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Tag: quotes

  • July 22nd, 2012 1:18am

    The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.

    In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.“

    —

    Roger Ebert (via ibad)

    And the media is still exactly the same. 13 years and multiple mass shootings later, the media still treats these atrocities the same. 

    (via wherethemindroams)

  • July 21st, 2012 6:55pm

    Fear is a cannibal that feeds upon itself. It lives in every dark shadow – waits around every corner. It can be in two places at once…on the path ahead, yet somehow always behind you. Fear hides in every decision, questioning your every move. And it’s your fault. You are the one who gives it life. You are the parent of your own fear. Every instinct tell us we can do nothing in the face of that which terrifies us. But that’s what fear is – instinct. We run because that is our nature. Better to fun away and live to fight another day, or so the saying goes. But if we run, the cannibal feeds and grows stronger. Better to run towards your fear. Better still to face it. Stare it in the eye. Make it blink. Watch it shrink.

    — Bruce Wayne (David Finch – The Dark Knight #1)

  • July 18th, 2012 12:58pm

    The question of 3-D is a very straightforward one, I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for. It’s up to the audience to tell us how they want to watch the movies. More people go see these films in 2-D, and so it’s difficult data to interpret. And I certainly don’t want to shoot in a format just to charge people a higher ticket price.

    — Christopher Nolan (via milleniumfalconpunch)