‘A reminder that we can resist’: hard-hitting documentary takes aim at anti-trans rhetoric

Heightened Scutiny is a new film premiering at Sundance looking at the troubling rise in anti-trans legislation and the mainstream media outlets who have helped stoke the fire A new documentary at the Sundance film festival delves into the fight to preserve access to gender-affirming care for minors via the US supreme court, with a major decision due in June 2025, and details the mainstream media’s role in legitimizing anti-trans legislation. Heightened Scrutiny, directed by Sam Feder, argues that the fear-based ideology underlying bans on hormone therapy or puberty blockers for minors has been pushed not only by conservative activists but center-left publications such as the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, whose articles have fixated on surgery, potential regret or risks. As the film notes, such therapies, with the same side effects and risks, are prescribed for other conditions and only raise alarms when applied to trans youths, and the rate of “detransiti...

‘That train sound? It’s a hovering mothership!’: legendary Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt reveals his secrets

Burtt, the man who created iconic moods in George Lucas’s sci-fi blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien and WALL-E, explains the nuts and bolts – and hammers, ceiling fans and squeaky doorknobs – of his trade

When Ben Burtt Jr was invited to look at the concept art for Star Wars before filming began, he says he heard the lightsaber as much as saw it: it was the sound of a film projector. “I was a projectionist at a theatre,” he says. “I could hear a projector motor – not when it’s running the movie, but as it sat still: a musical humming. Fifty per cent of the lightsaber is that projector. I mixed it in with the buzz of a television tube.” So when you hear one of Burtt’s most famous sound effects, you are listening to cinema.

Yet it’s only one part of an amazing aural universe that Burtt has created, as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ theme music. Where would Star Wars be without the sound of Han Solo’s blaster – made by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer? Or the plaintive yowls of Chewbacca – a melange of vocalisations and animal recordings? The voice of R2-D2 is Burtt himself. “I was trying keyboards with electronic effects, and it didn’t have life. It wasn’t coming from something alive; something that was thinking. It’s only when I was able to channel a voice element into it that it changed. It’s about 50% vocal, 50% electronic.”

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/MLUTtV0
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

The Exorcism review – Russell Crowe v the Devil in cursed horror about a cursed horror

The Mother Of Nipsey Hussle’s Daughter Made This Move Regarding Guardianship