According to Cazares, Jacqueline was a giver, compassionate and emotional person. Every time the family went to San Antonio, she found a homeless person and told her mom or dad that they needed to help that person. One day she asked her brother for money to open a savings account for her sister Jazmine to go to college, he said.

“She had a heart of gold, just full of love, and everyone who came across her or met her along the way just felt it,” he said. “We don’t want her death to be in vain.”

Authorities initially said a school police officer had confronted the shooter. They gave conflicting accounts of how the law enforcement operation, which involved about 400 officers, unfolded.

I beg, pressing and hoping

The parents fought for full accountability, but the promised city investigation never materialized, and much information is hidden in the DA’s own investigation.

As some facts surfaced, they often contradicted the “official” version of what happened. Jesse Rizo, Jacklyn’s uncle, said he believes the leaked facts are the spirits of murdered children answering questions from their parents and loved ones.

Rizo, who joined Cazares in his fight for accountability and reform, said the year after the massacre was one of disappointments.

“All these things go down the line and you think, dammit, this is a disappointment, this is a disappointment, this is a disappointment. And so you start to wonder if you made a mistake,” he said. “What am I doing? Why am I not good enough to convince these people of the wrong thing in their actions? For a while, you start to believe it.”

But Rizo said that somehow they are energized to keep fighting because they are trying to save someone’s life, to prevent someone’s grief. “Here’s reason for hope,” he said. “Hope and faith are the only things we have left.”

The Uvalda shooting was one of the deadliest in history, as 20 children and six adults were killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It was preceded in 2018 by the Santa Fe, Texas high school shooting in which eight students and two teachers were fatally shot. This was followed by a mass shooting this month at a mall in Allen, Texas, in which the shooter killed eight people.

Yet Uvalde’s children and teachers’ families, as well as some relatives of the Santa Fe victims, had to beg their elected legislators to hold hearings on a bill that would change the age for buying assault weapons from 18 to 24.

They had to put pressure on these officials to vote on the bill out of committee, and they had to wait until the time needed for the bill to be put to a vote expired. They had to witness how their elected officials rejected attempts to revive the bill as an amendment to other legislation.

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If loose costumes didn’t give it away, the soundtracks did.

To the cinema Tetris: The boys from the pet shopOpportunities (let’s make a lot of money)” and a remix of a Bonnie Tyler songwaiting for a hero“. IN Blackberry: Elastica’s “link” with the lines “Riding any wave / It’s the luck you crave.” And in air, most straightforward: Dire Straits’ “Money for nothing.”

These songs anchor these 2023 movies in the time period: 1980s, transitioning into the early 1990s. But they also function as hymns to what the films celebrate. IN tetrisa video game manager travels to Soviet Russia to acquire the rights to wildly popular video game. IN air, Nike boss manages to sign Michael Jordan to support very popular shoe line. IN Blackberryphone company executives design wildly popular mobile phone. IN hot fieryanother movie in this mini-genre, Frito-Lay janitor-turned-CEO invents headline, wildly popular Cheetos snack. Hooray for the frenzied popularity of consumer goods.

These are interesting films. All of them are a hymn to entrepreneurial ingenuity, which May be somewhat dramatic, though not always. But these are also loosely fictional process stories without any obvious cinematic appeal. IN air, the Nike executive (played by Matt Damon) makes a lot of phone calls. IN tetristhere is a lot of chatter about the types of copyright available for video games. hot fiery about the idea for a more spicy corn layer flavor. In all of them, middle managers make their rich companies even richer. The acting is warm. This is not what you need for exciting presentations in an elevator.

But the films were made, and are made now, which speaks of their attitude to the present, which is actually much more interesting than the dialogues in the films themselves.

1. Cynical approach

The products in these films are also brands, and brands have supporters. “I feel a little dirty when I say this, but it’s about brand awareness” – John S. Baird, Director tetris said Los Angeles Times:

Ultimately, you want as many people as possible to see your film. And I think that when you make a movie about an existing product, you automatically have a built-in audience, and that helps in marketing and helps in raising audience awareness. This piques a little interest in what they might see next, whether it’s on streaming or in the movies.

Another “cynical answer” Matt Johnson saiddirector Blackberrything is [intellectual property] the chain of names of all these products is much easier to imagine for money people, and since everything is related to intellectual property – you either base a movie on an article, or a book, or something else – of course, people from [agencies like] CAA, William Morris and others said, “Well, wait, what about groceries?” And so I think this is just the beginning of what is likely to be a flood if there is market interest.” In other words: expect films about the light bulb moment behind an acid-washed Levi’s, a musical about the invention of the Sony Walkman, and a saga about how a hero brought Cabbage Patch Kids to market.

2. NOSTALGIC LOOK – I

All four films are written in the tone of nostalgia – but nostalgia for what exactly? Maybe for a while avant-garde China, when Western companies were comfortably running the world economy? And when the most dynamic businessmen had a distinctly American zeal—even if they were Canadians, as in Blackberryor act on behalf of a Japanese company, as in tetris?

IN air, Damon has to give clumsy inspirational speech: Two minutes to sell Jordan his advertising contract, during which the music swells and the eyes get wet. Jordan’s story, as Damon’s character says, “is an American story, and so Americans will love it. People will develop you… Because when you’re great and new, we love you… You’ll change the damn world.” Is he still talking about Jordan? He might as well be referring to Nike before they ran into problems with fake shoes and labor rights allegations. Or an American corporation around the 1980s and 1990s, when the US was winning the Cold War and when China’s meteoric rise was just around the corner.

3. NOSTALGIC LOOK – II

Maybe the nostalgia they’re chasing this was the heyday of a special type of capitalism, when companies made things that we could eat, wear or play with. (American production, in particular, suffered after the era depicted in these films; between 2000 and 2010. USA lost a third jobs in manufacturing.) The following decades were dominated by other ways to make money: the financialization of the economy and the creation of ubiquitous software. In both cases, the nuts and bolts elude the non-professional moviegoer. Although Cheetos? This is what we get.

Or was it really nostalgia for the last years of belief in corporate capitalism? His victory in the Cold War should have strengthened this belief. Instead, as the environment deteriorated, corporate greed grew, and inequality increased in the US and elsewhere, the luster faded. The main actors of capitalism today are seen as snooty and heartless. In films, Horatio Alger’s characters are portrayed as courageous and passionate people, and their work as useful and good. If capitalism ever needed puff things, now it has them.

🎧 Sideshow podcast

But back to the future for a moment. It’s 2023, in case you haven’t heard it yet, and among everything we think we should have figured out by now, two stand out in particular:

🧴Disposable plastic: Often it is the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what to do with a plastic product, but what can manufacturers do – and what should they be told to make a real dent in this problem?

🗳️ Online voting: Voting from your own device would theoretically increase the number of participants, but it is much more difficult than it seems. Will we get there in our lifetime?

Listen to the latest two episodes of the Quartz Obsession podcast –Now!

✅ Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | stapler | YouTube

4. 💲 THING

In a crime film, we protect the detective; in a sports film, an outsider. But these films are about people who want to make more money.

The idolatry of those who have become rich is not, in itself, as unusual as a Hollywood cliché. But the specific mechanics of it here is what happens in the middle rungs of a corporation, like a cog in a machine. doing his duty-different from entrepreneurial dramas such as workplaces, Juliaor minx.

Apart from V economic nostalgia works well, movie studios cashing in on these jagged heroes because they must think that this is who we want. The fault, dear reader, is not in our movie stars, but in ourselves..

Thanks for reading! And don’t be shy lend a hand with comments, questions, or topics you want to learn more about.

have a nice holidays

—Samant Subramanian, Global News Editor

KATHERINE KENDALL, actress/photographer:

Well, you know, I was a young actress and I had a formal meeting at the Miramax office earlier that day.

And then, at the end of the meeting, which I thought went really well, he invited me to come to the screenings. He said, “Welcome to the Miramax family. You know, come to premieres, shows and so on. In fact, there is one this afternoon. Would you like to come?”

And I said, “Of course.”

And in the end I went to watch a movie with him. The result was just a film, not a screening, but the film “Red Rock in the West.” And, you know, it was right when I had such a nagging feeling that something was going wrong.

And then, after the movie, we walked a few blocks. And he said that he needed to go up to his apartment to get some things and could I just go with him real quick? And I kind of said no, and we talked it back and forth for a minute. There were always some negotiations with him, I tried to defend my position, and then make sure that everything was in order.

I went to his apartment. Once there, we had a long talk about art and cinema. And it seemed to me that he treated me like an intellect.

And I felt that the meeting was going very well, and sort of going on. I didn’t feel safe when I was there. And at some point he got up to go to the bathroom. And he came back in a bathrobe and asked me to give him a massage.

And I was extremely uncomfortable. And I thought, oh my God, no, I don’t like it. And we went back and forth about it.

And then he went to the bathroom again, and this time he came back completely naked. And you know, for me, that has completely changed as well. It just took him to the next location. It was completely disorienting. And I was scared, you know? I was very scared.

And then it became a bit of a cat and mouse game, like how do I get out of there?

And I – it’s hard to understand what someone is trying to do to you when they’re completely naked and they…