The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews
The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews |
| 'Horror film' puts Internet privacy under spotlight Posted: Stalking isn't Cullen Hoback's style, but the chance to confront Mark Zuckerberg about the dark side of the Internet was just too good to pass on. "Mr Zuckerberg? I'm working on a documentary," the independent filmmaker asked the Facebook founder, strolling in a T-shirt and jeans on the leafy sidewalk outside his southern California home. "I was wondering if I could just ask you a couple of questions? Do you still think privacy is dead? What are your real thoughts on privacy?" "Are you guys recording?" Zuckerberg sheepishly replied. "Will you please not?" "I can stop," said Hoback, switching off his video camera, prompting Zuckerberg to loosen up, smile and invite Hoback to connect with Facebook's PR team – unaware that Hoback was still recording with a pair of spy glasses. It's a telling scene in Terms And Conditions May Apply, in which Hoback raises disturbing questions about the mountains of online data being collected, shared and stored by governments and Internet giants alike. The title derives from the rambling fine print most Internet users never bother to read when they sign on to a new online service or app – blissfully ignoring that they're entering into a legally binding contract. "I think the craziest thing about this whole experience is that I didn't realise I was making a horror film," the Los Angeles-based Hoback told AFP in a telephone interview. Two years in the making, Terms And Conditions was pretty much complete by the time Edward Snowden came forward with his revelation, leaving Hoback just enough time to tack a quick mention of the whistleblower onto the end of his film. "The story is constantly evolving, and it's hard sometimes to put the keyboard down and stop editing," he said. While it makes no blockbuster revelations, Terms And Conditions succeeds in weaving a series of Internet privacy issues over the years into a single narrative that's still playing itself out in real life. For a typical Internet user, it says, it would take 180 hours – the equivalent of one full month of work a year – to fully read all the terms and conditions attached to his or her favourite websites. "They're poorly written and they're exhaustive. They take into perpetuity everything you could ever imagine," said Hoback, for whom Internet privacy is "the biggest civil liberties issue of our time." Google's terms of service, for instance, clocks in at 1,711 words, according to an AFP count, not including a separate 2,382-word privacy policy that is still about 1,000 words shorter than the Google Chrome browser policy. Terms And Conditions also explains how Internet users, by clicking on a website's "agree" button, consent to their online lives being archived, shared with third parties or passed on to government agencies without notice. "I really think of the audience as the main character, because this has been happening to us for all of these years," said Hoback, whose 2007 documentary Monster Camp examined the cult world of action-figure enthusiasts. "The problem is, right now, you either get the service (you want to use on the Internet) or you don't," he said. "There's no one sitting at your side of the table negotiating these contracts." As for his sidewalk encounter with Zuckerberg, whose social media colossus has come under fire for modifying its user policies without notice, Hoback said he wanted to make a point. "I just wanted him to say, 'Look, I don't want you to record me,' and I wanted to say, 'Look, I don't want you to record us'," he said. "That was really the motive there." – AFP |
| Posted: [unable to retrieve full-text content]Peter Jackson celebrates the end of 'The Hobbit' filming with his cat, Mr Smudge. |
| Posted: Seven bright spots to end a crowded, messy summer at the movies. If you've been an avid moviegoer this summer, we understand that you might be worn out by now. Maybe you've got superhero fatigue or apocalypse overload, or maybe you're just fed up to the gills with gunshots and fights and things blowing up and tough guys overcoming impossible odds. And maybe, as July comes to an end, you're ready to stay away from the multiplexes for a while, to spend August catching up on Breaking Bad or House Of Cards or rooting on the Dodgers. But hang on a second. The summer movie landscape may seem as blighted and unappealing as the ravaged planet in After Earth or the zombiescape of World War Z – but with a month to go, there are actually a few movies that might be worth leaving the house to see. Besides, the volume of releases slacks off in August, meaning that some of these flicks could have a little more room to breathe than their May, June and July counterparts, which were shoved out in a brutally overstuffed release schedule that meant anything that didn't come out of the box with a bang was DOA. Note: We've only seen two of these movies, The Spectacular Now and Short Term 12, so don't blame us if they're not as good as we think they might be. But this is summertime, and hope springs eternal. Elysium (Aug 22) This is the big one. In 2009, Neill Blomkamp put a fresh spin on the sci-fi flick with District 9, which came out of nowhere to capture a Best Picture nomination. His follow-up is also set in the future, with bigger names in the cast (Matt Damon, pic below, and Jodie Foster) and a plotline (guy with cancer tries to fight his way to the one-percenters' haven in the sky where they can cure it) that should allow Blomkamp to once again slide social commentary into the action genre. Will this be the rare movie that brings a brain to a too-often-mindless arena? Hopes are high enough that Elysium tops our must-see list. Kick-A** 2 (Aug 29) If the original Kick-A** is any indication, the film's violence will be excessive but also cartoonish and tongue-in-cheek. Like the original, K-A2 is based on comic books by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr, which should guarantee that it will be as zestfully tasteless and gloriously offensive as its predecessor. Edgar Wright made three movies before this one, and the first two – Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz – were delightfully twisted comedies starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. So it's good news that The World's End stars Pegg and Frost as heavy drinkers whose attempt to complete a legendary pub crawl encounters some unexpected obstacles of alien origin. The film won mostly rave reviews after its July release in Britain – and in a summer long on end-of-the-world extravaganzas, this might be the right one to put the cherry on top of the impending apocalypse. Lee Daniels' The Butler (Sept 26) Daniels is hardly the sure thing he might have seemed after his Oscar winner Precious – his last film, The Paperboy, was an absurdly overheated Southern Gothic potboiler that needed to be a little worse to enter so-bad-it's-good territory. But he figures to show more restraint this time around, and you know that Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey and Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr and their castmates will all be acting up a storm. The Grandmaster The Grandmaster is a drama based on the life of Ip Man, a master of the Wing Chun style of martial arts. By all reports it mixes extraordinary action footage (and not a CG monster in sight!) with quieter and more philosophical sequences that have prompted occasional comparisons to the landmark Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Short Term 12One of the quietest but most touching films on the list, Destin Daniel Cretton's low-key drama won the jury and audience awards at this year's SXSW. It features a remarkable performance from Brie Larson as the supervisor at a foster-care home for at-risk teens, and has an array of fine teen actors playing the kids. Short Term 12 is a quiet gem that never gets mawkish but isn't afraid to be sentimental. Cretton, who adapted his short film based on his own experiences as a counselor, has made a touching, open-hearted movie that faces the darkness but also looks to the light, and one that insists that family can be forged in the toughest of circumstances. The Spectacular Now Remember when heartfelt coming-of-age movies were part of the major-studio mainstream release schedule? For today's moviegoers, The Breakfast Club and Say Anything and their ilk are ancient history, and films like The Spectacular Now are almost entirely the province of indie companies. But the indie arena suits this film, which consistently understates rather than overplays and features dead-on performances by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley that make them seem like real teenagers, not movie characters. Director James Ponsoldt, coming off the excellent but more harrowing Smashed, became a Hollywood hot property on the heels of this film's Sundance debut: He's now signed up to direct a Hillary Rodham Clinton biopic and is working on a few things for the Weinstein Co, including an adaptation of the musical Pippin. — Reuters |
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