As a teacher-scholar, Courtney Brannon Donoghue observes how the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) serves as a microcosm for understanding contemporary media industries where activities span production, distribution, and exhibition as well as reflect the evolving nature of film festivals.
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Tags: Black Mass, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang, My Name is Emily, Platform, Ridley Scott, Room, Scott Cooper, Simon Fitzmaurice, The Martian, Toronto International Film Festival
Posted in Film, Industry, Perspectives | Comments Off on TIFF 2015 Report
Mary Beth Haralovich reports on her experience at the Telluride Film Festival.
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Tags: Battle of the Century, Beasts of No Nation, Carol, cinema, Danny Boyle, Die Niebelungen, Eddie Cayhono, Eric Khoo, Fritz Lang, He Named Me Malala, Ixcanul, Jafar Panahi, Jayra Bustamente, Laurel and Hardy, L’inhumaine, Marcel L’Herbier, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Participant Media, Peter Sellars, Picture, Pierre Rissient, Rachel Kushner, Siti, Spotlight, Steve Jobs, Taxi, Telluride Film Festival, Todd Haynes
Posted in Film, Industry, Perspectives | Comments Off on Notes from the Telluride Film Festival
The newly rebranded GeekyCon fan convention struggles to reconcile commerce and community, negotiate the inclusion of more white (cis) men in a heretofore female/queer environment, and create a "positive" fan environment that still leaves room for dissent.
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Tags: branding, fan conventions, feminism, GeekyCon, LeakyCon, youth
Posted in Film, Internet, Perspectives, TV | 4 Comments »
Magic Mike XXL adds new iconography to the intersectionally raced, gendered, and very classed pleasures found within the women's film through its attention to the centrality of women's sexual desires vis-à-vis the deployment of male bodies who serve to maintain that pleasure.
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Tags: Amber Heard, Bryan Adams, Channing Tatum, female gaze, Ginuwine, homosociality, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Joe Manganiello, Magic Mike XXL, Matt Bomer, Nine Inch Nails, Steven Soderbergh, women's pleasure
Posted in Film, Perspectives | Comments Off on “Any God Worth Believing in Sends You Dudes in Thongs When in Need”: Exploring Women’s Pleasure in Magic Mike XXL
The Mad Max series continues to be a cult classic, in part because it re-appropriates the western and the road movie and redeploys them to create an environmentally catastrophic vision of a future that we could create.
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Tags: American frontier, Aunty Emity, Australia, Beyond Thunderdome, feminism, Fury Road, George Miller, Imperator Furiosa, Mad Max, On the Road, race, road movies, science fiction, spaghetti westerns, The Man with No Name, The Road Warrior, The Wild One
Posted in Film, Perspectives | 1 Comment »
Li Cornfeld considers the technofuturism and Cold War nostalgia in "Tomorrowland," in light of the Walt Disney Company’s own corporate departure from space age optimism.
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Tags: 1964 World's Fair, Brad Bird, cold war, Damon Lindelof, Disney, Disneyland, EPCOT, Magic Kingdom, NASA, nostalgia, retro-futurism, technofuturism, Tomorrowland, Walt Disney
Posted in Film, Perspectives | Comments Off on “They Repackaged It”: Technofuturism in Tomorrowland
Post by Debra Ramsay, Research Associate, Technologies of Memory Project, Glasgow University Following is the second installment in the series of fortnightly blogs “From Nottingham and Beyond,” featuring contributions from faculty in the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media and our alumni working in higher education or media industries in the U.K. and abroad. This week’s...
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Tags: "American Sniper", "Chris Kyle", Cling Eastwood, propaganda, war films
Posted in Film, From Nottingham and Beyond, Perspectives | 2 Comments »
Interstellar (2014) made its well-known debut last weekend. In Chicago, the film (yes, we can still call it that) screened in its “intended” format of 70mm at the Navy Pier IMAX. Its appearance there and at other such venues was predictably celebrated by old school cinephiles as yet another defiant declaration of celluloid’s continuing...
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Tags: distribution, drive-in theater, film, keno
Posted in Film, Film, Industry, Perspectives | Comments Off on Drive-Ins, and the Stubborn Usefulness of Film Nostalgia
This series on the NYFF52 concludes with consideration for Foxcatcher, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and Clouds of Sils Maria.
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Tags: Clouds of Sils Maria, Foxcatcher, New York Film Festival 2014, Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Posted in Film, Perspectives | Comments Off on New York Film Festival 2014, Part Four: The Reel Deal
Dina Khdair analyzes the conflict between interior and exterior in Highway and Queen.
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Tags: Highway, Queen
Posted in Film, Perspectives | Comments Off on No Place Like Home? Women on the “Outside” in Hindi Cinema
This year a number of the initial screenings have left me wondering whether they can conceivably get any better.
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Tags: Asia Argento, Cinema Journal, Goodbye to Language, Hill of Freedom, Hong Sang Soo, Jean-Luc Godard, Misunderstood, New York Film Festival 2014
Posted in Current Events, Film | Comments Off on New York Film Festival, 2014, Part One: Small Marvels
The fusion of cinema, television, and personality has critics resounding with near-universal praise for Cinemax's The Knick, resulting in a very heavy ride on the Steven Soderbergh bandwagon.
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Tags: auteurism, Cinemax, Steven Soderbergh, The Knick
Posted in Film, Perspectives, TV | 2 Comments »
Why do critics claim that only "fanboys" can make sense of Guardians of the Galaxy?
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Tags: Blockbuster Films, comics, critics, fandom, Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel
Posted in Current Events, Film, Film | Comments Off on The Guardians of Good Taste: Critics and the “Fanboy” Menace
This second installment of "I, Reboot" dives into the origins of the reboot-as-narrative-analogy and distinguishes "reboot" from "ret-con."
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Tags: comic books, comics, DC Comics, film, industry, Marvel Comics, reboot, ret-con, semantics, television, TV
Posted in Film, Industry, Perspectives, TV | 13 Comments »
What is a reboot, then? This is the overarching question of this series of articles and one which I have been wrestling with for six years or so.
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Tags: Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan, comic books, film, industry, movie business, reboot, semantics
Posted in Film, Industry, Perspectives | Comments Off on I, Reboot (Part 1)