https://vo.rs/tags/norman-jewison/Latest from the Norman-Jewison desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/screen/rollerball-the-corporate-sport-dystopia/<p>Every so often a science-fiction film invents a sport so vivid that audiences miss the argument underneath it. <em>Rollerball</em> is the classic case. Norman Jewison spent 1975 building a spectacle of studded gloves, motorbikes and a steel ball fired down a banked circular track, and half the people who saw it walked out wanting to play. Which is exactly the trap the film was warning them about.</p> <p>Watch it again and the genius of the con becomes clear. Jewison made a movie whose entire thesis is that a crowd can be taught to cheer its own powerlessness, and then he made the sport thrilling enough that the crowd in the cinema does precisely that. It is a dystopia that implicates you through your own pulse rate.</p>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000