Media Mindfulness

Film Society of Lincoln Center:
CANON FODDER: As the sun finally sets on the century of cinema, by what criteria do we determine its masterworks?
Read the Preface and Introduction below. The entire article, one of the longest published in Film Comment history, can be found in the 2006 September/October issue.
Motion pictures were the dominant art for [...]

A novel concept: hold a film festival with your friends.
The Film Connection:

Who We Are

The Film Connection is a community of film lovers, social activists and lifelong learners who use our non-profit online film library to watch, discuss and act on compelling films from around the globe. An initiative of the global humanitarian agency Mercy Corps, [...]

Environment - Movies - New York Times:
Dumping Hollywood villains of the past — drug lords, aliens, North Korean dictators, even the news media — for an environmental bête noire carries risks for studios that don’t mind frightening viewers, as long as it’s all in fun. But it also hints at the possibility of more sophisticated [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwsgkurfCjE

It’s about time the pop culture produced a decent dystopic cult movie. Enter Children of Men, directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), a post-Baghdad, Road Warrior-type movie sans the cheesy trappings of antiseptic sci-fi. Add one part Black Hawk Down, two parts Blade Runner, [...]

I once worked on a crew that built the set for the Billboard Music Awards in a hanger at the Santa Monica airport. We slaved 16 hours a day for three weeks while consuming massive amounts of raw materials, including miles of plywood and metal piping. But after the three-hour television event, everything went to [...]

Be forewarned, a movie about magic employs the principle technique of enchantment: misdirection. Thus any film claiming to be about magic has as its subtext the fact of the film itself, which is a carefully constructed illusion, just as any Hollywood motion picture about spectacle is ultimately self-referential (such as Gladiator being a veiled commentary [...]

The mutants are merging with nature; as ciphers for us, they are hybrids. Typically in sci-fi, hybrids are part machine. In the case of X-Men, the characters are elemental or animalistic. In a sense they are the earth force re-balancing the human realm, which resists the mutants and insists on instituting a policy of “curing them” (made possible by a genetically engineered serum). Unlike typical sci-fi, the conflict is not mediated by technology, but rather by biology (and bio-science). As the struggle ensues between the mutant factions, the battle goes mano-a-mano, albeit the group that harnesses the perfect balance between the forces of nature and human prevails.

Here is an ambiguous short review of an ambiguous movie. Rather than spoil the plot, which is fairly nuanced, I’d say that first of all, V is for Vendetta is better than the Matrix Trilogy, the first follow-up by the Wachowski Brothers. The film is not dominated by action sequences, and is philosophically more complex. [...]