“If Bigelow is not assembling the story, who is? The darkest implication of this is that Zero Dark Thirty takes no stand on the events of the last decade because the sources on which it relies believe that there is no stand to take. Her sources believe that the existence of war is a value-free fact; so this is what Bigelow believes.”
“Bottled and packaged products were sold mainly according to static imagery and rhetorical claims. With the advancing sophistication of the cinematic age, however, we gradually developed a taste for kinesthesia, ending the false dignity of stasis. The famous Heinz commercial, featuring ketchup slowly trickling downward onto a nude meat patty, was our watershed moment, our epiphany.”
Activist & Political · Essays · TV & Streaming
“There was a time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ‘formed as an educational, non-commercial, and public interest alternative to the vast wasteland of commercial networks,’ meant something other than drearily underproduced Anglophone mysteries, self-help seminars for pensioners and forced retirees, staged cooking lessons, cheapjack puppet shows, and various and unspeakable retrenchments of the petit bourgeoisie.”
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
“We become faced with the individuality and humanity of history, the functioning components of a movement. 18 Days translates this reality of individual experience to film, in a sense presenting the audience with 10 YouTube clips of people affected by the revolution, telling their stories.”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
“Peter Greenaway’s theses on the death of cinema perhaps inspired the greatest discussion at the Odessa festival: his insistent repetition that cinema was dead but that the screen is very much alive was received as an interesting provocation but didn’t convince many.”
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.” — C.S. Lewis”Becoming a cyborg is the ultimate goal.” — Kevin Warwick on Singularity Hub
Activist & Political · African American · Reviews
Only white Hollywood would make a mainstream movie where toilets and shit are used as significant tropes to tell a story of black-white relations, as if the topic is right up black folks’ alley.
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” – Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed
Activist & Political · Reviews
“The original industrial accidents as, for instance, the derailment of a train or the crash of an airplane, were all specific, localized, and particular accidents. They were taking place at a certain place and at a certain moment in time. Now, however, the revolution of instantaneous transmissions brought about by telecommunications makes the accident global.” — Paul Virilio
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence.”
A Final Statement of the Obvious
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
“Veering away from jingoistic portrayals of ‘us’ and the ‘Other,’ these films advocate instead a complex and globally entwined future of hybrid identities along with critical consideration of the political and cultural consequences of advanced technology.”
Activist & Political · Reviews
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (73)
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise than joining the enthusiasts of self-empowerments’ call “to just wish it.”
“How do you get a “Headstart” program going that isn’t about implanting early entrepreneurial ambitions in toddlers but one that gets a head start on that sort of brain ownership? More difficult: How do you develop a resistance to such ownership by the surround we are born into without falling into the illusions of an individual will-to-power?”
Activist & Political · Essays · New Media
“For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.” —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
“For a brief week or two, adventurous filmgoers can capture elusive truths found in works of complexity, moral ambiguity, and seriousness of purpose, all uncensored.”
