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No stranger to building a bone-chilling horror, Ari Aster is sharing one of his greatest fears for Hollywood.

The Eddington writer/director recently admitted he has “a lot of fear” regarding the growing use of AI in the industry and how some treat it “as a god,” knowing “we have no say” in how the technology is implemented as it continues to evolve.

“It’s obviously already too late. We’re in a race now,” he told Letterboxd. “It’s how the history of technological innovation has worked: If we can, we will. I have larger questions, you know? What did Marshall McLuhan say: ‘Man is the sex organ of the machine world,’ right? Is this technology an extension of us, are we extensions of this technology, or are we here to usher it into being?

Aster added, “If you talk to these engineers and the people ushering this AI in,...

Ari Aster may be synonymous with the horror genre, but the auteur is revealing what he finds most “frightening” in real life: The rise of AI. Aster told Letterboxd in a discussion with reporter Isaac Feldberg that the reliance on the technology, and the following of “disciples” it’s amassed, could have disastrous effects on the world.

“I have a lot of fear regarding this,” the “Eddington” director said. “It’s obviously already too late. We’re in a race now. It’s how the history of technological innovation has worked: If we can, we will. I have larger questions, you know? What did Marshall McLuhan say: ‘Man is the sex organ of the machine world,’ right? Is this technology an extension of us, are we extensions of this technology, or are we here to usher it into being?”

Aster pointed to how those who are supportive of AI speak...

Marcel Ophuls, the director of the seminal 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity that explored the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II, died May 24 of natural causes at his home in in the South of France over the weekend. He was 97.

His death was confirmed to Deadline by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert.

“He had been feeling unwell about three days before,” Seyfert said. “My father spent the last day with him, and they watched Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, then he retired to bed. The next day, they were going to watch his favorite Lubitsch, Heaven Can Wait. Unfortunately, it didn’t come to that.” Seyfert said his grandfather passed away in his sleep.

Born on November 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany – his father was film director Max Ophüls and his mother was actress Hildegard Wall, Ophuls was 11 when he and his...

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning, German-born French filmmaker whose powerfully eloquent documentaries confronted difficult political, moral and philosophical issues, has died. He was 97.

Ophuls “died peacefully” at his home in the south of France, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter.

Ophuls earned his Academy Award — as well as prizes from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals— for Hotel Terminus (1988), a 4-hour, 27-minute documentary that examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987.

Ophuls’ best known work, however, came almost two decades earlier with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), which explored the reality of the Nazi occupation in the small industrial French city of Clermont-Ferrand.

Ophuls spent more than two years compiling the more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually boiled down to that 4-hour, 11-minute film, which delineated France’s compliance with Nazi Germany. (Some in the country supported...

That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Movie: "Researched over the course of seven years, That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Movie explores the cyclical rise and fall of the cinematic witch in American culture and her relationship to feminist movements over time.

Through historical analysis and dozens of case studies, Payton McCarty-Simas analyzes how the witch came to be understood as the ultimate cultural bogeywoman on the one hand and a classic feminist symbol of empowerment on the other.

It traces the representation of “demonic women” in the past decade back to older horror cycles and through the “New Age” section of your local bookstore, investigating the (counter)cultural shifts along the way.

The book is a deep dive that demonstrates how changes in cinematic portrayals of the witch over time reflect major shifts in how feminism is perceived politically and interpreted culturally in America.

A clip in Beatles ’64 features Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan making a salient observation: “The chances of your understanding anything going on in your own time are very small, except through the means provided by artists. Artists are people who enjoy living in the present.” That perspective is both supported and disproven by the film’s candid access to John, Paul, George and Ringo — surnames not required — on the cusp of global superstardom during their first visit to America in 1964.

The band members are by no means oblivious to the seismic momentum of Beatlemania, becoming virtual prisoners at New York’s Plaza Hotel as it’s surrounded by a mob of screaming fans. And yet they remain at that time disarmingly innocent, almost incredulous — fundamentally still four goofy working-class lads from Liverpool with mop-top haircuts who appear to view the hysteria mostly as a lark. Only in interviews years...

One of the most brilliant and daring techniques used in the cinema is breaking the fourth wall. Traditionally, the fourth wall stands as an imaginary barrier between the fictional universe on screen and the audience a secret only known to the latter. The convention has its roots in theater, long before the birth of the cinema. To break the fourth wall means to cross a boundary, allowing the characters on screen to reach out to the public and engage with them.

In these rare moments, the characters acknowledge the presence of the audience as well as their fictionality. By challenging these conventions, the directors grant their characters a unique awareness and agency. Such scenes are particularly powerful because they create a shared intimacy between the protagonists of two realities that would otherwise never meet. Because of their unconventional premises, however, these moments have to be used thoughtfully.

Annie Hall (1977) Directed...

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a milestone in horror and a pioneer of the slasher subgenre. Key creatives recall the film's hectic development and their approaches to its controversial concept.

Screenwriter Kim Henkel recalled shooting The Texas Chain Saw Massacre "as if it were almost a reality show," and the aesthetic is evident in retrospect. The film that established many slasher tropes celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, marked by a reunion of its main creatives. In an interview with IndieWire, Henkel confirmed the 1974 flick was a commentary on the zeitgeist. "We were very much a product of our times, which was the late '60s, early '70s, and all of the things that were going on then," he said. "We were reading Marshall McLuhan and watching films like Blow Up and Medium Cool. Cinema Verite was very much on our minds. It lends itself to horror."

1:...

The Bomanizer is heading to TV. That’s the handle of Canadian comedian Boman Martinez-Reid, who broke out on TikTok in 2020 and is now starring in a TV show on the Canadian channel Crave.

The show in question is titled Made for TV with Boman Martinez-Reid, and it offers satirical commentary on the troubled path many creators walk when they attempt to jump to television. Each episode will see the comedian try his hand at a different genre in hopes of finding one that sticks. By the end of the series, Martinez-Reid will have attempted everything from news to competitive drag — though there are no guarantees he will find his calling before Made for TV‘s first season ends.

The eye-winking, meta nature of Made for TV jibes with its star’s social media personality. When he broke out during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Martinez-Reid drew millions...

Woody Allen's Annie Hall revolutionized romantic comedy, earning "The Big 5" Oscar nominations and winning four. The film's use of fourth wall breaks, split screens, and modern discussions on love was ahead of its time. While Annie Hall was a hit, some scenes have not aged well, prompting viewers to reexamine its problematic elements.

Woody Allen's Annie Hall was a groundbreaking romantic comedy when it was first released, but Allen's personal life since then and some elements of the film itself have left a bad taste in many viewers' mouths. Annie Hall is a staple of the romantic comedy genre and the seventh movie from the acclaimed actor, director, and producer. The film was a hit critically and commercially and ensured Allen would be considered among the greatest filmmakers of his contemporaries. Since 1977, he's directed 45 movies and still continues to work, though no longer in Hollywood.

Allen's personal life has...

David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" was made in the wired world of 1983, when cathode ray tubes were the only video screens available, Betamax videocassettes were still common, and snagging pirated TV signals with special antenna equipment was still seen as a punkish subversion of dominant media paradigms. The technology may be dated to audiences in 2024, but Cronenberg's sci-fi essay on media obsession remains as timely as ever, easily applicable to a screen-addicted generation accustomed to a state of near-constant media consumption. When we're constantly projecting ourselves into virtual spaces, are we essentially inventing new bodies for ourselves? New Flesh?

James Woods plays Max, a media pirate who has recently discovered a mysterious rogue TV signal — Videodrome — that carries a 24-hour show of nothing but scenes of torture. Max, jaded by violent media, finds it fascinating and thinks he can broadcast the signal on his local public access station, free of censure.

Movies are hot, according to Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t paying them a compliment but placing them within his theory of hot and cool media. He was referring to the sensory richness that makes movies such a captivating and complete experience that they require little active participation from the audience. Just sit in the dark and let the magic wash over you. Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t disagree about the magic, but he puts a different slant on things in the docufiction Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), whose focus is the moviegoer as an essential part of the equation.

Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...

At the Academy Awards in 1929, Charles Reisner's "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" was nominated for Best Picture. "Revue" is a relative obscurity to modern audiences — even less well-known than that year's Best Picture winner "The Broadway Melody" — and it may even baffle certain viewers. True to its title, "The Hollywood Revue" is a collection of musical numbers, comedic sketches, and dramatic scenes, all played out "live" on a theater stage. A curtain closes and opens in between each number, and two emcees — Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel — introduce each vignette.

Such filmed stage performances may look a little odd to the modern eye, but they were common throughout the '20s and '30s. Few audiences had access to high-end live theater, and Hollywood was happy to step in to provide. Studios would distribute such revues as, essentially, a Broadway substitute, allowing distant viewers to experience the theater events...

Koji Suzuki's novel "Ring" was first published in 1991, and no one could have guessed that the simple, tech-based ghost story would spawn a decades-long, worldwide media franchise that incorporates multiple movies, crossovers, comics, audio dramas, and video games. If one does a deep dive into the entire "Ring" series, one will uncover a massively complicated mythos that repeatedly peels back layers of reality to reveal an onion-like media metafiction that Marshall McLuhan would be proud of.

The premise of "Ring" is wicked and fun, and would have been all the more terrifying in 1991 when VHS was still in vogue. In the book, an investigative reporter named Asakawa finds a cursed video cassette of a surreal, 20-minute short film. At the end of the video, a captain informs him that he has seven days to live. Asakawa takes the threat seriously, as several teenage girls who watched the video have already died.

The latest episode of "X-Men '97," called "Motendo/Lifedeath, Part 1," features the return of Mojo, a longtime X-Men villain who made his debut in "Longshot" #3, published in November of 1985. Mojo was a horrible, mutilated cybernetic monster with robotic spidery legs and a series of mechanical tubes sprouting from his body. He ruled a dimension called the Mojoverse, and oversaw one of the realm's most popular TV shows, "Mojovision," a gladiatorial show wherein superpowered beings from across multiple dimensions would be forced to fight to the death. Mojo lived for ratings and only cared about watching his numbers increase. He was modeled after the shallow TV executives and schmoozing moneymen who oversee most creative efforts in Hollywood. 

Mojo made a memorable appearance in two episodes of "X-Men: The Animated Series" wherein he was enthusiastically played by Canadian voice actor Peter Wildman. In "Mojovision", he snarled and cackled as he forced the...

Editor’S Note: The following blog originally ran in July 2023. We’re re-posting it here with minor edit, special thanks to blogger Kristopher Hewkin. Stay tuned to our events page for more information about the Sloan Salon’s 2024 edition.

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“The visions of yesterday have all caught up to us and we must start looking towards the next visions,” stated moderator and veteran TV writer and producer Wendy Calhoun emphasizing a recurring theme of the June 22 Sloan Salon panel “Storytelling and Tech: Crafting Human-Centered Stories About Technology.”

The online conversation delved into timely subjects such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT, raising ethical questions about how we represent technology in stories and highlighting some optimistic views on where it could all be headed.

This dynamic discussion was made possible due to Film Independent’s exciting 15+ year partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that encourages filmmakers to create more realistic and...

Although analog technology has gone all but extinct in the 40 years since Videodrome first permeated viewers’ psyches, there’s no denying the prescience of its themes. Writer-director David Cronenberg, circa 1983, portended the exploitation of the internet age, virtual reality, and media manipulation. At its core, Videodrome confronts the viewer to examine their own relationship with entertainment.

As the head of Civic TV, Max Renn caters to the subterranean market, transmitting sex and violence into Toronto homes over Uhf airwaves. His appetite for depravity no longer fulfilled by the likes of softcore pornography, Max’s interest is piqued by a mysterious pirated broadcast called Videodrome. As he describes it, “It’s just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. Very, very realistic. I think it’s what’s next.”

Max’s perception of reality is altered from the moment he’s first exposed to Videodrome, as devious hallucinations — from a cancerous...

The enemy, as it seems it always has been, is within in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, but its violence, gore, and torrential mayhem is hard to miss. Influenced by the writings of Marshall McLuhan, this 1983 vision of the intermingling ideas and functions of technology, the mind, and “the flesh” is, like a great deal of Cronenberg’s work, endlessly fascinated with decay, bodily fluids, wounds, and growths. All of which come to bear in one form or another on Max Renn (James Woods), a forager of outré entertainments at Civic-tv, a sleazy Uhf television station in Toronto that he helped to found, and whose motto, “The One You Take to Bed with You,” is more ominous than goofy.

But where softcore pornography would effectively crawl up the ass of any major network executive and start biting as if it were its last meal, Renn is bored by shots of Asian...

The Future Of Music Interview is a Q&a in which our favorite artists and producers share their vision of what’s next, weighing in on everything from AI to emerging scenes to the artists inspiring them the most.

Meg Remy has been imagining radical new futures in her music for more than a decade, first on noisy, arty releases like 2011’s U.S. Girls on Kraak, and later on subtly subversive pop dreams like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited and this year’s Bless This Mess. But the artist behind U.

Over the years, there has been an overabundance of live-action anime adaptations, exploring everything from Dragon Ball and Death Note to Bleach and the upcoming One Piece live-action movie. While some aren't absolutely horrible, they definitely don't come anywhere close to touching the anime that inspired them. No matter how hard producers try to make an impact and take advantage of the massive fan followings anime franchises have, they repeatedly fail to impress fans, but why?

According to Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan's pioneering study from 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, "The form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived." How does that relate to live-action anime adaptations and the level in which they seem to fail no matter how much hype is built around them? When they change the media from its original presentation,...

Sooner or later, the lead actor of the movie-within-a-movie being made in “A Brighter Tomorrow” jokes, disgruntled director Giovanni (self-referential cornball Nanni Moretti’s latest on-screen avatar) was bound to make a movie that ended with its protagonist’s suicide — the implication being, the world wouldn’t be so surprised to find the helmer putting a noose around his own neck.

Well, he does and he doesn’t go that far in a high-concept meta-comedy that presents its director’s personal disillusion with art, love and the state of the world, before becoming a “just kidding” group hug for his fans. That’s a sizable public in Moretti’s native Italy, where this welcome return-to-form has already been a commercial success. The director’s not nearly as big a deal abroad, however, to the extent that few may care whether the Cannes regular (who won the Palme d’Or for...

The captivating opening sequence of Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow (Il Sol dell’Avvenire) watches as a dusty old Fiat passes Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and pulls up next to the Tiber. A man with a can of red paint and a rope steps out and scoots halfway down the stone wall that hugs the riverbank, neatly painting the words of the title. The whimsical music instantly alludes to Fellini, an homage confirmed soon after by the arrival in town of a Hungarian circus, and for all intents and purposes, the film is Moretti’s Otto e mezzo. Or at least it wants to be.

More than 20 years after winning the Palme d’Or with his shattering grief drama The Son’s Room, Moretti is back with his 14th feature for his regular appointment with Cannes. But after decades of wildly varying success attempting to stretch beyond his signature auto-fictions,...

In competition at Cannes, the Italian director’s comedy-drama about a failing film-maker is full of non-comedy and anti-drama – a complete waste of time

Nanni Moretti is the Italian director who will always have a place in our hearts, not least for his masterly The Son’s Room (2001), in my view the greatest Cannes Palme d’Or winner of the century so far. And more recently his cinephile comedy Mia Madre (2015) was tremendous.

But his new film in competition is bafflingly awful: muddled, mediocre and metatextual – a complete waste of time, at once strident and listless. Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

It is effectively a film within a film, both as dull as each other. Moretti himself plays Giovanni, a high-minded film director with a failing marriage who is struggling to shoot his passion project about the Italian Communist party standing up to...

From news to fiction to film to photography to podcasts to social media and even the human voice, technological innovation has inspired and enabled new paradigms in storytelling.

“We’ve seen so many technological changes come at us, so fast,” says host Jeff Kofman, “The idea behind this podcast is to explore how those changes have shaped what we watch, what we read, what we look at and what we listen to.”

StoryTech asks: how do technology and innovation shape the way stories are told?

Our starting point is journalism because those are the roots of host Jeff Kofman. Jeff brings deep experience in broadcast journalism and in tech innovation. In his first career Jeff spent 30+ years as an Emmy-winning broadcast journalist, foreign correspondent and war correspondent with ABC News, CBS News and CBC News. He reported from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. In 2014 he launched his second career,...

Wanna feel old? Contrary to popular depictions of millennial youth as being disenfranchised, politically feckless and bone idle, the eye-opening documentary The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution might be the bazooka that’s needed to shatter all those cozy assumptions. So of-the-moment is Ondi Timoner’s latest work that it premiered almost exactly when the collapse of Svb made international news, and though that particular eventuality isn’t foreseen here, it won’t take much post-festival fine-tuning to bring her film bang up to date.

After last year’s Last Flight Home, an emotionally intense but beautifully calibrated meditation on her father’s right to medically assisted death, Timoner returns to her forte, which is an uncanny ability to intuit the vicissitudes of pop culture while embedding herself in it while it’s happening. With awards season now a year away, it’s hard to say whether the immediate relevance...

Long Live The New Flesh, Bitch!

And just like that, we’re into February. After starting the new year with a redo of our episode on The Perfection, followed by AIDS metaphor Safe, del Toro’s Gothic Romance Crimson Peak and slasher remake House of Wax, Trace and I are settling into our birthday month with four weeks of ‘Weird Sex’ films.

First on the docket: David Cronenberg‘s iconic body horror film Videodrome, which just celebrated its fortieth anniversary last week. In the film, Max Renn (James Woods) works at a Toronto TV station that programs sexy, violent content and he’s always on the hunt for new fare. Enter Videodrome: a pirated signal originally thought to originate from Malaysia (but is actually from Pittsburgh) that is basically snuff.

The trouble is that Videodrome is also a weapon, causing physical changes in the body of viewers (tumors), as well as vivid hallucinations.

The history of film is filled with fascinating symmetries, with Edison’s early kinescopes like Fred Ott’s Sneeze and The Kiss resembling the kinds of stories friends might send you on Snapchat or Instagram. Unfortunately, Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s Fantastic Machine doesn’t know quite what to make of them. An essay film on the study of photography–from the early camera obscuras to cell phone videos and police body-cam footage–it has a seemingly limitless canvas to explore all aspects of photography, including its possibilities, shortcomings, and manipulations. Sourced from found footage, the film presents itself as a roadmap to the unknown, and playfully comes up short in its conclusions.

The starting point is early plate photography: Eadweard Muybridge’s 1859 experiment commonly considered the birth of the motion picture. The documentary then quickly crisscrosses over the next 164-or-so years, only periodically stopping to draw correlations...

This article will contain spoilers for the ending(s) of the 2018 film "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch."

In 2018, director David Slade and screenwriter Charlie Brooker (co-showrunner of "Black Mirror") teamed up with Netflix to try out something that hadn't been attempted too many times in the past. Using a kind of basic "branching video" technology, their "Black Mirror" feature film "Bandersnatch" could be watched as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style interactive experience, letting a viewer decide how the story would progress. About ten minutes of the film would elapse before the main character Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) was faced with a decision, major or minor. On the bottom of the screen, two buttons would appear, and the viewer could dictate Stefan's choice using their remote control. Fittingly, the plot of the movie involved 1984-era computer programmers attempting to build their very own Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style video game, based on his late mother's fictional novel "Bandersnatch." 

Patient viewers who watched through "Bandersnatch" several times,...

Writer, director and actress Rebecca Miller discusses a few of her favorite films with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002)

The Ballad Of Jack And Rose (2005)

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee (2009)

Maggie’s Plan (2015)

Explorers (1985)

The Way We Were (1973)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Annie Hall (1977)

Repulsion (1965)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Knife In The Water (1962)

The Tenant (1976)

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Persona (1966)

The Magician (1958)

Hour Of The Wolf (1968)

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Shining (1980)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Regarding Henry (1991)

Angela (1995)

Badlands (1973)

Casino (1995)

On The Waterfront (1954)

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Jules and Jim (1962)

The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant (1972)

Wings Of Desire (1987)

The Killer Inside Me (1976)

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Married To The Mob (1988)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Dune (1984)

Imitation Of Life (1934)

Imitation Of Life (1959)

Written On The Wind (1956)

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

All That Heaven Allows...

20 years ago, Tom Green directed his first film. Now he’s living in a van.

Picture this: A disturbed young man, prone to zoophilic outbursts, returns to his family home in Portland, Oregon, after being fired from a factory job in LA. His father berates and belittles him, often leaving his mother shaking from fear. He strikes up a relationship with a wheelchair-bound nurse to whom his father refers as a “cripple” and “retard slut whore.” Tired of the abuse, the young man invents a lie during a family therapy session: that his father sexually molested his younger brother, Freddy. The brother is committed to a home for abused children, their mother leaves the house, and the young man learns to channel familial trauma into art.

Then picture this: the synopsis offered above is not for a dour, European arthouse drama but a $14 million, 20th Century Fox-distributed comedy written by,...

Our 100th Guest! Comedy icon Martin Short joins us to discuss a few of the movies that made him.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Innerspace (1987)

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

On The Waterfront (1954)

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

Terms Of Endearment (1983)

Moby Dick (1956)

The Exorcist (1973)

King Kong (1933)

A History Of Violence (2005)

A Song To Remember (1945)

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Annie Hall (1977)

The Oscar (1966)

Sleeper (1973)

Bananas (1971)

City Lights (1931)

September (1987)

The Harder They Fall (1956)

Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Schindler’s List (1993)

Kiss Me Stupid (1964)

The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)

The Bad And The Beautiful (1953)

Ben-Hur (1959)

Spartacus (1960)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The Graduate (1967)

Klute (1971)

Blow-Up (1966)

Blow Out (1981)

The Godfather (1972)

The Godfather Part II (1974)

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Burn! (1970)

Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967)

Grease 2 (1982)

The Conversation (1974)

Back To The Future (1985)

Other Notable Items

Saturday Night Live TV...

In an onstage conversation with Katie Couric at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on Wednesday, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos waved away concerns over the streaming service’s upcoming loss of “Friends” and “The Office,” instead focusing on the company’s push in original programming and its international content growth.

“One of the reasons ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are so popular is because they’re on Netflix,” he told Couric. “You imagine what happens when your kid comes to school: ‘I just saw this new show called ‘Friends.'”

That wouldn’t exactly happen if the show were on Seeso, he alluded, referring to the NBCUniversal-backed comedy streaming service that shuttered in 2017.

Recalling Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that “the medium is the message,” Sarandos asserted that “part of the enduring success of the shows is they’ve been available on Netflix in a way that people can watch...

Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” At its most basic interpretation, it argues that what is being communicated is less important than how it’s being communicated. Perhaps with this idea in mind, film and TV production and distribution company A24 announced their Public Access series. They will screen six of their films on billboards throughout the summer in the cities in which the films take place. They’ve released the following screening times and coordinates: July 20 – Lady Bird @ 38°34’35”N 121°28’47”W, 8 p.m. 27 – The Bling Ring @ 34°13’7”N 118°27’59”W, 8 p.m. August 06 – The Witch @ 43°42’19”N 71°06’44”W, 8 p.m. 10 – Good Time @ 40°44’59”N...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

On July 16, 1969, Variety ran a package of stories under the headline “Greatest Show Off Earth,” detailing the three TV networks’ fever over the July 19 moon landing. CBS exec producer Robert Wussler predicted “the world’s greatest single broadcast.” Variety called it a “31-hour TV super-special,” running all day Sunday through midday Monday. The networks and four radio companies pooled resources and spent a then-huge $13 million collectively. NBC was handling the action at Kennedy Space Center, CBS at Mission Control in Houston, with ABC assigned “downrange pickups.”

But each network also wanted to plant its own distinct footprint on the moon landing. CBS offered Arthur C. Clarke, Walter Cronkite and Orson Welles (think “War of the Worlds”). ABC had Rod Serling, Isaac Asimov and Marshall McLuhan; ABC also commissioned Duke Ellington to compose a piece of music. NBC had a special hosted by John Chancellor and Danny Kaye, which Variety described...

On June 5, 1998, Paramount unveiled the Jim Carrey high-concept dramedy The Truman Show in theaters. The film went on to nab three nominations at the 71st Academy Awards, including for Ed Harris in the supporting actor category, Peter Weir for director and Andrew Niccol for screenplay. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below:

A satire of Orwellian proportions, Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a cleverly conceived (by Andrew Niccol), masterfully executed cautionary tale that would have tickled late media guru Marshall McLuhan.

In many ways a logical extension of MTV's Real World — not to mention ...

On June 5, 1998, Paramount unveiled the Jim Carrey high-concept dramedy The Truman Show in theaters. The film went on to nab three nominations at the 71st Academy Awards, including for Ed Harris in the supporting actor category, Peter Weir for director and Andrew Niccol for screenplay. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below:

A satire of Orwellian proportions, Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a cleverly conceived (by Andrew Niccol), masterfully executed cautionary tale that would have tickled late media guru Marshall McLuhan.

In many ways a logical extension of MTV's Real World — not to mention ...

In 2015’s Curve, starring Julianne Hough, the pervert drifter antagonist stomps her phone, snuffing out its electronic life and hampering her escape plans—no further explanation required. A phone ends up in a punch bowl in David Gordon Green’s Halloween to explain its later critical absence, disappointing given the original’s iconic phone scene (a ghostly Michael Myers murders Lynda with the cord).

The babysitter lifeline, the emergency call, originated in London in 1936. According to a BBC report, “Police stations during the 1920s and ’30s were often receiving too many visitors alerting them to emergencies.”

While first responders immediately embraced the utility of the technology, there were concerns on the consumer side. According to the book America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, in 1919, North American Bell executives were concerned that they “never thoroughly educated the public to the possibilities of the use of the telephone.”

One...

The 29th entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) is showing October 1 – 31, 2018 in the United States as part of the series Horrific October.Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon—the initial basis for an extensive string of films and the TV series Hannibal—embeds, in its structure, crucial references to the written and pictorial work of William Blake (1757–1827). Two particular creations by Blake appear to have especially fired the imagination of Michael Mann, director of the very first screen adaptation of Harris, Manhunter, in 1986: the illustration, one in Blake’s series devoted to the Biblical Book of Revelation, titled The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805), which offers key plot material; and the famous poem “The Tyger”—which does not figure at all in the novel. “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?...

From a psychological perspective, a movie provides a portal to other worlds. It appeals to our desire for escape: exciting our imaginations and presenting moving images that bring to life our wildest dreams and our worst fears. The distance from the action we experience in the movie theatre or in front of the small screen constructs a protective sheath between you and the action. We become voyeurs; engaged in someone else’s drama – safe from the perils that the protagonist is forced to face.

The fourth wall, therefore, is the long-established, imaginary barrier between us and the action. We can peek in; safe from harm. Breaking the fourth wall is a commonly used device in theatre – so familiar, in fact, that we’re unsurprised when one of the characters suddenly steps out of the action and addresses us – the audience – directly.

The movie, however, has a literal, impenetrable fourth wall...

Long before #MeToo and Ronan Farrow tarnished him, and back in the days when New York’s cultural elite could not lavish enough praise on his movies, Woody Allen did deliver one onscreen moment that remains truly audacious to this day. In “Annie Hall,” his Alvy Singer character is waiting in line at the movies when he overhears a man pontificate about and grossly misinterpret “The Medium Is the Message.” Wanting to verbally trash the blowhard to his face, Singer instead walks off camera to bring Marshall McLuhan into the frame to do the job for him. Regardless of how...

Originally published as an editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on March 27, 2017The debate about "our nation's visible memory" (German Minister of Culture Monika Grütters on the medium of film) is fortunately now gaining a certain visibility of its own, which it has never before had in Germany. What is less fortunate is the way in which the preservation of this memory is frequently being discussed and promoted publicly as well as politically – namely, in a reductive manner and using misleading images and concepts. This applies to the representatives of film archives and cinematheques who, in their pursuit of better funding, primarily use only terminology established by the media market. And it applies even to experienced commentators engaged in film culture who run the risk of bogging themselves down in an already-forgotten, secondary front by placing "especially valuable" spheres and contents of German film heritage against each other (most recently in this newspaper,...

On this day, media maven, Marshall McLuhan would have turned 106-years-old. To honor his great work in education and media, he's been given his very own Google Doodle! Here's everything to know about the professor!

Gas-s-s-s – Or – It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen/ 79 min. / Street Date October 18, 2016 / Gas-s-s-s / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Elaine Giftos, Robert Corff, Cindy Williams, Bud Cort, Ben Vereen, Tally Coppola, Lou Procopio.

Cinematography: Ron Dexter

Film Editor: George Van Noy

Original Music: Country Joe and the Fish

Written and Produced by George Armitage

Directed by Roger Corman

Roger Corman finally accepted himself as an iconic filmmaker for this, his final show for A.I.P.. Barely released and long considered a failure, Gas-s-s-s – Or – It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It sees Corman and his writer associate George Armitage attempting a Mad magazine- like amalgam of all the counterculture trends of the late 1960s. That tactical mistake becomes eighty minutes of unfocused and unfunny satire. Armitage’s script and dialogue might occasionally hit some serendipitous notes,...

Because 2016 cares not for subtlety, this month marks the 40th anniversary of “Network.” Since its release in November 1976 to wide praise and an eventual heap of Oscars, director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky’s excoriation of the exponentially money-driven, bottom-feeding tendencies of television news has only grown in renown, as each angry pundit updates the film’s library of prophecies about The State of Television Today.

With the ascent of an actual reality TV star to the U.S. Presidency following a broadcast news cycle that worked for everything but a dedication to public interest, it would seem that this depressing political season has reached the logical end of the film’s apocalyptic forecast, landing on a reality too absurd for even “Network” to dramatize: Howard Beale as President. However, as we reflect on what’s gone wrong with contemporary news media and political culture, it’s important to...

Ryan Lambie Nov 3, 2016

Predicted by Videodrome, gorily explored by The Neon Demon. Ryan looks at how technology has changed movies and the way we consume them.

Whether he intended to or not, Canadian director David Cronenberg captured the zeitgeist with his 1982 movie, Videodrome. His mind-bending, disturbing thriller imagined a world where videotapes and cable signals could literally deprave and corrupt: an apt concept, given the moral panic that would soon surround home entertainment in the UK.

See related How Alien: Resurrection led to the Ice Age movies The Peanuts Movie – Blue Sky’s million-dollar gamble When cinema projection mistakes work out Studio Ghibli: Marnie, its final films, the future of 2D animation

When the humble VHS tape emerged in the late 1970s, it altered the entertainment industry just as radically as the advent of television a generation earlier. Unlike 8mm film, videotape was relatively cheap; suddenly, the ability to...

Elyse Sternberg and Josh Kriegman's Weiner opens with a quote from Marshall McLuhan - "the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers" - which we might just as well paraphrase to: may the gods help those whose names write the jokes themselves. Weiner is one of the year's great films, but audiences may never know it, because the film, the story, and the person himself, are all hiding behind a dick joke. Or rather, a dick pic; or maybe more accurately, a dick. Weiner is all about dicks of one kind or another: Anthony Weiner's penis, which both launched him into international fame/ignominy, and whose camera-friendliness has now for the third time catastrophically ruined his life. It's unfair to...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. "The name of a man," he asserts, "is a numbing blow from which he never recovers." Its deployment in this particular context could hardly be more apposite; the tragedy of a man driven to build and live up to a name that predicts his own downfall with a double entendre of twisted, malicious glee. There was a horrible inevitability to the fact that Anthony Weiner's career in the Us Congress would end in sexual scandal, but watching him try to rejuvenate his fortunes is fascinating.

A study of once-promising American politician Anthony Weiner ending his own career is a hard watch

Related: Weiner review: an unsparing portrait of politics and a gift that keeps giving

A name of a man is a mind-numbing blow from which he never recovers,” says a prefatory title from Marshall McLuhan as this vertiginous political documentary begins. That was not always true for awkwardly named seven-term Us congressman Anthony Weiner. He always grasped the issue of his penile-soundalike surname, so to speak, with both hands. “Who does John Boehner think he’s fooling?” he’d often ask audiences. Weiner was a gifted street fighter, a loudmouth, at a time when Democrats had assumed a collective defensive crouch, and you have to think that name was among the things that toughened him up.

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David’s Quick Take for the tl;dr Media Consumer:

My quick take on 2001: A Space Odyssey is that, after carefully rewatching the film and reading a fair amount about it over this past week or so, I arrived at the conclusion that it’s my favorite movie of all that have ever been made. I have said the same thing in the past, but that was many years ago, long before I had become familiar with so many classics of world cinema and Hollywood’s past that preceded my birth. My deep immersion over the past decade into a self-directed study of film history led me to temporarily suspend judgment on so momentous a question as what I consider to be “the greatest film ever made,” but now I’m pretty comfortable with saying that it’s this one, without any doubt on my part. That’s subjectively speaking,...

Warner Bros.

It can be hard directing actors, especially when they’re a bona fide star, replete with their own neuroses and comforts. But that’s nothing compared to a director having to direct themselves to a great performance in a movie, one which draws on both his skill as a filmmaker and as a performer to deliver something special.

This is tougher than you might think (after all, who better to tell you what to do than yourself?), and one only needs to look at some recent examples (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon or Ben Stiller’s Zoolander 2 spring immediately to mind) to see that this directing/acting (and in many cases, writing, too) combination rarely delivers anything that amazing.

But when it works, it really works, as shown in these eight films that managed to achieve greatness with their director and star as one. That at least...