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February 7, 2007

Media Legends Old and New

A grab-bag of topics I've been meaning to blog: First, Michael at Zigzigger comments on Anne Hornaday's glib description of early cinema audiences in her recent article on YouTube. In describing YouTube audiences, Hornaday makes reference to the legend of panicked filmgoers diving under their seats when they first encountered the Lumiere bothers' film of a train entering a station, an account that most film scholars now regard as fabricated. As Michael adds, however, Hornaday's article, which charcterizes YouTube as an "uncurated museum" of video clips and home movies, is generally pretty insightful.

David Bordwell has an interesting read on Sharon Waxman's recent New York Times article on the limited output of many of today's indie auteurs such as David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kimberly Peirce, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and Baz Luhrmann. Boys Don't Cry for example, was released nearly eight years ago, and Punch Drunk Love came out four years ago, and Aronofsky's The Fountain appeared seven years after his previous film, Requiem for a Dream. Bordwell outlines five basic explanations offered by Waxman and addresses whether they are credible explanations.

I think he's mostly right, but the fourth explanation he identifies--that today's indie auteurs don't know how to deal with the post-9/11 world--doesn't really hold water in my opinion (Bordwell also seems relatively skeptical regarding this explanation). After all, a number of indie directors have already produced elegant and thoughtful responses to these issues, including Russell himself in I [Heart] Huckabees. I'm also inclined to agree with Bordwell that the entertainment industry has changed considerably since the 1970s. Karina also fact-checks many of Waxman's claims and finds them rather lacking, noting that her desciption of Russell's Huckabees as "disastrous" might be motivated by her personal "contempt" for Russell (Karina also points out what many people seem to have forgotten: when it first hit--and quickly disappeared from--theaters, Fight Club. was considered a box office bomb).

Finally, I've been meaning to mention that In Media Res, the MediaCommons videoblog has been putting out some interesting material over the last few days. Worth checking out: Jeffrey Sconce's reading of the press conference after the Cartoon Network's guerilla marketing campaign set off a war on terror panic in Boston a few days ago.

Posted by chuck at February 7, 2007 10:27 AM

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