
Within days of the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.
The newest in a long line of Cinderella adaptations, Amazon’s Cinderella (2021) prizes girlbossification above the very story it tries to adapt.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.
Gay representation is out there, but to portray a character who's gay as a big, happy brute is a rare treat.
Self expression among teenagers is explored in the live adaptation of Jerry Spinelli's novel of the same name.
At its heart, it’s a fond tribute to an influential artist and thus one that can speak to everyone’s inner artist, even if it lacks the sincere commentary you may wish to see.