Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie: was this the moment pop culture shattered into a billion pieces?

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When DeGeneres posted her A-list snap at the 2014 Academy Awards, it made a splash. But it was probably the end of monoculture – and now we’re all alone in our TikTok bubbles Name: The Oscars selfie. Age: Once upon a time (2 March 2014, to be precise), at the Oscars, the actor Bradley Cooper, who was nominated for best supporting actor, took a selfie with the host, Ellen DeGeneres, and a whole load of A-listers … Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/LPvBx0O via IFTTT
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The Six Billion Dollar Man review – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s rise, fall and limbo

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Cannes film festival
Focusing on the rogue’s gallery of hypocrites and crooks surrounding him, Assange himself is in the background of a pretty definitive examination

Julian Assange sits at the centre of this gripping account of the WikiLeaks founder’s rise, fall and protracted seven-year limbo inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Eugene Jarecki’s documentary takes its title from the price the incoming Ecuadorian government supposedly charged the Trump administration for helping furnish his extradition to the US, thereby reneging on a promise of political asylum. If The Six Billion Dollar Man doesn’t rebuild Assange, exactly, that’s because it’s more interested in comprehensively demolishing his enemies. Compared to the hypocrites, scoundrels and crooks who surround him, the man himself looks almost virtuous.

Actually Assange is mostly a background presence here. He’s more talked about than talking up; a karmic victim of his own success. While even his supporters admit to his personal failings (arrogance, cruelty, bouts of megalomania), the film asks us to regard him as a messenger shot down by bigger, darker forces; a man whose only real crime was publishing inconvenient truths. The Swedish rape charge, it argues, was largely cooked up as a means of delivering him to the US authorities, so that they in turn could charge him with violating the Espionage Act. “Julian Assange is not an angel carved in marble,” says the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (no angel himself). “But he’s not a vial of poison either.”

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