Category: rePosts

The cumulative result of “Boyhood” is rather touching and stunning and while Linklater is seemingly interested in the slighter, less trafficked moments of life, he uncovers a lot of sublimity overall (the fact that he somehow entrusted the entire movie with an unknown, then six-year-old boy, reveals just what kind of cinematic Buddha he is). The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, and the collective power of it all is quite moving, as a strange, almost unexplainable melancholy and pride hits you as “Boyhood” comes to its conclusion. We’ve watched Mason on his voyage to becoming a young adult, and we have a deep sense of gratification in the knowledge that he’s going to become a fine young man one day. And there’s a sadness in that you just don’t want “Boyhood” to end, with the film a remarkable accomplishment that won’t be forgotten anytime soon. [B+]
via Sundance Review: Richard Linklater’s Ambitious ‘Boyhood’ Starring Ethan Hawke & Patricia Arquette | The Playlist.

The show has always been fascinated by Holmes’s callousness toward those who love him, his tendency to abandon and exploit them: like Bones, House, and other dark TV geniuses who are his unacknowledged offspring, Holmes sees connections but can’t connect. He’s like a Google algorithm, if it were sexy and wore dashing wool coats. Halfway through his best-man speech, he describes a case in which a number of lovelorn women have had one-night stands with a “ghost” who disappears the next day. Sherlock gathers these lonely hearts in an elegant auditorium, where he interrogates them, searching for a pattern. It’s only gradually, as the camera toggles from closeups to dramatic shots from above, and then abruptly to images of Sherlock in his office, that we recognize what we’re actually seeing: a poetic representation of a virtual experience—Holmes is online, meeting the women through a discussion board. When his conversations end, the women vanish, and he closes his laptop.
The show is at its best in such moments, these sequences that capture the semi-virtual, semi-real ways that we think, and feel, and meet, and connect today. It’s a rare attempt to make visible something that we take for granted: a new kind of cognition, inflected by passion, that allows strangers to think out loud, solving mysteries together.
via Emily Nussbaum: “Sherlock” and Its Audiences : The New Yorker.

At the same time, as Alan Milburn has suggested in his somewhat oxymoronic role as the government’s “social mobility tsar”, internships might be made subject to same rules as the wider labour market – or, going further, we could establish a catch-all national internship service, so work experience was not just divided much more equitably, but also seen to be so. There would be squeals from the rightwing press and the private-school lobby, but so what? Any Labour fainthearts might recall that even Tony Blair used to talk about the many rather than the few.
You may have noticed one development that goes straight to the heart of all this. By way of underlining their interest in the great unwashed, independent schools have been hugely increasing fees, to the point that even affluent middle-class parents can’t afford them. The average boarding school now charges £27,600 a year. Therein, amid a great cloud of self-serving cant, lies proof of what too few people will admit: private education is part of the problem, not the solution.
via What exactly can private schools teach the state sector? | John Harris | Comment is free | The Guardian.

I’ve long been advocating for more character-based shows like this, series that embrace the world as it is instead of seeking refuge in the way it was or never will be. But with competition for eyeballs at an all-time high, it’s increasingly difficult to sell a network, even one as historically artist-friendly as HBO, on something that lacks an appreciable hook. I suppose that Looking’s hook is its gay characters and the occasionally explicit sex that entails. But there’s a difference between a hook and a cudgel. Behind the jokes about assless chaps, Looking is a proudly, almost sweetly romantic show that dares to suggest that only the tools for connection have changed, not our desire to connect in the first place.
via HBO’s New ‘Looking’ Sneaks Up on You in the Best Possible Way «.

6. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
Vinge’s brilliant 1992 novel is a space opera spanning most of the galaxy, but a good portion of the action is set on a pre-industrial world dominated by a dog-like species called the Tines. The Tines form hive minds out of small packs — singleton Tines are essentially disabled, while massive packs of hundreds become dim-witted and chaotic. Each pack functions as a single mind, but its members have their own personalities and can influence the pack personality and memories. Vinge does an incredible job imagining how these hive minds would create political empires, as well as what kinds of technology they’d want to invent.
via 10 Books That Will Change the Way You Understand the Mind.

Ibaka began his fifth season in Salt Lake City, in one of the impossibly faraway gyms that hosted those 1997 NBA Finals when Jordan ruled the NBA and Brazzaville was a war zone. He’s on pace to set career marks in minutes, points, and rebounds. Although it may be easy to brand Ibaka the best young African player in the league, that sells him short. Along with guys like Paul George, Damian Lillard, and Kawhi Leonard, he’s also one of the league’s best examples of player development and what can happen when a talented, hardworking kid is put into a nurturing environment in the right kind of organization.
The rapid globalization of the NBA has been remarkable for many reasons: On one level, international players like Ibaka demonstrate the value of a vaster global talent pool by heightening the overall level of play in the world’s premier basketball league. On another, it bridges the gap between places like Brazzaville and Moore, Oklahoma; it mimics the mounting connectedness of humanity. Stories like Ibaka’s provide proof of something more valuable than an NBA contract. And “making the leap” is more than just another locker-room aphorism. It’s a way to live.
via Thunder forward Serge Ibaka’s incredible journey from the Congo to the NBA – Grantland.

“Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.” ― Paul Theroux
via 23 Tips from Famous Writers for New and Emerging Authors | Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.

Johnson went on to produce a broad range of projects, including the Chronicles of Narnia films, Breaking Bad, Galaxy Quest, and Lance Hammer’s self-distributed drama Ballast. But looking back, he says a studio wouldn’t produce Rain Man today. It wouldn’t play to a broad enough audience, they’d say. The historical data doesn’t support its success.
“I go to pitch movies all the time and they say, ‘We love you, but know we’re not interested in dramas.’ If it won’t travel, if it’s too American, they aren’t interested. You point to a movie — ‘Look at how Argo did!’ — and they’ll [just] say it’s the exception that proves the rule.”
Making Rain Man — through a writer’s strike, and defined by non-commercial subject matter — was not easy. Still, Johnson says it never is.
“A lot of my contemporaries complain that [making movies] is harder than it ever was,” he says. “But I maintain that it’s always been hard. It’s just different.”
via Remembering Rain Man: The $350 Million Movie That Hollywood Wouldn’t Touch Today – Hollywood Prospectus Blog – Grantland.

Nonetheless, the very brief debates that go on among the Pashtuns feel refreshingly thoughtful for an American war movie — even if all that these ethnic men are doing is arguing about whether to save or sacrifice a white American. That argument and its outcome situates Lone Survivor within a long history of American movies in which ethnics circle the wagons around an outsider; Mel Brooks made a scathing joke of it 40 years ago this year. These 15 to 20 minutes of Lone Survivor could have been Berg’s entire movie. Instead, they comprise a dismaying set piece that aligns the movie with emptier blockbusters: more unexamined waste. This is Luttrell’s life, but at the movies his life has become another Hollywood ending.
via Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg, and ‘Lone Survivor’ – Grantland.