We’re only two months from the start of awards season, which means all the high-profile Oscar contenders about serious, relevant social issues are hitting theaters. Or, as someone more cynical might put it, all the Oscar bait has finally been released into the waters. Filmmakers want to tell meaningful, engaging movies, but to be frank, […]
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How the West was whitened
The Western genre is having something of a mini-comeback between Westworld and The Magnificent Seven. (Or, maybe we all just love Yul Brynner?) This year’s trips to the Old West look a little different than in the past, specifically the actors. Our collective imagined memory of the Western looks white, middle-aged, and male. But if […]
Continue readingWhat does Netflix’s shrinking library mean for film history literacy?
Even with our collection of 14,000 DVDs, we’ll all admit to watching things on Netflix and Hulu all the time. Streaming subscriptions are convenient, and we’re realizing that it’s their primary way that many incoming students watch movies and television now. But we’re concerned about how that narrows what movies and television people can watch. […]
Continue readingEvery Frame a Painting looks at the surprisingly unmemorable state of modern film soundtracks
Every Frame a Painting continues to be one of the best online film criticism video series. Usually the channel looks at editing and composition, but this time, creator Tony Zhou turned his sights to a very difficult film question: why are modern film soundtracks so uninspiring? Zhou puts forward a cohesive argument, with the Marvel […]
Continue readingDo some TV shows work better un-binged?
So today, a contentious issue came up in Media Services: one of our staff members gave up watching HBO’s Deadwood. One reason it didn’t click, they thought, was that episodes might not play as well when watched one after another. Unlike some shows with slowburn stories that make sense to watch in extended sessions, maybe […]
Continue readingWhen happens when film crews lack diversity, too?
We know that the film industry has visible diversity problems, from directing to acting. We can point to the lack of racial diversity among the Oscar acting nominees as a glaring problem, but less obviously, behind-the-camera craft roles like sound and editing suffer from both subtle and overt racism. Variety recently ran a cover story […]
Continue readingMatt Damon in The Great Wall sadly isn’t unprecedented
Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu Last week, a trailer debuted for Matt Damon’s new film, The Great Wall, set during the Song dynasty in China. Matt Damon basically has no business being in that movie, and the fact that he’s the star at all sadly capitalizes on how international audiences associate white […]
Continue readingEven reviews of media for women are more hostile
Gender-targeted abuse and harassment have long made comment sections on the internet borderline unreadable, but those same nasty attitudes have been poisoning the digital well for years in subtler ways. As a recent exposé from FiveThirtyEight shows, online reviews for television shows geared towards women have been artificially lowered by axe-grinding men. By analyzing a […]
Continue readingVanity Fair turns blockbuster movie credits into a budget list
A $200 million movie budget almost seems abstract. We can say that a whole bunch of that money went to the effects, but what does that actually mean? How much does the assistant director figure into it? Does Robert Downey Jr. just get $180 million and everyone else splits it up? Vanity Fair made a […]
Continue readingNew infographics break down gender in screenplays… and it’s about what you’d expect
Late last week, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels released a study on Polygraph breaking down the dialogue of over 2000 major screenplays by the gender and age of the actors. If you’ve followed any of the other news about representation in film for the last few years, the results should come as no surprise: it’s […]
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