Editor’s Note: Projecting features a selection of great film and television focused writing from around the internet.
Steven Lloyd Wilson reflects on how the internet slowed things down enough for us to consume television on our own terms, for Pajiba:
Back before the Internet, movies lived in theaters for what seemed like forever, before disappearing into the ether of maybe eventually catching it on heavily edited television runs over the holidays. And missing a particular show pretty much meant that you missed it forever. Television couldn’t be serial in any meaningful way precisely because with an audience unable to timeshift or catch up on old episodes, they’d just be lost if they happened to go on vacation.
Sam Adams elucidates the need for editing awards in the coming awards season, for Criticwire:
But in spite of the fact that they’re usually awarded to a credited individual or individuals, awards, especially the ones bestowed by people outside the film industry, don’t recognize the process but the final product: That’s why it’s Best Editing, not Best Editor(s). Short of conducting an extensive investigation for each nominated film, there’s no way of knowing whether the credit for a bravura tracking shot should go to the director, the director of photography or the camera operator, yet few awards-bestowing bodies balk at handing out an award for cinematography, because everyone knows when a movie looks great.
Julia Marchese professes her deep heartbreak over what The New Beverly Cinema is becoming:
Over the past eight years, I felt I have given more of myself to the theater than I had to give. I have loved that place with all of me, and have told every soul I came in contact with about how absolutely fantastic it is. I have loved it more than any person should love a theater.
And now everything I have been fighting for with all of my heart all this time has just been taken away.
They’ve won.
I can’t fight anymore.
I am done.
Vikram Murthi looks at Pulp Fiction through the lens of postmodernism, for Movie Mezzanine:
It’s a pastiche of various cinematic modes—film noir, B-movies, samurai films, Blaxploitation—coupled with a disregard for coherent historicity, i.e. “the past” becomes The Past with no direct historical referent—the wall-to-wall ’50s iconography in the Jack Rabbit Slims diner, the ’60s pop music that scores its storms and their preceding calms, the ’70s “cool” exhibited by almost all the characters. It’s not necessary to read Pulp Fiction as a postmodern text. But a text that collects and samples various “surfaces” of previous texts to create a new one nevertheless lends itself to postmodern interpretations.
