Five Easy Pieces

Rod Stoneman selects and analyses five samples from a broad spectrum of moving picture culture: Kill Bill, Jackass - The Movie, The Office, Big Brother 4 and Reality Television, and Éloge de l'amour.

This brief and itinerate survey of the airwave spectrum, a somewhat arbitrary scan across the audio visual radar, takes a glancing read of some current films and television programmes. There should never be any inhibition or snobbery about the range or pluralism of the material we take seriously, in fact there is an imperative to attend to the things that most people watch. Even if these five fragments, very different pieces from different places in film and television, cannot possibly add up to a balanced overview, they form some part of the pattern of how things are now.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 97