Tag: media

The writers of these sites—nearly all women, and nearly all amateurs—annihilated the boundaries of traditional women’s media. Not only was their writing “political” by definition, the subculture rewarded an assertive, opinionated style and the ability to tackle a wide variety of topics. Essays about abortion rights belonged on a feminist blog, but so did posts about wage discrimination, Ben Roethlisberger’s rape charges, and the latest Judd Apatow movie. […] The only real criteria when it came to determining coverage was that the subject had to affect women—which, upon close examination, turned out to be true of literally everything.

Sady Doyle, The true story of how Teen Vogue got mad, got woke, and began terrifying men like Donald Trump, Quartz

Right now, the most common plot in Hollywood is White Male Finds His Inner Strength. That umbrella covers every movie from The Imitation Game to Taken 3 to, yes, The Interview.

We need a range of faces behind desks, behind cameras, and (as Chris Rock suggests) even behind sound-mixing boards … [Hollywood is] very much a white, male, friend-of-a-friend business. I’m not trying to bash white males. Some of my favorite movies were directed by white males! (Er, how could they not be?) Sure, I want to see more movies like Amma Asante’s mixed-race period piece Belle. But I also I wonder if the true test of diversity would be the inverse: say, when Ava DuVernay gets hired to direct Taken 4. Of course, why would she want to?

I’ve thought a lot about this from a few angles. Earlier this year I tried to figure out why there wasn’t a single hit romantic comedy in 2013. Not one cracked the top 100—because no major studio released one. No one likes to stick up for the middlebrow romantic comedy where a goofy blonde finds her handsome, dull prince. But that they’re not even getting made feels like the canary in the studio’s conformist, cartoon-superhero coal mine. It shows that Big Hollywood has placed all its chips on the young white male audience, and somehow still sees female-driven hits like Maleficent and Lucy and even The Hunger Games as outliers. (And The Hunger Games movies are made by Lionsgate—no major studio was smart enough to buy the rights, even though they’ve made so much cash that Lionsgate has leveled up.)

Sure, The 400 Blows belongs in the canon of the most important films of all time—Boyhood might, too—but watching both films, I felt exhausted in the exact same way. Why must I always care about a boy’s coming-of-age story, when there are so few movies similarly tracking and mythologizing the growth of a girl?

Amy Nicholson, “Why I’m Just About the Only Critic Who Found Boyhood Less than Fascinating.” (via georgeorsonwelles)

Every generation has a modern media mythology that serves as a framework for entertaining as well as educating about ethics, morality, issues of race, gender, class, and so on. For the past several years, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have served in that role for tens of millions… [yet w]e have a generation coming of age with these characters and this completely mapped-out universe. It could be argued that it’s never been done better. But no matter what your age, there is always a fantasy/sci-fi/superhero realm that helps you to explore your place in the world, your identity, and your ideals. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is that realm for this generation.

Arnold T. Blumberg

You’re talking about newspeople who don’t even know anything about hip-hop culture. It’s so disrespectful for them to even comment on something they have no idea about. They don’t say anything when they’re watching the Victoria’s Secret show and seeing boobs and thongs all day. Why? Shame on them. Shame on them for commenting on “Anaconda” and not commenting on the rest of the oversexualized business we’re a part of.

Nicki Minaj, on criticism of her Anaconda cover

Do we already live in a post-apocalyptic age, in which consumer wasting and willing enslavement to our technologies is not imminent but immanent, that is, already arrived? While the world goes to waste for future generations (persons we can only apprehend in the imagined world of the post-apocalyptic film), we distract ourselves from disaster by watching it as entertainment on a lit screen in a darkened amphitheater. … The savviest of these post-apocalyptic films recognize that the ultimate marker of apocalypse is not some yet to be enacted marker of depravity, like cannibalism or environmental catastrophe. Rather, films like Wall-E, The Matrix, and David Croenenberg’s prescient films Videodrome and Existentz suggest that the end of civilization is within our sights—literally. The apocalypse lies in our mass addiction to the entertainment spectacle, an apathy-causing narcotic that cleverly implicates the very film delivering us the warning. The medium is indeed the message, and the message is, tune in or be tuned out.

Christopher Schmidt, Why are dystopian films on the rise again