newcritics

Cross-posted at The Chutry Experiment.
Newsweek, of all places, has a fascinating intellectual exercise in which they ask several of their film and media writers to name one popular culture text that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Obviously, the idea of capturing the zeitgeist of [...]

I haven’t posted in newcritics in far too long, in part because of teaching and writing obligations, but in the spirit of year-end list-making, I thought I’d share some recent reflections I posted on the practice of popular culture list-making over at The Chutry Experiment.

With the end of the calendar year fast approaching and end [...]

Cross-posted from The Chutry Experiment
Starting with its premiere last night on HBO, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Recount (IMDB), the cable channel’s dramatization of the month-long battle between Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2000 election. I did ultimately watch the whole thing, but it’s a hard movie to take [...]

We have the terrorists on the run. We’re keeping them on the run. One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.–George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 28, 2003
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in [...]

To celebrate the first anniversary of newcritics, Tom has invited contributors to identify their most important single piece of media from the previous year, or perhaps, more specifically as Tony Alva reminds me, “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” As usual, I’m somewhat late to the blog [...]

As documentary films persist as an important aspect of the wider cinematic public sphere, definitions of documentary and its social and political role have become increasingly important. Invariably, when I mention at a cocktail party that I am interested in documentary, at least one partygoer will corner me in the kitchen and challenge me [...]

Cross-posted at The Chutry Experiment, but I thought New Critics readers might be interested in some of the questions about authorship raised in Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about child painter Marla Olmstead, My Kid Could Paint That.
My Kid Could Paint That (IMDB), Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary focuses on Marla Olmstead, a four-year old child painter who took [...]

One of the tasks that has kept me busy over the last few weeks has been teaching a senior-level seminar course on the theme “Documenting Injustice.” The course examines various strategies and debates about the role of documentary practices (written, photographic, and filmic) in depicting various forms of injustice, and one of the issues [...]

While Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko may not receive nearly the attention that his last film, Fahrenheit 9/11 did, I think that Moore’s scathing critique of the health-care industry deserves wider attention, if only because it challenges the way that our current health-care system, with its incessant ads for drug companies and minimal hospital stays, [...]

Cross-posted on my blog, but I thought New Critics readers might be interetsed: Everyone is talking about the American Film Institute’s updated Top 100 list. I’m intrigued by these kinds of lists, in part because I think they do introduce important questions about taste and about our criteria for evaluating films, and while I [...]

One of the coolest uses of web video–or perhaps more precisely mobile video–is Yellow Arrow’s documentary project about the Washington, D.C., harDCore punk scene, Capital of Punk. The project features ten short videos that you can watch either on your computer, with the scene’s prominent locations highlighted on a Google map, or via video [...]

In his post on The Sopranos, Dennis commented that “the longer a TV series runs, the tougher it is to end.” I think Dennis is basically right about this point. As TV series develop increasingly complex story worlds, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide any satisfactory closure for those worlds. Because [...]

In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel has jumped into the fray ignited by Motoko Rich’s New York Times article on the reduction in the number of pages devoted to book (and film) reviews in daily newspapers. I’ve already written at some length on this topic on my personal blog, [...]

Like Dennis, I’m a new contributor to Newcritics, and I’m pleased to be joining an impressive list of authors, although now that I’m writing for a new blog, I’m suddenly confronted with a variation of writer’s block. So maybe I’ll start by acknowledging my double addictions to classical Hollywood films and to viral videos–an [...]