I remember the first time I sat down and watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s lyrical, meandering sci-fi epic Stalker. It was a long time ago, before the advent of smartphones and tablets. I watched a beat-up VHS copy on a non-“smart” TV, and had no ability to pause every few minutes and swing by Facebook, Twitter, or […]

When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing in a televisual league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began building its prime-time lineup with two original programs more thematically and aesthetically daring than anything on those staid networks: the […]

From 1945 to 1951, Disney produced a series of educational films to be shown in American schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t drive fast. Disney covered these subjects in its educational shorts, and then eventually got to the touchy subject of biology and sexuality. If there was […]

As of this writing, the Beatles’ “Revolution 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spotify. This has no doubt generated decent revenue, even given the platform’s oft-lamented payout rates. But compare that number to the more than half-a-billion streams of “Blackbird,” also on the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea of […]