ababeel links

---"public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation"

---"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity."

---"Doyathing" by Gorillaz

---the 50 greatest opening title sequences

---"It’s a great loafer’s job” and the stand-up roots of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris 

---the iPad 3 expanding

---the battle over Citizen Kane

---Alphaville remixed

---"IT WAS IN SEPTEMBER 2006 that I heard a drone for the first time, flying over the mud-walled village of Ali Khel, a couple of miles west of Miram Shah. It was a hot summer night, too hot in the house of the building-contractor friend with whom I was staying, so I had gone out to sleep in the open along with several laborers who worked for him. The men were telling me about their travels in Afghanistan, how they would cross the border to fight for the Taliban and then return after a week or two to North Waziristan to work and make some money. Then I heard the buzzing, far above our heads -- like a bee, but heavier and unceasing, drifting in and out of earshot. The laborers said nothing."

---the problem with trying to ask the police for a complaint form

---"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"

---photos from Chernobyl and The Lively Morgue

---Gotye's "Easy Way Out"

---Ed Howard and Jason Bellamy discuss Spike Lee's Bamboozled

---Melissa Harris-Perry's problem with The Help

---Divine Trash, the John Waters documentary

---trailers for The Other Side of Sleep, Frankenweenie, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, ParaNormanBernie, The Avengers, and H+  

---La Jetee

 ---as oil prices surge, as oceans acidify, and as global temperatures rise, it will be increasingly hard to find good sushi

Comments

Craig said…
Great links as always. The problem with that "Battle over Citizen Kane" doc, though, is it makes the seductive yet utterly false and misleading claim that Welles and Hearst were a lot alike. It also promotes the well-worn Welles-as-failure storyline (as does its awful fictional counterpart, "RKO 281"), which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, is accurate only if you think of Welles as a Hollywood filmmaker, rather than an independent filmmaker who got Hollywood funding for his first movie. To take nothing away from "Citizen Kane," as history is showing us, his entire career left a whole bunch of pretty damned interesting and important films we're only beginning to understand (and see).
Thanks, Craig, for pointing out the weaknesses of the documentary. Welles seemed incapable of shooting any scene in a conventional way, and I like the way he subversively went after one of the largest targets (Hearst) of his time period.

Too bad about Damsels in Distress. Since Metropolitan is one of my favorite films, I hope to like Stillman's more recent work more than you did.
Craig said…
"Damsels" is one of those movies I can see others outright loving or hating. For me, it's one where I feel both, often at the same time. I'll be curious to see what you and everyone else thinks of it; the audience was with it for a while, but that affection petered out.