privatized links

---Gangster Culture in the Movies

---Moonrise Kingdom's letter-writing montage

---How Motion Pictures Became The Movies 1908-1920

---The Avengers visual effects featurette

---Zero Dark Thirty accepts without hesitation or question the importance of this unconstitutional detention policy as crucial to the torture program. From the very first days of the war on terror, the US government rounded up individuals globally and began to question them brutally. Whether they actually had information to reveal, whether the government had any concrete evidence against them, they held hundreds—in the end, thousands—of detainees in US custody at secret CIA black sites worldwide, in the prisons of allied states known for their own torture policies, at Bagram Detention Center in Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo, which was the crown jewel of the Bush administration's offshore detention system.

Dan and Maya themselves not only travel to secret black sites to obtain valuable information from detainees, but to the cages and interrogation booths at Bagram where men in those now-familiar orange jumpsuits are shown awaiting a nightmare experience.  Bigelow's film repeatedly suggests that it was crucially important for national security to keep a pool of potential information sources—those detainees—available just in case they might one day turn out to have information." --Karen Greenberg

---behind the scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

---"this is going to mean 1362 bookstores disappearing from the American landscape — less than two years after 686 Borders stores disappeared."

---"'Well we can fly where we want, we can shoot where we want, because we can."

---Brakhage

---The Thirty Nine Steps


---"I’d like to make two points here. First, we sometimes mistakenly think of 'film criticism' as something that is performed exclusively in the journalistic/cinephile domain of film culture, while academics devote themselves to 'theory' or 'history'. This isn’t quite true: In reality, there is a lot of good, in-depth film criticism written by scholars. To take just a handful of examples, think of Tom Gunning on Lang; Joe McElhaney on Minnelli and Hitchcock; Dan Morgan on Godard; Steve Shaviro on ‘pop cinema’; David Bordwell on Ozu; or James Naremore on Welles and Kubrick. These folks are (or were) all full-time academic scholars.

Second, I think the potential for mutual learning and cross-fertilization of work between the academic and journalistic domains is immense. But there are barriers to entry on both sides. For journalists, it is knowledge of academic specialized language and of the traditions (and the histories of those traditions) of various schools of thought that have animated writing about movies. For scholars, it’s sometimes a tendency to read and cite other scholars almost exclusively, rather than looking to journalistic outlets or the fertile, fast-transforming landscape of Internet film criticism.

Similarly, when I read journalistic film critics in newspapers, magazines or on the web, I often find myself wishing that they would cultivate, even if modestly, an ongoing familiarity with scholarly work. There is one indispensable website that makes this activity much easier than it once used to be: scholar Catherine Grant’s Film Studies for Free, which posts vast amounts of scholarly (and other) work available in open-access form on the web. Bottom: I think that today, journalists and academics have less reason to not be acquainted with and inspired by each other’s activities and writing than ever before."  --Girish Shambu

---trailers for Beyonce: Life Is But a Dream, 42, The Pirate Bay, TranceGoogle and the World Brain, and Wrong

---"decreased air quality, insect-borne diseases, and 'threats to mental health' are all on the docket for the coming decades."

---Hollywood: Allergic to Originality

---"If you come out, others condemn you for politicizing your private life (read: making them uncomfortable) but if you don't you contribute, however non-malevolently its intended, to the repression and the homophobia that flourishes through societally-condoned ignorance."  --Nathaniel R.

---behind the scenes of The Grandmaster

---"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.

Will you join us?"  --Aaron Swartz

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