Collected Data
"So every month I’m going to be giving one of my six ebooks away!"
I launched NMK by giving away free ebook versions Angry Young Spaceman. Pre-Kindle and iPhone, people found it baffling. But the gift economy works — it's come back to me in a lot of ways.
No Media Kings Launched 15 Years Ago
"There could be no more cruelly perfect metaphor for the ultra-efficient sorting processes of socioeconomic privilege."
In short, Sesame Street was founded to help low-income kids keep up with their more affluent peers. That is literally why it exists. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And now it is becoming the property of a premium cable network, so that a program launched to help poor kids keep up with rich kids is now being paywalled so that rich kids can watch it before poor kids can.
Why Sesame Street’s Move to HBO Is Both Great and Extremely Depressing
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing sums it up pretty well…
This turn of affairs comes from the austerity brought on by the economic crisis, which has deeply cut the public broadcasters on whom Sesame Street depends. In other words, the richest people in America, having first looted the world's bank-accounts through an act of incredible fraud, and then having benefitted from the bailouts that followed, and then having used the Republican Congress to create tax-breaks and preserve tax-loopholes, have so starved public services in America that programming created specifically to serve poor children must be optimized for the viewing of rich children, and delivered only to the poor children it was intended for after the children of the rich have tired of it.
Watch: "In the Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco"
Jim Emerson;
Wrapping up the series with looks at William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971), Peter Yates' "Bullitt" (1968) and Don Siegel's "The Lineup" (1958).
Watch: "In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)"
A great video essay by Jim Emerson.
A (very) detailed look at the first part of a famous TDK car/truck chase sequence, analyzing how it is put together and whether the filmmaking grammar makes sense.
You can read a transcript here.
"All of that tracking and data collection is done without your knowledge, and — critically — without your consent."
"It certainly seems to be keeping their makers (“architects” feels like a more accurate term than “creators”) from any sense of joy"
When, in the space of three months, all three movies in a genre arrive with very public news that they are not the movies they could have been, something has gone wrong. There is, I think, an increasing sense that every mark the comic-book genre is forced to hit — origin stories, Easter eggs, big-picture continuity, action beats, fan service, world-stakes battles, potential sequels, post-credit sequences — is obstructing them from being movies.
The ‘Fantastic Four’ Fallout: The Future of Comic-Book Franchises
Watch: "Chaos Cinema Parts 1 - 3" by Matthias Stork
The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire's journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound.
"This has been coming for a long time"
This is just the first shot in a new system of distribution that has been building for quite a while; I’m really surprised it has taken traditional media this long to notice that frankly, they’re in long term trouble. There’s no way this trend is turning around, and what happens next is -as far as I can see- that Netflix gets bigger and bigger, and traditional media becomes less and less relevant to millennials.
A Bad Day For Traditional Media
“The government had constantly denied that Canada was involved in spying or espionage,” Macadam said in one of a series of phone interviews. “I thought it was important to find out if we were.”
Rather than arouse suspicion by coming at the Canadian establishment directly, they chose to begin their investigation in the United States. “I think the fact that I was American may have helped,” Dubro admitted over the phone in a thick Bostonian accent. “Once we stumbled on [the Ramparts interview], we started throwing the CBNRC into questions with US intelligence people. And they, stupidly, would tell us more.”
When Canada Learned It Had Spies
movies4machines