captive attention links
---Incident by a Bank
---trailers for Thor: Ragnarok, Proud Mary, Call Me By Your Name, Una, Ready Player One, Justice League, 9 Doigts, Mother!, and Suburbicon
---"What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale, that film noir archetype of the scheming woman who preys on men? Even more than greed or coldheartedness, it might be deceit: a virtuosic ability to manipulate men with lies and playacting. The femme fatale is spawned by male anxiety—not prompted by women’s wartime emancipation, as many have argued, but arising from the age-old fear of being fooled by women, and the misogynistic belief that they are inherently duplicitous and inscrutable. This shapes the way actresses play femme fatales: they are often giving a performance of a performance, enacting a charade of feminine sweetness and frailty that satisfies the expectations and desires of their marks. In Eddie Muller’s Dark City Dames, Jane Greer recalls that when she played the enchanting thief, liar, and killer Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947), director Jacques Tourneur wasted no time on the character’s psychology, simply instructing her: 'First half—good girl. Second half—bad.' He told her to play it 'impassive,' conveying the depths of her evil through a shocking depthlessness. A woman like Kathie or Kitty almost doesn’t seem to have a real self beneath the layers of lies: she is, as a disgusted Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) tells Kathie, 'like a leaf the wind blows from one gutter to another.'" --Imogen Sara Smith
---Anatomy of a scene: Valerian
---five action sequences from Atomic Blonde
---"I still feel that we’re still in the early years of what digital will ultimately become." --Henry Blodget
---Aldous Huxley on Technodictators
---"If there’s a defining mood to Brooks’s work as writer/director/star, it’s one of profound restlessness and dissatisfaction, often followed closely by the shame of leading a life of privilege and comfort and its never being enough. As David, Brooks wants for nothing but perspective, and the price for that perspective is the liquidated value of his material possessions and a sizable share of his dignity and self-worth. In the film’s moral reckoning, it’s a fair sum." --Scott Tobias
---"'Cool' was our mantra on this film, and it became very empowering" --Cindy Evans
---The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers
---"The premise of hijacking is that it undermines your control. This system is better at hijacking your instincts than you are at controlling them. You’d have to exert an enormous amount of energy to control whether these things are manipulating you all the time. And so we have to ask: How do we reform this attention economy and the mass hijacking of our mind?" --Tristan Harris
---"Charlize Theron Is Not Here to Make Friends" by Anne Helen Petersen
---Romero's filmmaking tips---Zygote
---"They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising and subscription revenue." --Tobias Rose-Stockwell
---Schorem
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