure sign of a “trap,” that, if succumbed to, will expose one’s work to “bullshit,” a word he does not use lightly. If we […]
Two major anniversaries in digital technology happened in 2019. October 29th marked the fiftieth year since the first message was transmitted via ARPANET, an early network of computers developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and hosted at universities including UCLA and Stanford (where the message was, respectively, sent and received)—a relatively pat and mutually agreed upon milestone for the beginning of the internet as we know it. The other anniversary—the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web—is much less decisive: You might notice people celebrating the thirtieth year of the internet’s most transformative application well into 2021. A quick […]
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