Monday Morning Links
Some reading material for your morning cup of coffee:
- The In Media Res feature is back up and running on the MediaCommons website after a brief break for the winter holidays. This week features an “Irony and Politics” theme, which is right up my alley.
- Miriam has a thoughtful review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, taking in the politics of adapting Upton Sinclair’s rather didactic novel, Oil!. I won’t have time to read the novel before the film reaches Fayetteville, but I’m interested in how Miriam explores some of the adaptation issues, including Anderson’s much greater emphasis on the psychology of the characters than the politics of capitalism. Interesting stuff, and I can’t wait to see the movie.
Update: While taking a break for lunch, I came across Oliver Willis’s pointer to the godawful trailer for Untraceable, a thriller featuring Diane Lane as a cop tracking someone who broadcasts murders on his website. I mention the trailer mostly because Oliver and his commenters point to one of my biggest pet peeves, the inability of Hollywood studios to depict internet use (or computer use in general) in interesting, thoughtful ways. While I haven’t seen Untraceable, which looks like a big-budget adaptation of Dee Snider’s Strangeland crossed with an Ashley Judd thriller, the trailer makes it appear that Hollywood depictions have advanced little since the era of Hackers, The Net, and Swordfish. Certainly part of the problem is the difficulty of depicting tension using mouse clicks, rather than typing on the keyboard, but these depictions of the internet always make me cringe. That being said, the degree to which the film suggests that audiences themselves are complicit in the culture of depictions of violence in the media might be interesting.
