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 […]
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Love British TV? See where those shows are meant to take place
Have you ever seen one of those experiments where people from other countries try to identify the United States? Let’s admit that we’re just as bad with the United Kingdom. Unless you’ve spent some time over there, everything that ends in “-shire” sounds interchangeable. And when it comes to television and movies, we just sort […]
Continue readingWatch HBO documentaries for free through Films On Demand
from Citizen U.S.A. You probably know HBO for Game of Thrones and their other hit shows, but they’re also known as a powerhouse of prestigious documentaries, like the Academy Award-winning Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1. Films On Demand just signed a deal with HBO to stream their collection of documentary films, and as part of […]
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 readingDirector Edgar Wright names is favorite 1000 movies (Yes, 1000)
Edgar Wright is one of the most distinctive, stylized directors working in film right now. If you’ve seen Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, you’ll recognize his unmistakable, kinetic energy. We’re all ears when he wants to share his thoughts on the art of filmmaking. As it turns out, Wright was happy to […]
Continue readingWould you work for a fictional company? (Don’t mind us, we’re very tired.)
Alright, listen, we’re drained. The weather has been hovering near 100 degrees all week, and after a few weeks of inescapable political talk, we just need something fun and not-heady today. Maybe you do too. So here’s a silly infographic from Euroffice, a British office supply company, rating fictional corporations by how great they’d be […]
Continue readingChecking your perspective on making a documentary
SOC’s great film program often has AU students creating their own documentaries and heading out into the local community to capture a slice of life (take the Community Documentary class!). We love that AU students get to collaborate with DC to tell their stories, but there’s a potentially fraught dynamic with having college students marching […]
Continue readingIt’s okay: Scorsese has guilty pleasures, too
Ingmar Bergman apparently loved Ghostbusters. He’s not alone among great directors. Even some of the most storied names in film loved popcorn junk once in a while; Film Comment magazine has been collecting lists of directors’ favorite guilty pleasure movies for years now, and The A.V. Club rounded up some of their favorite examples. John […]
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 readingWhat’s it like to be a woman in cinematography?
via Variety Much has been made about the unfortunately small pool of women directing in Hollywood and lack of the opportunities they are given. Things are even more dire for women in cinematography. According to Vulture, only 2% of cinematographers for major films are women, and none have ever been nominated for an Oscar in […]
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