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August 18, 2006
Friday Film Reads
I managed to survive day three of faculty orientation without any major scars, so here's yet another lazy entry with links to what I've been reading and thinking about this afternoon. First, Henry Jenkins, responding to an email from a former student, discusses in "City Blogging in Beirut," the role blogs and other digital media have played in the current Middle East conflict. Jenkins concludes that "We might think of these practices as a low tech form of grassroots convergence -- people taking up the responsibility to transmit information, stories, and images from one medium to another and in the process, broaden their circulation." I'm currently skimming Jenkins' Convergence Culture for one of the articles I'm writing, so I may have more to say on that a little later.
Second, via a comment on Eric Alterman's blog, I found a mention of WTC View (IMDB), which sounds far more interesting than Oliver Stone's 9/11 rescue story World Trade Center, and as Ruth Rosen points out, it's worth noting that Stone's film does little to dispel some of the false perceptions about the WTC attacks.
Finally, Green Cine has some early (and generally positive) Snakes on a Plane reviews, including Stephanie Zacharek's review for Salon, which reads the film less as a movie than as an experience: "Because while Snakes on a Plane barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event. A fellow critic present at the same showing said that afterward, he couldn't quite tell if the crowd actually liked the picture. But everyone sure liked being there." I'm going to try to catch a late screening (maybe at midnight) to see how SoaP plays down here, but the local art house is showing Who Killed the Electric Car?, and I'm enough of a documentary geek (and car hater) to delay seeing Snakes, even if it's only for a few hours.
Posted by chuck at August 18, 2006 4:35 PM
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