Synthetic Cinema
The 21st-Century Movie Machine
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Slaves of Vision: The VR World
Films are becoming more and more like videogames in terms of spectacle and special effects, but without the game-playing aspect of controlling the narrative, the viewer’s interest almost immediately wanes. The...
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Synthetic Cinema: Leaving the Real World
What precisely is “synthetic cinema”? It’s filmmaking that’s motivated by the profit motive alone, devoid of any genuine artistry, designed solely to make money. When digital cinema first appeared, computer-ge...
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Service Providers: Form Over Content
Contemporary film directors, most of whom work within rigid genre formats, have become little more than “service providers” who create long, loud, open-ended, and ultimately unsatisfying “epic” films for an ev...
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The 21st-Century Movie Machine
Streaming is the future of cinema, and theaters are part of the past. Theatrical “real estate” was once essential to the opening of a film, but today, it’s not really necessary. Naturally, huge spectacle films...
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The DC Universe
As the millennium dawned, the two major comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, were moving aggressively toward television and film projects featuring their most iconic characters, but this time designed as majo...
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Origins
Though comic book movies are now seen as mainstream entertainment, they were once designed specifically for children, and usually formatted as “serials” which played out on successive Saturday mornings at movi...
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The Marvel Universe
While rival DC focused on building a media empire around the popularity of two of its signature entities, Superman and Batman, Marvel’s first dedicated foray into film production was a surprising choice. Steph...
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Indies and Outliers
While comic book movies are a big business, dominated on the whole by multinational conglomerates, there are also films that don’t really fit into the overall scheme of things—films that take additional chance...
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Animé
Animé (animated cartoons) and manga (comics) are multicultural creations, a fusion of traditional Japanese visual arts and Western cultural influence. When Japan opened for trade in 1853, a long-standing popul...
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This Is the End
In 1967, Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first eponymously album, containing the determinedly fatalistic song “The End,” but the idea of such terminal nihilism is nothing new. At the time of the song...
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The New Hollywood Economy
Today, production expenses in Hollywood have gone through the roof, and yet the demand for escapism remains as strong as ever. For the movies thrive on such fantasies—whether large-scale disaster films, or sma...
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The Visible Invisible
In the twenty-first century, we live in the age of the visible invisible; everything is supposedly available to us online, but in fact, only a small fraction of the knowledge and culture of even the most recen...
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The Center Will Not Hold
Social instability and inequality in America is seemingly reflected in the paranoid dreams of other, even more repressive regimes, as evidenced by such “guns and ammo” governmental takeover fantasies as Antoin...
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Hollywood under Attack
Hollywood, as a business, is increasingly under attack, as demonstrated by the cyberattack on Sony Pictures Corporation. What happened with the Sony hack was a wake-up call to the entire industry. The studios ...
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Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point
Much has been written on Richard C. Sarafian’s existential road movie Vanishing Point (1971), a shambling, glorious wreck of a film that nevertheless manages to achieve a certain sort of ragged splendor in its co...
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The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist
Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance films, often with swee** tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophül.....
