attention
9 films tagged with “attention”
Sorry to Bother You
The film opens every transaction with an apology, and the apology is the business model. Sorry to bother you is what Cassius says because bothering people is precisely what he has been hired to do: to interrupt strangers…
The Social Network
The Social Network begins with a breakup and a night of work, and the sequence is not incidental — it is the film's thesis stated before the title card. A young programmer, drunk and humiliated, goes back to his room and…
Wag the Dog
Two weeks before a presidential election, a fixer named Conrad Brean is brought in to manage a crisis: the President has been caught in a sexual indiscretion, and the story is about to break. Brean's solution is not to d…
Quiz Show
The quiz show scandal of 1958 is usually told as a story about fraud, and it was fraud, but Robert Redford's film is interested in a more structural question: how does an institution arrive at a lie that everyone inside…
Wings of Desire
Damiel and Cassiel drift through Berlin in 1987. The Wall is still standing. The city is full of people thinking — not talking, thinking — and the two angels can hear every one of them. They sit in the Staatsbibliothek a…
Videodrome
Brian O'Blivion is the first character in cinema to understand that a medium is not a delivery mechanism but an environment, and to draw the conclusion that an environment, given enough time and exposure, does not merely…
Being There
The first thing to understand about Being There is that Chance the Gardener does not deceive anyone. He never claims expertise. He never adjusts his language to his audience. He says what he knows — that gardens have sea…
Network
Network opens with a firing and ends with an assassination, and everything in between is an experiment in measurement. Howard Beale is dismissed because his ratings have fallen; he announces on air that he will kill hims…
The Candidate
The proposition is clean. Marvin Lucas, a campaign manager who has run enough races to know exactly what losing looks like, approaches Bill McKay with an offer that sounds like freedom: run for the Senate against an incu…