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New York Film Festival Gives New Life to 'The Spook Who Sat by the Door' - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...spook-who-sat-by-the-door.html racism anti-racism movie film history culture
shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • There are movies whose back stories and reception histories are as compelling as the movies themselves. “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” is one.
  • Directed by Ivan Dixon, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was adapted from a best-selling novel by Sam Greenlee that, according to its author, was rejected by nearly 40 American publishers before it was brought out by a British house in 1969.
  • The novel was a thriller, but Greenlee — a veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service — used it as an exposé of institutional racism. “Spook” is both a racial slur and a slang term for spy; seated “by the door” suggests a person hired for show.
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  • Both the novel and the film, which Greenlee produced with Dixon, concern an apparently docile Black C.I.A. employee with the allegorical name Dan Freeman. Recruited as a public relations gesture, Freeman plays the long game, using what he has learned at the agency to mastermind an guerrilla war in Chicago.
  • Racial solidarity is the movie’s subject and the project’s DNA. Not only did Greenlee raise money from Black investors and get a fellow Chicagoan, Herbie Hancock, to write the score, he was able to use Gary, Ind., one of the first large American cities to elect a Black mayor, as a stand-in location for Chicago, thus enjoying the cooperation of the municipal authorities for powerful riot scenes.
  • The white characters (mainly male authority figures) are fools, brutes, knaves and patronizing liars. The Black ones are also stereotyped but given greater depth. The movie suggests a live-action animated cartoon in which the whites have two dimensions and the Blacks have three.
  • if “Spook” is a cartoon, it’s one animated by the ideas of the radical psychiatrist and champion of decolonization Frantz Fanon.
  • The movie is an analog to anti-imperialist films like “The Battle of Algiers,” albeit in the guise of a blaxploitation cheapster
  • after three weeks in release, during which F.B.I. agents hounded exhibitors to pull the film, UA withdrew it from circulation, citing poor box office grosses.
  • Spook” brought in $270,000 during its abortive run.)
  • White America was spooked. The movie was blamed for serving as a Black Panthers textbook and for inspiring the Symbionese Liberation Army
  • Historically, it can be bracketed with two earlier, highly successful independent productions — “Putney Swope,” a 1969 absurdist comedy by the white director Robert Downey in which an African-American takes charges of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles’s groundbreaking celebration of a Black outlaw,
  • unlike “Swope,” “Spook” is something other than hip satire and, as opposed to “Sweetback,” it did not lend itself to recuperative commercialization.
  • “Spook” may be a eulogy, but the most shocking thing about this unquiet movie is how relevant it remains.
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'Letter to Afar': Pre-Holocaust Home Movies from Poland - 0 views

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shared by Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    Within the past week, a collection of movies amateur movies have been discovered. While they would typically be seen as insignificant and irrelevant to our lives today, these home movies come from American Jews that returned to their hometowns in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. These videos evoke unsettling emotions, as most of the relatives in these movies were soon after slaughtered in killing camps of Nazi-occupied Poland.
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Kathryn Bigelow: Not A Torture Apologist - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • , a brilliant piece of film-making. The direction, acting, and cinematography make it as good as The Hurt Locker. The attention to detail is stunning, and the raw, granular honesty of its dialogue manages to avoid the tired tropes of action movies. It's entirely believable.
  • the film shows without any hesitation that the United States brutally tortured countless suspects - innocent and guilty - in ways that shock the conscience.
  • The acts that Lynndie England was convicted for are here displayed - correctly - as official policy, ordered from the very top. In that way, the movie is not an apology for torture, as so many have said, and as I have worried about. It is an exposure of torture
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  • it exposes the Biggest Lie of the Bush-Cheney administration: that Abu Ghraib was an exception, and not the rule. What was done to suspects in Abu Ghraib was actually less grotesque, less horrifying, and less shocking than what Bush and Cheney ordered the CIA to do to human beings directly.
  • The movie also depicts waterboarding in a way that destroys the pathetic defense that this wasn't torture, because the tortured were not asked direct questions during it. They were, of course. Torture was followed by interrogation which was followed by more grisly torture. There is no doubt here that what the US did was almost a text-book definition of war crimes.
  • It shows the horror of terrorism and then the horror of the torture that Cheney illegally used to respond to it.
  • the simple juxtaposition of terror with torture in the film does not force an obvious conclusion. In some ways, like Spencer, I think it reveals the core truth behind Cheney's armchair warrior mindset. The torture was not for intelligence (and it provided nothing reliable as well as countless leads that were dead ends). It was for revenge.
  • What the movie also shows - importantly - is the evil of Jihadism, and its fanatical religious roots. It shows the terrorism as well as the torture. The easy view that all of this torture was based on hallucinatory threats is rebutted.
  • this movie echoes what we are told the Senate Intelligence Committee report concludes. We got bin Laden when we stuck to Western values. When we acted like the Nazis or the Communists, we failed.
  • It may be that many people watching this movie will actually believe the torture was integral to the end-result. But that will be because they want to see that or because they are as dumb as Owen Gleiberman. It isn't there. And if they want to see that, they will also be forced, at least, to own the barbarism depicted on screen in a way that euphemisms like "sleep deprivation", "stress positions" and "enhanced interrogation" were designed to obscure.
  • But my view is that Americans were shielded by their government and, disgracefully, their press, into living with barbarism - because Orwellian language was used and propagated to disguise the true evil that was at the heart of the Cheney mindset.
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Regal Cinemas To Reopen Its Theaters In April : NPR - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Regal Cinemas will reopen its theaters in the U.S. in April, six months after they closed amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.The reopening plans were announced by parent company Cineworld Group on Tuesday. Cineworld intends to reopen its theaters in the U.K. in May. Regal has more than 7,000 movie screens in 536 theaters in the United States.
  • The theaters' reopening will coincide with a couple of big-ticket movie openings: Godzilla vs. Kong on April 2 and Mortal Kombat on April 16.
  • Cineworld also announced a multiyear deal with Warner Bros. Pictures Group in the U.S. that will guarantee a period of exclusivity for movies in theaters before being released more widely, starting in 2022. But in 2021, Warner Bros.' new movie releases — including Godzilla vs. Kong and Mortal Kombat — will also be available to stream on HBO Max.
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  • Other companies, including Comcast NBCUniversal and Disney, opted last year to release films directly to online streaming as theaters were closed.Movie theater revenues were battered by the pandemic. A number of big movies have been delayed from 2020 or early 2021 openings, including Dune, Jurassic World: Dominion and the next James Bond installment, No Time to Die.
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The Politics of 'The Shallows' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ics-of-the-shallows-1475192583 reading superficial internet culture media movies books history politics
shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • What impact has the modern media environment had on the 2016 campaign?
  • modern media realities make everything intellectually thinner, shallower. Everything moves fast; we talk not of the scandal of the day but the scandal of the hour, reducing a great event, a presidential campaign, into an endless river of gaffes.
  • This year I am seeing something, especially among the young of politics and journalism. They have received most of what they know about political history through screens.
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  • they have seen the movie and not read the book.
  • Their understanding of history, even recent history, is superficial. They grew up in the internet age and have filled their brainspace with information that came in the form of pictures and sounds. They learned through sensation, not through books, which demand something deeper from your brain
  • Reading forces you to imagine, question, ponder, reflect. It provides a deeper understanding of political figures and events.
  • A movie is received passively: You sit back, see, hear. Books demand and reward. When you read them your knowledge base deepens and expands. In time that depth comes to inform your work, sometimes in ways of which you’re not fully conscious.
  • In the past 18 months I talked to three young presidential candidates—people running for president, real grown-ups—who, it was clear to me by the end of our conversations, had, in their understanding of modern American political history, seen the movie and not read the book.
  • Two of them, I’ve come to know, can recite whole pages of dialogue from movies. (It is interesting to me that the movies our politicians have most memorized are “The Godfather” Parts I and II.)
  • Everyone in politics is getting much of what they know through the internet, through Google searches and Wikipedia. They can give you a certain sense of things but are by nature quick and shallow reads that link to other quick and shallow reads.
  • Sometimes subjects are treated in a tendentious manner, reflecting the biases or limited knowledge of the writer.
  • If you get your information mostly through the Web, you’ll get stuck in “The Shallows,” which is the name of a book by Nicholas Carr about what the internet is doing to our brains
  • Media, he reminds us, are not just channels of information: “They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”
  • The internet is chipping away at our “capacity for concentration and contemplation.” “Once I was a scuba driver in the sea of words,” writes Mr. Carr. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
  • If you can’t read deeply you will not be able to think deeply. If you can’t think deeply you will not be able to lead well, or report well.
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Antony Beevor: the greatest war movie ever - and the ones I can't bear | Film... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-ever-and-the-ones-i-cant-bear war movie History
shared by Javier E on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • recent imitators lack all intellectual honesty. They throw dates and place names on to the screen as if what you are about to see is a faithful reproduction of events, when they are simply trying to pass off their fiction as authentic. This is basically a marketing ploy that has developed over the last 20 years or so.
  • Unfortunately, fake authenticity sells. People are more likely to want to see something they think is very close to the truth, so they can feel they are learning as well as being entertained.
  • In a post-literate society, the moving image is king, and most people’s knowledge of history is regrettably based more on cinematic fiction than archival fact.
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  • His great line was: “But Antony, who can tell where myth begins and truth ends?
  • The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible.
  • Hollywood has to simplify everything according to set formulae. Its films have to have heroes and, of course, baddies – moral equivocation is too complex. Feature films also have to have a whole range of staple ingredients if they are to make it through the financing, production and studio system to the box office.
  • One element is the “arc of character”, in which the leading actors have to go through a form of moral metamorphosis as a result of the experiences they undergo. Endings have to be upbeat, even for the Holocaust. Look at Schindler’s List and the sentimentality of its finale, revealing that in movies only the survivors count.
  • I still shake my head in disbelief when it is regularly voted the best war movie ever. It is nevertheless a work of intriguing paradoxes – some intended, others not. Steven Spielberg’s storyline rightly dramatises the clash between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival. Those mutually contradictory values are, in many ways, the essence of war.
  • After a truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic
  • Amid the horror of war, Spielberg seems to be trying to rediscover American innocence, that Holy Grail that existed only in the Rousseau-esque imagination yet was virtually incorporated into the constitution
  • Spielberg, like other Hollywood directors of the time, came from a generation scarred by the moral quagmire of Vietnam. He understood the national need, in the post-cold war chaos, to reach back to more certain times, seeking reassurance from that moment in history – the second world war – when the fight seemed unequivocally right.
  • This representative of American motherhood appears to be reassuring the US as a whole. She seems to be speaking to a nation unable at that time to come to terms with its role in a disordered world, to a nation that, for all its power, can be bewilderingly naive abroad because it so badly needs to feel good about itself at home.
  • Andrew Marr rightly called The Patriot, set in the American war of independence, “a stinker”. As he pointed out: “Black Americans, in fact destined to stay slaves thanks to the war, very many of whom enlisted with the British, are shown fighting shoulder to shoulder with their white rebel ‘brothers’. The British are portrayed as effete sadists and serial war criminals, just as in other American films. The huge support of the Bourbon French, who helped win the war, is airbrushed out. And the fact that most colonists actually sided with King George is airily forgotten.”
  • a national self-image certainly existed during the war and for some time afterwards. Perhaps that is partly why I do not react so angrily when watching films of that era. Also, they never used that weasel claim “based on a true story”
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U.S. Lawmakers Suggest 25 Movies About Latinos to the Film Registry - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By diversifying the films added to the national registry, members of Congress hope that more opportunities will open up for Latinos in Hollywood.
  • The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is continuing work it started in January, when it nominated the movie “Selena” for the National Film Registry, with a list of 25 more films it would like to see the registry add.The movies nominated by the caucus last week are from as early as 1982, and they also include films like “Spy Kids” (2001), a comedy featuring a Latino family, and “Frida” (2002), an Oscar-winning movie about the artist Frida Kahlo. The registry typically adds new movies in December.
  • Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States, at 18.5 percent of the population. But they continue to be underrepresented in films and on television. A 2019 study from the University of Southern California’s School for Communication and Journalism found that only 4.5 percent of all speaking characters across 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2018 were Latino.
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  • “It is an important way to influence that diversity effort in an industry,” Delgadillo said about the caucus’s effort.She and other professors, though excited about the effort, were also critical of the list, because, they say, there were few stories about Latinas and L.G.B.T.Q. people.
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'Dear White People,' About Racial Hypocrisy at a College - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • “Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.
  • “Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.
  • Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy.
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Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss. - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss.
  • Are these the whitest Oscar nominations ever? Or just the most recent Academy Award whiteout? For the second year in a row, the nominations failed to recognize any minority actors.
  • The black directors of each movie along with their nonwhite actors were shut out
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  • Last year, Vin Diesel boldly predicted that “Furious 7” would win the Academy Award for best picture, “unless Oscars don’t want to be relevant, ever.”
  • s “the economy of prestige”
  • done a reasonably good job of recognizing black talent, belatedly making up for decades of neglect. “12 Years a Slave” won best picture.
  • whiteness of this year’s field of nominees exposes not only the myopia of the nominating body but also the deep structural biases of the industry that feeds it.
  • I love that so many people are enraged at this year’s whiteout — anyone who yells at the Academy is a friend of mine — but I wish that this anger was being expressed 365 days a year and not when the nominations are announced
  • I mean, half of me really doesn’t care. There’s obviously a serious problem with regard to race, sexuality and gender in Hollywood. B
  • . The Oscars aren’t full-time jobs. To hear some voters talking about this time of year, it sounds like tax season or exam tim
  • In the case of both “Creed” and “Compton,” I just don’t think the campaigns were there for these movies. Just as I don’t think they were there for “Selma” the previous year.
  • But I don’t want to let the Academy and its members off the hook. Or rather, I want to broaden the indictment beyond the specific complaints that they ignored Mr. Elba, “Creed,” “Straight Outta Compton” and Will Smith’s excellent Nigerian accent in “Concussion.”
  • I think it’s when you get to that one that race sneaks back into the picture. The Academy, in its function as the culture industry’s upholder of the ideology of Quality, has for a long time been open to African-American talent and even eager to promote and reward it.
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Jordan Peele Is the New Master of Suspense - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...master-of-suspense-11551708118 comedy suspense race exploitation culture movies
shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Peele draws a straight line from his past, conducting laughs, to his present, conducting dread: “People who have done live comedy and who have written comedy develop a real sense of how an audience is going to react. It’s a skill that continues to sharpen, and in my directing career, it’s left me obsessed with riding the audience like a wave.”
  • “I do like to give the audience enough to figure it out, if they were to watch the movie enough, but I feel similarly to David Lynch in that I don’t think the audience needs to know everything. The key for me, as a director, is that I need to know everything, because the audience can sense it if I don’t. The beauty of Lynch’s work is that you can leave fulfilled and, at the same time, clueless as to what it was about.”
  • Peele wants social critiques to intertwine with his scares. “When you look at the great horror directors—George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Alfred Hitchcock—they’re all talking about something without talking about it,
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  • Peele repeatedly explained how the notion of a post-racial America, which circulated around the 2008 election, struck him as part of a destructive national mind-set of denial. “The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race. With this one, I asked myself, ‘What are we not ready to talk about now?’ And the answer for me was, ‘What is my part in this mess?’
  • “We’re living in a messy time,” he continues. “A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, What if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.”
  • By the time he dropped out of Sarah Lawrence he’d become hyperliterate in horror and, simultaneously, obsessed with improv comedy. In both idioms, he has addressed complex questions about race, such as what it means to be authentically black—a question with particular resonance to a kid whose own dad once asked him why he “talked white.”
  • in Us. Rather than another meditation on race, Peele says, he wanted to explore questions of economic privilege, training his lens on an upper-middle-class American family that happens to be black.
  • “There’s this idea that we deserve our privilege,” Peele says, “but when someone enjoys privilege, there almost has to be someone suffering so you can have that. Which means it’s not deserved. It’s violent. In this country we shield ourselves from the people who make our shoes. The people who have to work three jobs. The people we’ve murdered to build over. The wars that have happened so that we can have what we have. If we really acknowledge our place in the world, we have to acknowledge the atrocities, even if we’re not active members in them.”
  • I observe that Peele has just paraphrased Marx’s theories of alienation in describing a potential Hollywood blockbuster, and he doesn’t miss a beat: “The Tethered are wearing red.”
  • “I can watch Us, just like I watched Get Out, and learn what I’m trying to say to myself,” he says. “You never make a film and know what you were doing entirely.”
  • Peele says that, in Hollywood, “the presumption used to be that a successful story is about someone who looks and feels like the audience. With the majority population being white, why would you make a movie with a protagonist of a different race than where your money is? It was a failure of imagination. Black people always saw white movies—because we had to! But also because when a story works, you see yourself in it no matter who you are.”
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What Oppenheimer really knew about an atomic bomb ending the world - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • In a chilling, existential, bizarrely comic moment, the new movie “Oppenheimer” revives an old question: Did Manhattan Project scientists think there was even a minute possibility that detonating the first atomic bomb on the remote plains of New Mexico could destroy the world?
  • physicists knew it wouldn’t, long before the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range, about 210 miles south of the secret Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory.
  • “This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The question on the scientists’ minds before the test, he said, “wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”
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  • In the movie, one scene has J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory, seeking to reassure his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, on the eve of the test. Upon investigation, Oppenheimer tells him, physicists have concluded that the chances the test detonation will destroy the world are “near zero.” Realizing the news has alarmed, not reassured, the general, Oppenheimer asks, “What do you want from theory alone?”“Zero would be nice,” the general replies.
  • no physicists or historians interviewed for this story recalled coming across any mention of such a conversation between Oppenheimer and the general in the historical record.
  • “Did the actual exchange happen at that moment? No, I don’t think so,” said Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and author of the 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”“But were there discussions like that? I believe so,” he added.
  • At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.
  • “I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.
  • Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test. In 1946, three Manhattan project scientists, including Teller, who would later become known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote a report concluding that the explosive force of the first atomic bomb wasn’t even close to what would be required to trigger a planet-destroying chain reaction in air. The report was not declassified until 1973.
  • A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.
  • Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.
  • Dudley’s essay also recounted a story that on the day of the test, “as zero hour approached” Gen. Groves was annoyed to find Manhattan Project physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi making bets with colleagues about whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico ― or the entire world.” (Some experts have suggested Fermi’s actions may have been more of a joke, or an example of gallows humor.)
  • Fascination with this doomsday scenario may stem, at least in part, from a misunderstanding of what physicists mean when they say “near zero.” The branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, which deals with matter and light at the atomic and subatomic scale, does not rule out any possibilities.
  • For example, if a boy tosses a rubber ball at a brick wall, there is an exceedingly remote — but still valid — possibility that instead of watching the ball bounce back, he could see it pass through the wall.
  • Aditi Verma, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, put it this way: “What a physicist means by ‘near zero’ would be zero to an engineer.”
  • In the 2000s, scientists encountered a similar problem of terminology as they prepared to generate high-speed particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Talk surfaced that the activity might generate a black hole that would devour Earth.
  • As outlandish as the notion was to many scientists, the nuclear research organization CERN felt obliged to deal with the fear, noting on its website that “some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe.”
  • In other words, any black hole created by the collider would be far too small to pose any risk to the planet.Scientists say such disaster scenarios are sometimes the price of crossing new thresholds of discovery.
  • “You don’t often talk in certainties,” he said. “You talk in probabilities. If you haven’t done the experiment, you are hesitant to say ‘This is impossible. It will never happen.’ … It was good to think it through.”
  • Rhodes added that he hopes the “Oppenheimer” movie will not lead people to doubt the scientists on the Manhattan Project.“They knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were not feeling around in the dark.”
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Opinion | Why Barbie and Ken Need Each Other - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...barbie-ken-ideology.html partnerships partner couples happiness male female marriage feminism patriarchy
shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2010s, in their responses to the General Social Survey, American women reported themselves to be steadily unhappier. The trend was not drastic, but it was consistent: Women were less happy in the 1980s than they were in the 1970s, less happy in the Obama era than the Clinton era, and still less happy under Trump.
  • For men, the trend was more complex. They started out slightly unhappier than women and then made gains in the Reagan and Clinton years, while female happiness declined. But then male unhappiness plunged between the 9/11 era and Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, before stabilizing a bit thereafter. By the pre-Covid period, the sexes were close to parity — sharing more reported unhappiness than either had been experiencing 30 or 40 years before.
  • These figures are drawn out of a fascinating new paper, “The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” from the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman
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  • a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.
  • Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.
  • the simplest possible explanation for declining happiness: For women maybe first, and for men too, eventually, less wedlock means more woe.
  • Barbieland itself is a female-first utopia that looks fundamentally dystopian — plastic, denatured, death-denying, cut off from love and procreation. The way that Barbiedom marginalizes images of pregnancy and motherhood, to say nothing of literal baby dolls, is a running preoccupation of the film
  • Is the Greta Gerwig movie proudly feminist, crypto-conservative or somewhere in between?
  • The simplest reading is the feminist one. The movie depicts a dolltopia where Barbies occupy every important job and office (with their Kens as arm candy) and tell themselves that their example has solved all of women’s problems in the real world, too — only to discover, when Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” goes on a quest into our own contemporary reality, that sexism still exists, the patriarchy is disguised but maybe still resilient, the board of Mattel is proudly “feminist” but all male, and early 21st-century women are being asked to do it all for meager recompense.
  • Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire claims, “conservative, anti-feminist, pro-family, pro-motherhood” themes
  • In part, the conservative spin comes from the sheer fun of Gosling’s performance
  • I want to talk about these findings in the light of the running debate about the true ideological perspective of the billion-dollar box-office juggernaut “Barbie.”
  • Ken’s plight is treated sympathetically — he’s mostly running his coup to impress Barbie, and what are men for in the post-sexual-revolution landscape, anyway?
  • Barbie’s own arc is away from the female-dominated dystopia and back toward embodied womanhood, the real world with all its patriarchal holdovers
  • “Barbie” is a movie with a feminist default, but also complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done and where feminism ought to go.
  • It’s against the resilient patriarchy, but wary of the girlboss alternative
  • It wants womanhood and motherhood, but it doesn’t want the Kens back in charge, and it doesn’t really know what purpose men should serve.
  • In each narrative, the one way that the current dissatisfactions of women and men can’t be resolved is with the happy ending that even stories about the battle of the sexes used to take for granted — not a rearrangement of political power but a romantic partnership, not one sex’s rule but both sexes’ contentment.
  • so the movie ends — again, spoiler — with Barbie out of Barbieland but on her own, seeking out some sort of reproductive destiny at the gynecologist with a mother-daughter cheerleading squad beside her and no Ken in sight.
  • There’s an interesting parallel to the ending of Lena Dunham’s series “Girls,”
  • A guy can literally organize a revolution and it still isn’t enough to make Barbie see him as a lover, a romantic partner, an erotic object, a husband or a father.
  • In the movie they made, “Barbie and Ken” is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that “and” into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.
10More

Lone Survivor's Takeaway: Every War Movie Is a Pro-War Movie - Calum Marsh - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282812
shared by B Mannke on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The point of this sequence, it seems, is to show how exceptional the real-life SEALs are before introducing SEALs as characters. With soldiers’ conviction and might thus demonstrated, the film can then whisk a few of them off on a mission that, as the title suggests, does not end particularly well.
  • Many of its more aggressively nationalistic elements are just a matter of following genre protocol.
  • They are, in other words, ordinary guys, totally down-to-earth despite being the best at what they do.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This is cartoon villainy—the realm of the black hat and the twirling moustache. Such gestures serve a straightforward dramatic purpose: They align the audience with the heroes while encouraging them to dislike the bad guys, so that when the battle finally ignites, the viewer’s sympathies have already been sorted out.
  • We need to believe, even subconsciously, that while the Americans are three-dimensional characters to whom we can relate, the seemingly endless droves of attackers who besiege them are not—they’re merely The Enemy, a faceless mass, a manifestation of evil
  • it’s doubtful that even the most outrageously jingoistic war films are actually dangerous in any meaningful sense
  • Not asking is its own kind of answer. It tells us to focus elsewhere: on the heroism of these men, on the bravery of their actions. The moral issues are for another day.
  • But it’s important to remember that despite their moralizing, war films are still essentially action films—blockbuster spectacles embellished by the verve and vigor of cutting-edge special effects. They may not strictly glorify. But they almost never discourage.
  • War isn’t great; war makes you great. What is such a sentiment if not pro-war?
  • He grumbled that it was just “another goddamned recruiting film.” And maybe that’s all they’ll ever be
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Hollywood Is Giving Up on Comedy - John McDuling - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373914 comedy hollywood movie international profit
shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • While fewer Americans are going to the movies, it is a totally different story in many other parts of the world, where cinema is booming. Non-U.S. moviegoers accounted for about 70% of global box office receipts last year (which hit $35.9 billion) compared to about 63% in 2007.
  • Emerging economies are responsible for most of that growth, and there is plenty of room for more, because there are significantly fewer cinema screens per capita and lower ticket prices
  • But the emerging world enthusiasm for Hollywood films does not extend to comedies, or at least not relative to its love of action movies and animated films.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • U.S. comedies account for only 10% of box office spending, compared to 25% in the U.S.
  • Hollywood action films are 44% of the box office in China (the latest Transformers release has broken just about every box office record in the country) as against 36% in the U.S.
  • Comedy is the least profitable genre for the studios.
  • And the ruthless profit machine that is Hollywood is responding. Fox in particular has scaled back its comedy output significantly (from 44% of releases in 2010, to just 8% this year). Disney is not releasing any comedies this year,
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'Vice' Review: Dick Cheney and the Negative Great Man Theory of History - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vice-review.html dramatization politics history US bush presidency
shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • McKay, staying close to the historical record (and drawing on books by the journalists Jane Mayer and Barton Gellman), propounds a negative great man theory of history, telling the story of an individual who was able, through a unique combination of discipline, guile and luck, to bend reality to his will
  • The story of his rise, roller-coastering through four decades of American history, is a hectic blend of psychohistory, domestic drama and sketch-comedy satire bound together by McKay’s ingenuity and indignation. Like “The Big Short,” his rollicking explication of the financial crisis of 2008, this movie transforms gaudy pop-cultural toys into tools of polemic and explanation. The pace is jaunty, the scenes crackle with gleeful, giddy incredulity, and the dry business of statecraft attains the velocity of farce
  • “What do we believe in?” Dick asks his Yoda at one point, provoking a gale of laughter in response. The more substantive answers are torture, deceit and the all-but-unchecked power of the American presidency
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • To the question “How did he do it?” McKay offers a fairly coherent answer, one grounded in Bale’s canny and sensitive performance. As biography, in other words, the movie works pretty well. As history, though, it’s another story — at once tendentious and undercooked, proposing a reductive, essentially conspiratorial account of recent events.
  • The motley pageantry of our politics — the endless arguments about race, class, religion, ideology, sex, region and heritage that have defined the republic since the beginning — boils down to a single personality. All you really need to know about the world today is that everything wrong with it is Dick Cheney’s fault.
  • How did he get away with it, though? The answer McKay supplies is that he was smart and the rest of us were too dumb and too distracted to stop him
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Is a Film About a Transgender Dancer Too 'Dangerous' to Watch? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...x-film-transgender-debate.html transgender dancer film
shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • “Girl” sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around. It depicts a teenage trans girl, Lara, raised by a single father who supports not only her dreams of becoming a ballerina but also her gender confirmation surgery. It’s set in Belgium, so much of Lara’s health care is paid for and her doctor and therapist are encouraging caregivers. And it’s a prize winner that is up for a best foreign-language Golden Globe on Sunday.
  • Yet “Girl,” which has been picked up by Netflix, faces a firestorm, one that pits the director, Lukas Dhont; the trans woman who inspired it, the dancer Nora Monsecour; and the film’s supporters against trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it
  • “Girl” asks a provocative question: Have we gotten to a place where a film can explore dark aspects of an individual trans character without feeling regressive? No one should have the burden of representing a class of people in a film; real people are complicated. But what happens when a movie is both art and a trigger?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • That’s the question behind the two main criticisms of “Girl.” One is that neither Dhont nor his co-writer, Angelo Tissens, nor the young actor who plays Lara, Victor Polster, are transgender
  • The other objection, the one that has prompted foes to label the film “traumatizing” and “sickening,” involves scenes near the end.
  • The outrage has played out ferociously online. The film critic Oliver Whitney wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that “Girl” is the “most dangerous movie about a trans character in years.” Whitney, who identifies as trans masculine, told me that seeing a trans girl mutilating herself suggests “it’s part of her survival, and that’s harmful.” He said he was most upset that the film “sends a damaging message to all audiences, but especially to trans folks suffering from dysphoria who may not have access to medical care or information about medical transitions.”
  • Three trans women who saw the film at a screening in Los Angeles said it was the film’s dark territory that made it compelling. Crystal Stull told me “Girl” was “the closest that cis people in society will ever get to understanding just how bad dysphoria can really get.
  • Ann Thomas, the founder of Transgender Talent, a talent listing service for trans people, chastised the campaign against it.“The message these arrogant trans activists are saying is that Nora doesn’t have the right to tell her story,” said Thomas, who also defended “Girl” in an opinion piece for The Advocate.
  • “We’re worried about harm reduction,” said Elena Rose Vera, the deputy executive director of Trans Lifeline, who has not seen the movie. “We just want to protect our community.”
  • Monsecour told me she hoped the trans community knew that “Girl” was a beginning, not an end.“I have a platform to speak with ‘Girl,’” she said. “Without ‘Girl,’ I wouldn’t have that. There’s a lot of work to do, but I’m confident that more trans people will tell their stories.”
4More

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918 trump politics US
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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'The Gatekeepers,' Documentary by Israeli Director Dror Moreh - NYTimes.com - 0 views

movies.nytimes.com/...raeli-director-dror-moreh.html israel mideast politics history
shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “The Gatekeepers,” a new documentary by the Israeli director Dror Moreh, consists of interviews with six men, all of them retired, most of them bald, one of them a grandfatherly type, well into his 80s, in suspenders and a plaid shirt. They reminisce about past triumphs and frustrations, but Mr. Moreh’s amazing, upsetting film, which opens Monday for a weeklong awards-qualifying run in advance of a wider release next year, is the opposite of nostalgic. It is hard to imagine a movie about the Middle East that could be more timely, more painfully urgent, more challenging to conventional wisdom on all sides of the conflict.
  • “The Gatekeepers” is in part a history of post-’67 Israel, in which familiar events are revisited from an unusual and fascinating perspective. The leaders of Shin Bet, who answer directly to the prime minister, are not part of the country’s military command structure. Nor, because of the clandestine nature of the agency, are they visibly part of the Israeli political establishment, though they sometimes function as public scapegoats when politicians make mistakes. What is most astonishing about the interviews Mr. Moreh has recorded is how candid and critical these six spymasters are, inflecting their stories with pointed, sometimes devastating assessments of the failings of successive governments.
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