The movies will only get bigger, shinier and more thoroughly standardized, like airports and hotels in big, business-hub capitals. But this is only half the story. […] Both the metastasis of the blockbuster and the viral replication of the small-scale art movie are digital phenomena.
Tag: nytimes
Two (Sucked) Thumbs Up – NYTimes.com
How much can I trust the critical faculties in which I once had so much faith? Now that I see so few movies, every single one is an ecstatic experience. They all become impossibly brilliant and entertaining.
Who Will Prosper in the New World – NYTimes.com
A lot of jobs will consist of making people feel either very good or very bad about themselves.
The Strange Ascent of ‘Strained Pulp’ – NYTimes.com
There was a time when just about anything — dumb commercial entertainment, ugly clothes, the weird dishes your grandmother used to serve — could be appreciated and appropriated in quotation marks. Strained pulp is not quite that — its celebration of the formerly marginal and disreputable is serious and sincere. The condescension is not overt but is latent in the desire to correct and improve the recipes retrieved from the past, to finish vernacular artifacts with a highbrow glaze. We’re going to make ’em — movies, cocktails, regional dishes, zombie novels, garage-rock anthems — just the way they used to, but a little bit better. This strikes me as a form of snobbery. But then again, maybe I’m the snob.
Mark Larson 