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Hyped, discussed, and anticipated: Barbie is surely the film of the year. Even before its premiere at the height of the summer blockbuster season, the Barbie movie had achieved a level of public celebration and saturation that is uncommon in twenty-first century media culture. Today, buy-in for Barbie can still be witnessed in the proliferation of online memes, cross-promotions official and unofficial, and huge box-office profits. Barbie is also significant for being the highest-grossing feature film by a single woman director, an important achievement given Hollywood’s marginalization of women in directorial roles, and the film has also been explicitly described as a feminist movie by its producer and star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig. As Gerwig explains, “It’s feminist in a way that includes everyone.”1This introduction posits Barbie as both a landmark film and a way of measuring feminism’s place in popular discourse. The authors consider whether Barbie is the best evidence yet of the popularity of fourth-wave feminism in integrating feminist discourse into the mainstream, or simply another co-optation of feminist ideas. They also investigate the film’s negotiation of issues affecting contemporary women, including the cultural meanings of femininity, women’s aspirations and limitations, intersectionality, and the manosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Korean blockbuster film Exhuma (original title Pamyo) (2024) features several selling points that appeal to both audience and film reviewers. From these selling points, this review will focus on a dark side in Korean modern history: colonial remnants that should have been cleared away since the Liberation, but have still remained pretty much intact. Jae-hyun Jang, the director of Exhuma, approached the unresolved issue from the perspective of Korean shamanism, historically oppressed and marginalized, having lost its special function to help beings communicate, including human beings and higher beings. Chong-ho Kim (2003) calls the dominant ambivalence and complexity toward shamanism found in Korean society a ‘cultural paradox.’ The film Exhuma is an example of cultural paradox. It shows that clearing away the remnants of Japanese colonialism in Korea still has a long way to go, even 80 years after the Liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media has always played a significant role in shaping education. Visual cues and observable phenomena brought to life on screens or through vivid and engrossing sound effects make science accessible to people in ways that textbooks, journals and technical reports cannot. With the release of blockbuster films that tackle complex subjects, the science education community gets a chance to revisit how the story of science is told. This commentary considers how two blockbuster movies might be used to discuss how to teach science-technology-society topics in secondary classrooms. The NSTA Position Statements will also be examined in the context of science storytelling through popular media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using gendering as an artistic strategy, Daniela Comani rewrites not only the history of literature and publishing, but also the canon of general history, blockbusters movies and daily news. Over the years, Comani's artistic research has included photographic and video material produced by herself, as well as images and articles collected from magazines and newspaper which she put together into an ongoing archive, from which she has drawn since the 1990's and from which she continues to draw to create her works of art and her artist books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood will encounter some cultural policies when its films are imported to the Chinese film market on a revenue-sharing basis. These include a quota system, a censorship system and an uncertain release schedule. However, China has been the fastest growing film market since 2008 and the second largest film market in the world since 2012 (yet the current film industries worldwide are recovering from the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic). Despite the restrictive cultural policies, Hollywood, attracted by the promising profitability, have incorporated more Chinese roles and more plots about China to please the Chinese film regulators and audiences in order to gain access to the lucrative Chinese film market. Furthermore, the depiction of China has become more positive and diverse in recent Hollywood blockbusters compared with the Orientalist stereotypical images in the past. The author intends to examine the reasons behind the phenomenon through analysing the positively changing images of China from early Hollywood films to the recent Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the positively changing depiction of China illustrates China and the US negotiating the dynamic process of cross-cultural exchange in economic and political terms through compromise, competition and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the "wolf warrior cycle" on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the "wolf warrior diplomacy" image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese state-endorsed films have transformed in the past decade. These films make up the "new mainstream", a genre defined by its ability to match strides with Hollywood commercial cinema. But, what exactly comprises Hollywood's impact on official Chinese media? How does it manifest onscreen? Exploring the relationship between state-endorsed blockbusters and Hollywood, this article analyzes a pioneer of the "new mainstream", Wolf Warrior II (2017). This film stands out as the inaugural collaboration between Chinese media conglomerates and Marvel Cinematic Universe directors. From this collaboration emerges the film's protagonist, Leng Feng, an ex-soldier who saves civilians from rebel forces in Africa. As Leng enacts justice at home and abroad, however, affective portrayals of his feats foreground ambiguity over coherence and unresolvable impulses over a singular agendum. These melodramatic sites of contradiction, I argue, culminate in the film's own "global superhero vernacular". Such a vernacular aligns with transnationally circulating serial franchise logics, pushing the film's connection with Marvel beyond local–global and state–market binaries. Ultimately, my analysis complicates the smooth thread that links together the superhuman individual, nationalist sovereign power, and international order, thereby re-evaluating state-endorsed cinema's role within Chinese media cultures and social fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extent to which the films Wolf Warrior 2 (战狼2) (Wu 2017) and The Wandering Earth (流浪地球) (Guo 2019) might help to cultivate pride in the dream of a revitalised China among Chinese university students in New Zealand. A combination of state oversight, private capital and market forces have led to the People's Republic of China's (PRC) increased production of blockbuster films that promote the 'Chinese Dream'. These films receive regular theatrical release within New Zealand but our understanding of how PRC university students in New Zealand respond to these films remains limited. Understanding this response is vital given the state's view of these students as 'civil ambassadors' and 'a diaspora in the making'. Using focus group data, the article shows how the reception of these films is complicated by the pluralised context of these films' production and consumption, with the engagement of some participants pivoting upon issues of genre more than ethno-national identification. Nevertheless, for some of the participants these films do help to affirm their identities as Chinese and generate pride in a rejuvenated China via the complex ways in which these films connect to their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No Time to Die (NTTD), the 25th entry in the Bond franchise, became central to the plight of theatrical film exhibition during the Covid-19 pandemic. Produced as one of MGM's and the wider industry's biggest commodities, a tent-pole film, it was due to be released in April 2020. One of the first big film casualties of the global lockdowns, NTTD endured several delays before finally reaching cinemas in September 2021. The Bond franchise and the disruption to NTTD's release are symptomatic of developments in global Hollywood and the entertainment business. Covid-19 had a huge impact on film exhibition and provoked all sorts of radical experiments by the Hollywood studios with online releases for blockbuster films that would previously have been key players at the global box office. As EON and MGM held out for a theatrical release, the hype around the film in the UK and the USA suggested it might single-handedly save the film exhibition business and finally bring audiences back to cinemas. Indeed, its eventual success at the box office suggested to some that Covid, streaming platforms and the home entertainment business had not after all killed off cinemagoing. But the writing was on the wall, and the extended periods of lockdown in the UK, the USA and elsewhere allowed the digital disruptors to establish an even firmer foothold. Amazon's purchase of MGM and the Bond IP are prime indicators of that shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts / Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU is the property of Institute of Ethnography, SASA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

McBride, like the Coens, asks audiences to live in tension with their films and scratch the generative itch offered by truly challenging pieces of art. McBride uses common criticisms of the Coens as a starting point for most of the chapters in his study, pinning them to the top of the page before methodically dissecting the weaknesses of each. McBride sensibly responds that just because the Coens have not shared much about the roots of their films' subjects does not mean their films can't offer an important perspective on the world (58-59) or that they do not take their work seriously. [Extracted from the article]

The title of a movie is the first to attract the audience's attention. Poorly translated movie titles may result in a "low box office", as translators in different countries have their styles and preferences in translating film titles, which might eventually result in different translations of the same movie title and cause confusion to the audience. This qualitative research used exploratory induction to investigate the influence of genre and translation style on the Chinese translation of Hollywood blockbuster movie titles in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Titles of 300 Chinese movies produced between 2001 and 2020 were purposefully selected from the top 50 Hollywood movies in the adventure, horror, and action genres. Genre was found to be slightly effective in the choice of translation style and strategies. Among the three genres, horror was found to have the greatest influence on the choice of translation strategy. It was concluded that translators from Mainland China were more conservative in title translation compared to translators from Hong Kong, whose attempt was to create innovative translations. The findings may have some theoretical and practical implications for film translators, book translators, advertising translators, translation trainers, and trainees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The films of the crisis express a "weird wave" and suggest that weirdness is necessary to the attempt to interact with the biopolitical present of the crisis. It is unclear how the authors understand how diverse audiences perceived the films; I felt that personal gaze is occasionally generalized and that there was over-reliance on film reviews as a source for reception politics. See P. Zestanakis, ' "The storyteller who survived": the Greek crisis through its biggest blockbuster film Worlds Apart by Christopher Papakaliatis (2015) ', Studies in European Cinema 19. 4 (2022) 268 -86. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Alsun Beni-suef International Journal of Linguistics, Translation & Literature / Mağallaẗ Kulliyyaẗ Alsun Banī Swaīf Al-Dawliyyaẗ Li Luġawīyāt wa Al-Tarğamaẗ wa Al-Adab is the property of Beni Suef University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contemporary Tamil films are largely dependent on viewers having prior knowledge of film canon, celebrities, industry happenings and social issues in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Taking the form of complicated chains of intertextuality, self-reflexive moments are fundamental to the ways in which Tamil film narratives, particularly the narratives of mass hero films, are constructed. The 2019 blockbuster film Bigil (Whistle), a sports film about a male coach leading an all-women soccer team, highlights the extent to which Tamil mass hero films rely on self-reflexive techniques to uphold the portrayal of specific gendered identities. This article examines the ways in which Bigil constructs contemporary Tamil masculinity through both the narrative representation of the central character Michael and the use of cinematic techniques, which privilege and celebrate the star's (Vijay) relationship with his fans. This article conducts a close textual analysis of key sequences in the film, including song sequences, and interactions between Michael and the women soccer players. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which the hypermasculinity of the male protagonist fundamentally diminishes the film's supposedly empowering storyline and the ways in which contemporary Tamil films seek to capitalise on the marketability of such narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a brief period (1969-1976), the bureaucrat in charge of the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was a film critic - B. K. Karanjia - and it was during his tenure that the FFC funded many of the films now associated with the art cinema of the Indian New Wave. Majumdar's conclusion charts the decline of art cinema production in India and raises broader questions about the legacy of these films in the contemporary moment. Rochona Majumdar's Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony is a history of the art cinema movement in India in the immediate aftermath of decolonization and an argument for reading Indian art cinema, particularly the work of Bengali filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray, as forms of historiographic thinking, which provide conceptual insights into the postcolonial present. [Extracted from the article]

The study focuses on Bohemian Rhapsody (2018, directed by Bryan Singer, later Dexter Fletcher), the biographical drama that reflects on the extraordinary lives and career patterns of the four members of the rock band Queen, predominantly the band’s frontman, Freddie Mercury. Given the fact that this feature film has changed the way we perceive the economic potential of biopics entirely, we offer an overview of some of the reasons why it was so successful in terms of the globalised film industry. The main objective of the study is to outline the biographical drama’s synergistic tendency in relation to the movie industry and the music business. Acknowledging Bohemian Rhapsody’s unprecedented global success, we work with the assumption that certain biographical dramas can, in fact, become globally popular, partly thanks to the fact that they utilise music as a nostalgia-driven narrative tool making portrayals of musicians deeper and more complex. The assumption is addressed via a theoretical reflection on the given topic and through a qualitative content analysis of the biographical drama Bohemian Rhapsody [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of gender bias is highly prevalent and well known. In this paper, we have analysed the portrayal of gender roles in English movies, a medium that effectively influences society in shaping people's beliefs and opinions. First, we gathered scripts of films from different genres and derived sentiments and emotions using natural language processing techniques. Afterwards, we converted the scripts into embeddings, i.e., a way of representing text in the form of vectors. With a thorough investigation, we found specific patterns in male and female characters' personality traits in movies that align with societal stereotypes. Furthermore, we used mathematical and machine learning techniques and found some biases wherein men are shown to be more dominant and envious than women, whereas women have more joyful roles in movies. In our work, we introduce, to the best of our knowledge, a novel technique to convert dialogues into an array of emotions by combining it with Plutchik's wheel of emotions. Our study aims to encourage reflections on gender equality in the domain of film and facilitate other researchers in analysing movies automatically instead of using manual approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves console video game constitutes a significantly different vision of the Middle Ages than the blockbuster film upon which it was based. Prince of Thieves is one among a prolific tradition of Robin Hood-themed digital games, which produce anew a legend that has thrived across intermedial networks of representation since the Middle Ages. The game represents a desire to transform popular medievalist narratives into play formats, but also the entwined and invested relationship between Hollywood and the game industry over the last half-century. This article will analyse how three core thematic elements of the game are inherently shifted in the adaptation process: the range of perspectives reduced by a first-person game, the modes of violence, and the role of familial relationships. The game is more than just a remediated version of the same story, as its adaptation process is a result of not only the medievalist tradition of Robin Hood and a connection to this film but also of the history of the action-adventure game genre and movie-adaptation games. This article will argue that the context of video game adaptation and genre conventions shape the way this text operates as a piece of franchise media, and that these constraints or choices in the game's design in turn shape the production of vastly different historical meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multidimensional analysis (MDA) approach was brought in by Douglas Biber (1988) to compare written and spoken registers in English in the first instance, but it has comprehensively started getting applied to many different genres. The present study uses 100 texts of Hollywood movie trailers from five different genres i.e. romantic, horror, comic, animated and crime thrillers. The study aims to decipher the extent of variations found in the movie trailers pertaining to linguistic functionality. To explore the linguistic variation within movie trailers across genres, multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) is opted. Thereupon, the linguistic features used in the five genres are studied and contrasted against Biber's dimensions. The comparative study found that most of the movie trailers of designated genres go along Dimension 1 and resultantly considered as informational rather than involved as per Biber's textual dimensions. Similarly, the rest of the four dimensions collectively reveal slight variations in the selected trailers of varied genres. It can be claimed that the movie trailers are commonly created using standardized strategies and techniques without focusing on the particularities and demands of the specific genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on science fiction and its relationship to other genres such as fantasy, magic realism, and speculative fiction. It discusses the evolution of science fiction in terms of themes in both India and the world, and explores different viewpoints on the inclusion of fantasy elements in science fiction, as well as the difference between magic realism and fantasy.

Research Summary: Prior research has studied whether digitization shifts demand away from mass‐appeal blockbusters toward a "long tail" of existing products. We extend this work by studying whether digitization influences the products created. Using unique data on movies, we examine whether the reduced costs of production and new digital distribution channels spur producers to create products aimed at smaller audiences. We employ a flexible, transparent, and largely graphical empirical approach to document changes unfolding with digitization. We find growth in both intended blockbuster and long tail products, but also, the rise of a "middle tail," movies distributed via digital channels, with budgets suggesting commercial intent but well below the averages for theatrical distribution. The new middle tail is largely due to newcomers rather than major incumbents. Managerial Summary: Digitization has reduced the costs to create movies, while also enabling new distribution channels that avoid the high costs of theatrical distribution. With lower costs, movies no longer need to be "blockbusters" at the box office to be financially successful. In this article, we study whether digitization has spurred an increase in lower‐budget movies that are not aimed for release in theaters. We find that digitization has unleashed a large number of very low budget movies that attract little commercial attention (i.e., the "long tail"). However, we also find an increase in a new category of movies with budgets between $100,000 and $10 million, aimed at smaller audiences via new digital distribution channels. We show growth in this "middle tail" following digitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how countries create mythologies about themselves through film, focusing on Hollywood blockbusters. It explores how the United States has used Hollywood to shape its self-image and promote a vision of total control. The article then examines the films Black Panther, Wakanda Forever, and The Woman King, which present a new mythology about Africa. It argues that these films deflect attention away from the history of slavery and colonialism and offer a liberal solution that exonerates the West from its role in colonialism. The article raises questions about the use of violence and the portrayal of women in these films, suggesting that they may hinder the pursuit of social justice. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a new platform called "Kinetarium" that aims to revolutionize education in planetariums. Developed by the design studio halbautomaten, Kinetarium offers interactive and collaborative fulldome shows that engage audiences and provide valuable educational experiences. The platform allows visitors to actively participate in the shows, combining entertainment, knowledge transfer, and interactive gaming elements. The article highlights positive feedback from planetariums that have implemented Kinetarium, emphasizing its ability to attract new visitor groups and enhance the learning experience. One specific program offered by Kinetarium, called "Cosmic Carousel," allows visitors to create celestial bodies and learn about the formation of stars and planetary systems. The article also mentions the inclusivity of Kinetarium, as it is accessible to all ages and languages, and can be used with just a smartphone and internet access. Overall, Kinetarium offers an immersive and inclusive educational tool that seamlessly combines entertainment and education in planetariums. [Extracted from the article]

Another bumper edition, again by way of apology for absenteeism in the spring issue (though this time due to paternity rather than plague). We begin with the latest Beard blockbuster. In her Twelve Caesars, based on her 2011 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Mary Beard turns her trademark combination of penetrating gaze and jovial tongue to the reception of the famed group of elite first-century ce Roman men who span a key moment in the transformation of ancient politics. Belying their importance for ancient historians and archaeologists, they have been rather neglected by art historians of later periods. With an extraordinarily wide lens, spanning from Alexander the Great to the 2017 modern art of Alison Wilding, Beard corrects that omission, demonstrating their central place in the history of Western art, and exploring not just how those emperors have been represented, repackaged, and reused, but what that says about the identities, worlds, and priorities of those who so mobilized them. The result is a tour de force of art and intellectual history. Not only is the reader presented with gloriously arcane anecdotes on almost every page, but their sum amounts to a sustained inquiry into the role that past power has played, and continues to play, in our history, politics, art, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

S. Shankar's 2018 Tamil language science fiction film 2.0, the stand-alone sequel to his 2010 blockbuster Enthiran, presents a bleak vision of a near-present time when obsession with technology has led to deteriorating human relationships as well as destruction of the natural world. The film articulates a posthuman dharma founded on the understanding that humans have an ethical obligation towards all living things, not merely other humans. The film posits the individual as fractured and unstable but valorizes the interconnectivity of humans and non-humans, which is underscored by the film's innovative evocation of the rasas of classical Indian aesthetics in the context of non-human agents. This essay argues that 2.0 presents a Hindu-inflected ecological posthumanism as the only viable alternative to a dystopian future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Berry reminds us it is essential to position Jia within the dual environments of the local Chinese film industry and international art house cinema to understand his political orientation and aesthetic personas (p. 14). I Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke i , containing a series conversations between these two heavyweight cultural icons in contemporary Chinese cinema, provides a comprehensive and profound view of Jia's film style. Jia Zhangke, one of the most important Chinese film directors and screenwriters, is a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema. [Extracted from the article]

The chapter introduces a I joona i driver named Bilal, his wife, Noori, and their son Farid, who has recently married a woman named Malika - English-educated and from an upwardly mobile Mumbai family. The book's third chapter - the one that reminded me of the I Gully Boy i scene - is titled " I Jaalu i : Autobiographies and Automobilities." Through sensorily attuned attention to the embodied worlds that Chillia taximen inhabit, Bedi's book topples such presumptions of unitary global aspiration, destabilizing the presumption that what every driver's kid must necessarily want is not to drive. [Extracted from the article]

Focusing on the question of the metaphysical possibility of change, the article explores a particular musical instance of change: the loss of world. Starting from the general observation that music plays a special role when it comes to the collapse of worlds, it studies two philosophical scenes (from Plato and Schopenhauer) in which music is thought as opening the possibility of change. In Plato, music occurs as an educational facilitator of (individual, personal) change that is ambiguously described in terms of sovereignty and groundlessness. In Schopenhauer, music is thought as the very edge of the world, where the loss of world (and the transition to religious renunciation) is a structural aspect of music’s very concept. This notion of music as being somehow outside, or on the margin of the world, but in a hyperbolical and almost redemptive sense, is then taken into a discussion of the Hollywood blockbuster The Big Short (2015), in which the (historical) 2007 collapse of Wall Street is prophesized by a number of marginal figures, one of whom entertains a special relation to music. Again, music appears as a figure (a cipher) of the change that these characters feel coming, and a shift near the end of the movie suggests a loss that not only affects the world, but this time also music. While music has historically been regarded as an agent of change (of feeling, concept, or sociality), here it would seem that it is music itself that is affected by the possibility of change beyond recognition, and perhaps beyond its own concept. The idea of music would then suggest a logic of change reminding on one hand of the eminent hyperboles of ancient music theologies (Augustine), and on the other hand the more recent accounts of change, apocalypse and miracles in such diverse thinkers as Derrida and Meillassoux, and in contemporary ‘apocalyptic’ novels such as David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988). Does the loss of music in these works suggest a possibility of new worlds? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]