media
13 films tagged with “media”
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…
Good Night, and Good Luck
Clooney shoots the film in black and white and confines it almost entirely to the CBS newsroom, and both choices are structural. The black and white is not nostalgia; it allows the film to integrate actual footage of Sen…
The Insider
The question at the centre of The Insider is not whether Jeffrey Wigand should speak. He has data showing that Brown & Williamson manipulated nicotine delivery while its executives testified to Congress, under oath, that…
The Truman Show
The Truman Show is the first film about a platform product, made a few years before anyone needed the word. The economics are stated plainly and are worth restating because they have become the default arrangement of the…
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…
RoboCop
The boardroom scene tells you everything the film is about, and it happens before the title character exists. Omni Consumer Products is demonstrating ED-209, a fully autonomous enforcement unit, to its senior leadership.…
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…
Rollerball
The premise of Rollerball sounds like a parable, and Jewison treats it like a procedural. In 2018, corporations have replaced governments, eliminated war, assigned populations to energy, food, transport and luxury conglo…
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…
The Great Dictator
The resemblance that makes the film possible was not invented by Chaplin. Hitler was born four days after him, in the same spring of 1889, and by the early thirties had adopted a toothbrush moustache that the most recogn…