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johnsonel7

Is politics getting in the way of assessing which films are actually good? | Jessa Crispin | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eeing-important-mediocre-films

politics opinion psychology

shared by johnsonel7 on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • If cinema had the impact on the world that film critics insisted they did in 2019, Joker would have brought about an incel revolution, and Little Women would have ended misogyny.
  • This was the year police departments issued warnings about the possibility of mass shootings at opening-night screenings of Joker, after all. It was a hysteria that built online after film critics saw the movie at festivals and started to complain it somehow “glamorized” or sympathized with violent incels.
  • But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shame people into seeing it as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection. Same with the “dangerous” or “disturbing” moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female co-star Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess). If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous – and implying you might get killed if you go see it – is an attempt to keep people away.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Saudi Arabia has been showing Black Panther in its theaters, too – the first commercially released film to be screened in almost 35 years in this repressive, autocratic regime. And that’s a political victory too. For the repressive, autocratic regime, of course. Because as revolutionary as Black Panther was hailed as being in America, it is ultimately the story of a monarchy triumphing over the challenge presented by a rebellious force. It turns out that it makes for good propaganda for the Saudi monarchy. Oh, the irony.
Javier E

How the Disney Animated Film 'Frozen' Took Over the World : The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...rozen-took-over-the-world.html

hit causes movie hollywood

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations.
  • few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity
  • And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium always—it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.”
  • one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawed—actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them
  • what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely new
  • She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists.
  • the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,”
  • It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedly—and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning.
  • In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance.
  • “A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,”
  • Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.
  • The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story,
  • Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness.
  • And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media.
  • part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.
  • In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent
  • to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.
Javier E

Hollywood Seeks to Slow Cultural Shift to TV - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...slow-cultural-shift-to-tv.html

hollywood movies decline

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.
  • the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.
  • After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”
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  • The weakness in movies has multiple roots. Films, while in theaters, live behind a pay wall; television is free, once the monthly subscription is paid.
  • a collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay
  • But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002,
  • “So, what does that mean for us as a culture?” Ms. Sylte asked of a vacuum that might occur if the better films went away. The hole, Mr. Gazzale said, to whom the question was relayed, would be a large one. “Movies remind us of our common heartbeat,” he said.
anonymous

Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-stajnfeld-hold-me-right.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Her Film on Sex Assault Depicts Her Own and Fuels a #MeToo Moment
  • Danijela Stajnfeld included her account of being assaulted in a film that has led to contentious debate in Serbia and prompted other women to come forward to say they were sexually abused.
  • Her face graced billboards in Belgrade. She appeared regularly in Serbian movies, magazines and television shows
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes
  • The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.
  • In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.
  • “I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.
  • Stajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.
  • She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator
  • Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”
  • While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.
  • A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.
  • In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.
  • Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.
  • “After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”
  • Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.
  • “When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.
  • “I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.
  • But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016
  • Lecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”
  • In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”
  • Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.
  • “Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”
  • When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.
  • “In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.
  • “For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,
  • After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.
  • “Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”
Emily Horwitz

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_OSCARS_FACT_OR_FICTION

historical movies truth fiction

shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.
  • they've caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.
  • And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.
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  • But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?
  • In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)
  • Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."
  • "Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."
  • Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."
  • No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.
  • Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.
  • "This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.
  • Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.
  • Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.
  • Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.
  • have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.
  • screenwriters have a double responsibility: to the material and to the audience.
  • The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.
  • "When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    This article reaffirmed my feelings that we can't trust everything that we see or hear through the media, because it is often skewed to better captivate the target audience. As the article stated, there appears to be a fine line in catering to the attention span of the audience, and respecting the known facts of a given event that is portrayed by a movie.
summertyler

Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...riving-us-apart-after-all.html

technology research sociology social media

shared by summertyler on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park
  • They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers.
  • groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public
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  • the sociologist William H. Whyte
  • The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.
  • affected people’s enjoyment of a public space
  • We could make people happier.
  • Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?
  • Project for Public Spaces
  • time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.
  • studies how digital technology changes our lives
  • summertyler on 07 Mar 15
     
    Human behavior, or sociology, in major areas was filmed and studied in order to get a better understanding of how people used the spaces and how the could be improved.
Javier E

Why Her Is the Best Film of the Year - Christopher Orr - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282544

movie love romance

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Though intimate in scope, Her is vast in its ambition. Every time it seems that Jonze may have played out the film’s semi-comic premise, he unveils an unexpected wrinkle, some new terrain of the mind or heart to be explored. Though the relationship between Theodore and Samantha forms the movie’s central thread, Jonze weaves in a variety of intricate counter-narratives, alternative lenses through which to view his subjects of inquiry:
  • Her is a remarkably ingenious film but, more important, it is a film that transcends its own ingenuity to achieve something akin to wisdom. By turns sad, funny, optimistic, and flat-out weird, it is a work of sincere and forceful humanism.
  • Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—of which Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight. What makes love real: the lover, the loved one, or the means by which love is conveyed? Need it be all three?
Javier E

Son of Saul's László Nemes: 'Our civilisation is preparing for its own destruction' | Film | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...paring-for-its-own-destruction

movie anti-Semitism totalitarian tolerance internet tech destruction western civilization movies superhero social media knowledge psychology

shared by Javier E on 10 May 19 - No Cached
  • László Nemes went to see a superhero movie. He didn’t last long. “I found it unwatchable and false, boring and self-referential, a world of ideal people who don’t behave as humans but more like machines.”
  • such films infantilise viewers in two ways. The plots let them defer responsibility for the fate of the world to demigods; the way they are shot – lots of signposting, everything carefully controlled – offers a false sense of omniscience.
  • “I’ve been extremely saddened by the way cinema has narrowed its language and created an alphabet that’s never been poorer,
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  • “Superhero movies take away mystery because there’s nothing in the shadows. All is revealed. And that’s not how our relationship to the world is, because, unfortunately, you can know only a fraction. So it gives a false impression of our might.”
  • Genre fans must be terrible worriers, he continues; prisoners of “an extreme state of anguish” soothed only by narrative certainty. “Superhero films let people put away their fears. But this ‘saving’ is not very realistic. And if you create only objective films that avoid big questions of life, then we just create machines to eat popcorn.”
  • “Sunset is really about our perception of the world,” shrugs Nemes. “It’s a labyrinth. The audience has to accept confusion as part of the process – and people don’t like that! I have come to understand that it creates major anxiety. But that is the challenge and the promise: to experience the world through the eyes of someone who is not a god. Then you’re not just a popcorn-eating machine, you’re someone for whom this experience can become personal and subjective and meaningful.
  • Antisemitism has always been a barometer to measure the moral temperature of a civilisation, for almost mystical reasons. The Jew can go unseen. They are hard to distinguish and so can be the threat coming from inside. Today, it’s therefore very alarming. Almost like we’re now past a critical point.”
  • “For the first time since I left Hungary I found this oppression of having to adapt my discourse to a sort of well-received set of ideas. It’s extraordinary that internet on a voluntary basis creates a new form of totalitarianism. One that is much more dangerous because people think they are free.
  • Sunset is more than a historical study. It is a warning that sophisticated societies can combust. Actually, it’s a prophecy; Nemes thinks it inevitable that we will follow suit.
  • What can he say, he grins. He’s from Eastern Europe, fatalism is in his blood, Kafta taught him that while humans struggle to build meaningful things, they are also digging their own graves.
  • What has actually got Nemes fretful is, it turns out, computers. They’re making it much, much worse. “We take from our brains so much power and give it to machines,” he says. “It’s unprecedented. Likewise the incredible amount of imagery we’re producing and the fact so much is virtual. We are building a sort of narcissistic image of ourselves through social media that means we perceive people as potential angels. There’s an increasing self-righteousness, and a great moral expectation on human beings I don’t think is realistic. Then there’s a backlash when we realise we can’t meet this ethical standard.
  • “I would love to be wrong, but I really believe that democracy and the internet are not compatible. New technology channels so much of our darkness and we are blind to it. And sometimes the accumulation and spreading of knowledge means people reach a new level of ignorance.”
  • Recently, he says, he has found himself in situations in which communication was impossible. Where he was speaking to people who couldn’t think freely because they had been enslaved by ideologies fed to them by the web. Who believed themselves individuals while reciting mass rhetoric
  • “I really have the feeling that a self-assured civilisation such as ours is preparing our own destruction,” he says. “Even Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, this incredible whirlwind of creativity and positivity, was already longing for its own demise.”
  • “I’ve never been called a white man until recently,” he says. “But now I’m a white guy from eastern Europe who is a Jew. And so I should only speak about such people.
  • “This is fractioning humanity – and it’s actually reverse racism. It works as racism, but cloaks itself in the beautiful, beautiful dress of tolerance. And that’s extremely dangerous.”
sissij

The Wave (2008 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/...The_Wave_(2008_film)

film psychology

shared by sissij on 17 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Ron Jones's "Third Wave" experiment, which took place at a Californian school in 1967. Because his students did not understand how something like national socialism could even happen, he founded a totalitarian, strictly-organized "movement" with harsh punishments that was led by him autocratically. The intricate sense of community led to a wave of enthusiasm not only from his own students, but also from students from other classes who joined the program later. Jones later admitted to having enjoyed having his students as followers. To eliminate the upcoming momentum, Jones aborted the project on the fifth day and showed the students the parallels towards the Nazi youth movements.[3][4]
  • “Therein lies the great danger. It is an interesting fact that we always believe that what happens to others would never happen to us. We blame others, for example the less educated or the East Germans etc. However, in the Third Reich the house caretaker was just as fascinated by the movement as was the intellectual.”[10]
  • sissij on 17 Sep 16
     
    I think this experiment is very interesting because it shows a flaw in human thinking that we are always progressing. However, just like the quote says: "Barbarism is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step." The film "Die Welle", based on this experiment, is also very interesting and worth-watching. --Sissi (Sept 17, 2016)
Javier E

What Eating 40 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day Can Do to You - The New York Times - 0 views

well.blogs.nytimes.com/...s-of-sugar-a-day-can-do-to-you

sugar diet weight loss

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • In “That Sugar Film,” which first had its debut in Australia this year, Mr. Gameau gives up his normal diet of fresh foods for two months to see what happens when he shifts to eating a diet containing 40 teaspoons of sugar daily, the amount consumed by the average Australian
  • The twist is that Mr. Gameau avoids soda, ice cream, candy and other obvious sources of sugar. Instead, he consumes foods commonly perceived as “healthy” that are frequently loaded with added sugars, like low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, health bars and cereal.
  • Mr. Gameau finds that his health and waistline quickly spiral out of control.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • These are the foods with flowers and bees and sunsets on their labels. That’s the whole point of the film. If I had been eating chocolate doughnuts and soft drinks, we know what would have happened to me. But the fact that this happened when I was following the low-fat diet that we’ve all been prescribed for 35 years – that was surprising.
  • What was your diet like before the start of the film? A. I kept away from processed foods as much as I could. I’d have eggs for breakfast. I’d eat healthy fats like avocado, and I’d snack on nuts and a little cheese. I’d have lots of fruits and vegetables and protein sources like fish. I just tried to eat real foods, and I kept it really simple.
  • How did it change during the film? A. I swapped all that for the refined carbohydrates. Cereals, low-fat yogurts and apple juice would be my breakfast instead of eggs and avocado. And lunch would be pasta with pasta sauce, or some vegetables or fish with a teriyaki sauce or some kind of dressing that had added sugars in it.
  • My calorie intake didn’t change. What I was eating before – the avocados and nuts and other foods – are high in calories. So I kept a similar calorie intake. But on the diet with all the added sugars, I was snacking a lot more. I just never felt full, and it was affecting my moods. What I learned was that I was triggering insulin and all sorts of hormones that were trapping fat in my body.
  • I don’t think we should ever demonize one nutrient. But when that one single nutrient is now in 80 percent of all foods, we do need to look at it. This is not just about putting sugar in your tea or coffee. It’s pervaded our entire food supply, and people are having far too much of it. And I think most of those people don’t realize how much they’re having.
  • When I went back to just drinking water and eating food again, the weight dropped, and all my symptoms went away. I think we just need to simplify things. Stick to the perimeter of the supermarket where all the fresh foods are. Buy real foods as much as you can.
Adam Clark

Films For Action - 0 views

www.facebook.com/video.php

ethics Advertising films Presentation

shared by Adam Clark on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 04 Mar 15
     
    "Brandalism is a revolt against corporate control of the visual realm. It is the biggest anti-advertising campaign in world history and it's getting bigger. Starting in July 2012 with a small team in a van, Brandalism has grown tenfold to include teams in 10 UK cities skilled up in taking back space. This film covers the Brandalism takeover in May 2014 which saw the reclamation of over 360 corporate advertising spaces with hand made original art works submitted by 40 international artists."
carolinewren

How movies influence perceptions of brain disorders - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article23081874

movies influence brain

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Blockbusters, from the 2002 action thriller The Bourne Identity to last year’s Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lucy, reinforce pervading misconceptions about how the brain works.
  • “Watching movies about neurological disorders, if they’re done well, I think gives people an appreciation for what the characters may go through,” she says, while films that promote stereotypes “can actually be a little bit more hurtful to people who have those disorders.”
  • this 2003 Disney film offers surprisingly solid insight about a neurological disorder.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Dory, voiced by comedian Ellen DeGeneres, suffers classic symptoms of anterograde amnesia, which is typically associated with damage to the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in encoding memories.
  • the portrayal of the condition is spot on. She has difficulty remembering names and retaining new information, but her condition doesn’t affect her sense of identity.
  • it’s just a perfect example of the neuromyth
  • Jason Bourne, the amnesiac main character of this action flick, exhibits no trouble with short-term memories, but wakes up after suffering an unspecified injury to the brain with no recollection of who he is.
  • explaining that the “double conk” myth – the idea that someone can lose their identity after being hit in the head and regain it after a second blow or psychological trigger – is actually a conflation of two ideas.
  • Identity loss is more closely associated with psychogenic amnesia, an extremely rare and controversial diagnosis, whose origins, some experts believe, may be influenced by culture.
  • This sci-fi action film relies on the conceit that humans only use 10 per cent of their brains.
  • Sure, filmmakers may take artistic licence, she says, but the trouble is many people actually believe we only use a portion of our brains.
  • she notes that due to its success, the film may have inadvertently contributed to the stereotype of the autistic savant – the notion that people with autism excel in a specific area, which, in the case of Hoffman’s character, involved dealing in numbers. In reality, Spiers says, this is very rare.
anonymous

VHS Tapes Are Worth Money - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vhs-tapes.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes?
  • Despite the rise of streaming, there is still a vast library of moving images that are categorically unavailable anywhere else. Also a big nostalgia factor.
  • The last VCR, according to Dave Rodriguez, 33, a digital repository librarian at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., was produced in 2016
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • But the VHS tape itself may be immortal.
  • Today, a robust marketplace exists, both virtually and in real life, for this ephemera.
  • “Hold steady. Price seems fair. It is a Classic.”
  • Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.
  • “The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,”
  • “promised as a giant video store on the internet, where a customer was only one click away from the exact film they were looking for.”
  • “Anything that you can think of is on VHS tape, because, you’ve got to think, it was a revolutionary piece of the media,”
  • “It was a way for everyone to capture something and then put it out there.”
  • preservation
  • “just so much culture packed into VHS,”
  • a movie studio, an independent filmmaker, a parent shooting their kid’s first steps, etc.
  • finds the medium inspirational
  • “some weird, obscure movie on VHS I would have seen at my friend’s house, late at night, after his parents were asleep.
  • “The quality feels raw but warm and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.
  • views them as a byway connecting her with the past
  • from reels depicting family gatherings to movies that just never made the jump to DVD
  • “I think we were the last to grow up without the internet, cellphones or social media,” and clinging to the “old analog ways,” she said, feels “very natural.”
  • “I think that people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,”
  • “So many cultural touch points are rooted there,” Mr. Harris said of the 1980s.
  • It was, he believes, “a time when, in some ways, Americans knew who we were.”
  • Not only could film connoisseurs peruse the aisles of video stores on Friday nights, but they could also compose home movies, from the artful to the inane
  • “In its heyday, it was mass-produced and widely adopted,”
  • She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.
  • Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
  • the first technology that allowed mass, large-scale home media access to films.”
  • Mr. Arrow said that home videos captured on VHS, or taped television programs that contain old commercials and snippets from the news, are particularly insightful in diving into cultural history.
  • “There’ll be a news break, and you’ll see, like: Oh my god, O.J.’s still in the Bronco, and it’s on the news, and then it’ll cut back to ‘Mission Impossible’ or something.”
  • Marginalized communities, Mr. Harris said, who were not well represented in media in the 1980s, benefited from VHS technology, which allowed them to create an archival system that now brings to life people and communities that were otherwise absent from the screen.
  • The nature of VHS, Mr. Harris said, made self-documentation “readily available,
  • people who lacked representation could “begin to build a library, an archive, to affirm their existence and that of their community.”
  • VHS enthusiasts agree that these tapes occupy an irreplaceable place in culture.
  • “It’s like a time capsule,”
  • “The medium is like no other.”
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
anonymous

Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's Detective | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...e-Thinking-Mans-Detective.html

ToK film photography knowledge science

shared by anonymous on 24 Feb 12 - Cached
  • To illustrate the near-impossibility of establishing veracity in photography he engaged in what might seem like a mad, hopeless enterprise: to see whether the cannonballs were initially on the road or placed there—posed for ideological impact. An investigation that involved him going halfway around the world to the Crimea to find the road and subsequently interviewing “shadow experts” on the time of day each photograph might have been shot. As one commenter wrote: “Don’t miss the excursus on the use of albatross eggs to provide the albumen for photo emulsions in early film developing. Or the meditation on Descartes’ Meditations. Or the succinct and devastating deconstruction of deconstructionists’ dim witted view of truth (just because we can’t necessarily know it, they rashly conclude it doesn’t exist). This leads to his critique of the correlative misreading of the film Rashomon [it’s not an ‘all points of view are equally valid’ manifesto] and his desire, expressed in a footnote, for a Rashomon about Rashomon.”
Javier E

Movie Review: Inside Job - Barron's - 0 views

www.barrons.com/...111904502004575562621077193024

psychology economics great recession documentary review

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
  • As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.
  • I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Ferguson replied that their role in subprime mortgages was not very significant, and that in any case their behavior was not much different from that of other capitalist enterprises.
  • We get no inkling that Rajan's views on what made the world riskier, as set forth in his book, veer quite radically from those of Inside Job. They include, as he has written, "the political push for easy housing credit in the United States and the lax monetary policy [by the Federal Reserve] in the years 2003-2005."
  • Rajan, author of Fault Lines, a recent book on the debacle, speaks with special authority to fans of Inside Job. Not only is he in the movie—one of the talking heads speaking wisdom about what occurred—he is accurately presented as having anticipated the meltdown in a 2005 paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" But the things he is quoted as saying in the film are restricted to serving its themes.
  • Yet it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
  • THE STORY RECOUNTED in Inside Job is that principles like safety and soundness were flouted by greedy Wall Street capitalists who brought down the economy with the help of certain politicians, political appointees and corrupt academicians. Despite the attempts and desires of some, including Barney Frank, to regulate the mania, the juggernaut prevails to this day, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
  • This version of the story contains some elements of truth.
  • Text Size Regular Medium Large "A MASTERPIECE OF INVESTIGATIVE nonfiction moviemaking," wrote the film critic of the Boston Globe. "Rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument," opined the New York Times. The "masterpiece" referred to was the recently released Inside Job, a documentary film that focuses on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.
Javier E

What all the critics of "Unorthodox" are forgetting - The Forward - 0 views

forward.com/...s-of-unorthodox-are-forgetting

art reality truth beauty

shared by Javier E on 08 May 20 - No Cached
  • The series has garnered glowing reviews
  • It also has its critical critics
  • both those who have celebrated the series and those who lambasted it are missing something. Something important.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • intelligent assessors of artistic offerings never forget that truth and beauty are not necessarily one and the same. At times they can even diverge profoundly. There is a reason, after all, why the words “artifice” and “artificial” are based on the word “art.”
  • something obvious but all the same easily overlooked. Namely, that art and fact are entirely unrelated
  • Not only is outright fiction not fact, neither are depictions of actual lives and artistic documentaries, whether forged in words, celluloid or electrons
  • A brilliant artistic endeavor that has been a mainstay of college film studies courses is a good example. The 1935 film has been described as powerful, even overwhelming, and is cited as a pioneering archetype of the use of striking visuals and compelling narrative. It won a gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. The New York Times’ J. Hoberman not long ago called it “supremely artful.”
  • And it was. As well as supremely evil, as Mr. Hoberman also explains. The film was Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”
Javier E

Afire Is a Comedy of Manners at the End of the World | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...-christian-petzold-film-review

climate change environment response crisis culture psychology art

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Christian Petzold likes terrible, irreversible events: accidents, suicides, eternal separations. In his melodramas, Petzold has established a fascination with the trope of love lost at the hands of misrecognition. At the crossroads of historical circumstance and feelings of personal guilt and shame, his protagonists carry burdensome secrets, with devastating consequences.
  • His latest film at first appears to diverge from recent work. Set in contemporary seaside Germany, Afire takes a break from the backdrops of extreme repression and deprivation that the director has favored for at least a decade
  • fire is really a slow build to the disaster that Petzold does so well. Only by dint of calamitous events, it seems, can Leon awaken to the reality he resolutely shuts out. The arrival of a forest fire, suddenly overwhelming the plotless plot, seems to satisfy a perverse fantasy grounded in the belief that extremity is required for a life lived fully.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Taking cues from Éric Rohmer’s summertime romantic comedy-dramas, Petzold fills much of the film with routine errands, trips to the beach, and aimless conversations over dinner—scenes of leisure and languor that appear plotless.
  • In Afire, Petzold revisits the question posed in Transit. Does the search for humanity in cataclysm—a pursuit that can take over one’s life—make us, conversely, less human?
  • With the events in the last act of Afire, Leon finally possesses “real experience” of the sort that can rescue him from his solipsistic writing. His writing and conduct outwardly improve at a rapid clip. The newly mature Leon is thoughtful and expansive, yet there is something garish about his transformation at the eleventh hour.
  • The characters of Afire confront a crisis that threatens to vacate all narratives of meaning, and Leon comes out the other end with a feeble text. It’s better than what came before, but can it begin to make sense of what has taken place? This time, the atrocity is not historical but natural, and Petzold is cynical about the redemptive potential of melodrama in an age in which disasters, if still largely caused by human decisions, unfold beyond the grasp of our control. If he wants Leon to scrutinize the stories he tells about himself, the ending of Afire suggests that there is a possibility he finds even more concerning: a future with no stories at all.
dicindioha

Breitbart's James Delingpole says reef bleaching is 'fake news', hits peak denial | Graham Readfearn | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-is-fake-news-hits-peak-denial

climate change

shared by dicindioha on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It takes a very special person to label the photographed, documented, filmed and studied phenomenon of mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef “fake news”.
  • It also helps if you can hide inside the bubble of the hyper-partisan Breitbart media outlet, whose former boss is the US president’s chief strategist.
  • So our special person is the British journalist James Delingpole who, when he’s not denying the impacts of coral bleaching, is denying the science of human-caused climate change, which he says is “the biggest scam in the history of the world”.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
       
      oh dear...
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • When we talk about the reef dying, what we are talking about are the corals that form the reef’s structure – the things that when in a good state of health can be splendorous enough to support about 69,000 jobs in Queensland and add about $6bn to Australia’s economy every year.
  • The Great Barrier Reef has suffered mass coral bleaching three times – in 1998, 2002 and 2016 – with a fourth episode now unfolding. The cause is increasing ocean temperatures.
  • So it seems we are now at a stage where absolutely nothing is real unless you have seen it for yourself,
  • Senator Pauline Hanson and her One Nation climate science-denying colleagues tried to pull a similar stunt last year by taking a dive on a part of the reef that had escaped bleaching and then claiming this as proof that everything was OK everywhere else.
  • Corals bleach when they are exposed to abnormally high ocean temperatures for too long. Under stress, the corals expel the algae that give them their colour and more of their nutrients.
  • After the 2016 bleaching, a quarter of all corals on the reef, mostly located in the once “pristine” northern section, died before there was a chance for recovery.
  • Essentially, the study found the only measure that would give corals on the reef a fighting chance was to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Some commentators have suggested a key cause of the 2016 bleaching was the El Niño weather pattern that tends to deliver warmer global temperatures. But Hughes says that before 1998, the Great Barrier Reef went through countless El Niños without suffering the extensive mass bleaching episodes that are being seen, photographed, filmed and documented now.
  • dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
     
    This frustrates me enormously. When there is evidence of bleaching of the coral and the impact of global warming on this coral, I don't understand how people can say this is fake news. It seems the US, at least, will not be helping fix this problem, but the whole world is at fault for this, and we should be a part of fixing it.
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