eco-anarchy links

---"The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes."

---"Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed." --Julian Assange

---an interview with James Brown

---"the proper way to tame all those Yemeni kids angry about the drone strikes is to distract them with—ready?—cute cats on YouTube and Angry Birds on their phones" --Evgeny Morozov

---the modern surveillance state

---"the logic justifying drone attacks comes full circle: we kill them because they are our enemies, and they are our enemies because we kill them."

---"what if computers were able to learn from us to the point they could instantly draw on every interaction we’ve ever had online?"

---media attention after a murder in Woolwich

---"every movie I have mentioned and many more besides, from mega-budget spectacle out to the indie fringe, is just a mechanism for deflecting actual political resistance into the symbolic realm. And, hey, having a godlike quartet of prankster-magicians increase my bank balance several times over sounds like a lot more fun than contemplating the impossible or implausible social changes that would be required in order to divert Wall Street’s zillions to better purposes." --Andrew O'Hehir

---“If you want to make an anarchist film, make it with a corporation”  --Zal Batmanglij, director of The East

---social media-fueled protest in Turkey and in Zuccotti Park

---White One Hundred

---discussing Samuel Fuller

---"Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives."

---"poverty is what makes the rich, rich."

---"A higher-up declared that, forthwith, every story in the magazine had to answer at least one of two questions: 'How do I dress?' and 'How can I get laid?'" --Peter Rainer

---"How to make an indie movie"

---Richard Brody considers Howard Hawks' Scarface

---trailers for The Act of Killing, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and Machete Kills

---"Nasser al-Awlaki told me that, when he found out that his son was on a kill list, he wrote a letter to President Obama and said basically 'Can’t we resolve this some other way? If my son did something, can’t you present the evidence?' He got no response."

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thank you for the links. I'd like your opinion on an article I just read on Cracked called ''5 overused Twist Endings it's time for Movies to Retire'' - I won't provide the link in case Blogger thinks I'm spamming, you can google it! I found it very interesting and it made me think a lot: Are there any original twist endings left? Is there a point in having a twist ending apart from a quick, cheap thrill?
I think that the when faced with this kind of screenwriting conundrum, filmmakers have to deal with increasingly sophisticated audience expectations about narrative form, making it ever harder to come up with a third act that anyone would find at all compelling, so the cliched quality of twist endings would naturally follow. After just watching Man of Steel, I inclined to think that the screenwriting committee of that film just went with the most confusing and bombastic ending to deal with the problem.