Yahoo informs us that the arrival of Joss Whedon’s latest cultural contribution is just around the corner.
Anticipation for the film is off the charts, and having Whedon running the show reassures Marvel fanboys that it’s been done right, since he’s been one of them from childhood, and informs general audiences that it’s worth their time, since he has a gift for taking far-out tales into the mainstream.
The film opens in U.S. theaters May 4 and a bit earlier in many overseas territories.
Variety tells us that Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” (2012), scheduled for release next December, is going to have a different look.
Exhibs and press gathered at Caesar’s Palace to see the debut of 10 minutes of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” at 48 frames per second, the format that James Cameron championed at the confab one year ago.
Exhibitors—all of whom would need projection upgrades to show the format—were not all enamored of the 48 frames-per-second look. The “Hobbit” reel looked distinctively sharper and more immediate than everything before it, giving the 3D smoother movement, while losing the cinematic detatchment from the motion blur of the longtime industry-standard 24 fps.
“Some of the closeup shots looked like an old soap opera on TV,” said one exhib, who added that his cinema already has a digital projector to accommodate the change. “But the wide vistas were pretty breathtaking. It will take some getting used to, for sure.”
The century anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is right around the corner. James Cameron’s record box office winner “Titanic” (1997) will be returning to the theaters in 3D, and we can expect the networks to be running round-the-clock broadcasts of the regular version.
Lindy West of Gawker sat down and watched the interminable Leonardo DiCaprio tearjerker and offers to spare us having to bother. Her review is devastating and extremely funny.
I don’t remember a lot of specifics about watching Titanic in theaters in 1997, but I was 15 years old, which means my two biggest concerns were 1) locating romance, and 2) not dying in a nautical catastrophe. So I think we can safely assume that I fucking loved that movie. I watched Titanic again on TV with my sister a few years later, making sure to switch it off right before that whole stressful iceberg thingy—a strategy that turns the movie into a pleasant romp about two teenagers who take a perfectly safe boat ride and then bang in a jalopy. The end. Charming! Watching Titanic for a third time this weekend—in advance of Wednesday’s big 3D reopening—I cannot imagine what I was thinking that second time around. I could not wait to get to the second half and watch all these motherfuckers drown.
Here’s the thing about Titanic, and the reason 15-year-old girls love it so much: James Cameron is a 15-year-old girl. All of the characters are either 15-year-old girls in disguise (“Parents just don’t understand!” “Waaah, make the boat go faster!” “I know we literally met 20 minutes ago, but I love you with a suicidal fervor!”), or the kind of goofy caricatures that 15-year-old girls would write if we let 15-year-old girls write our blockbuster screenplays. It’s She’s All That on a Boat, only with Kate Winslet as Freddie Prinze Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio as that girl who isn’t famous anymore, and also everyone freezes to death in the north Atlantic at the end.
Robert Loveless, An America Legend Film Poster, top lines read: “A reputation can put a load on your shoulders that some men don’t want to bear.”—Jack London. Below: “A Documentary about the greatest custom knife maker in the World.”
Information and publicity are scarce. Hey! it’s twenty-odd days away. But we have that tiny (nearly unreadable) poster image above, and we know that there will be a pre-theater get-together at 4:00 p.m. at Mel’s Diner, 8585 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.
The actual screening will be at the Clarity Theater, 100 North Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills. Red Carpet reception at 5:30 p.m. The film is scheduled to run from 6:00 – 7:20 p.m.
Intended viewers are instructed to RSVP to Producer Ed Wormser at edw11@aol.com. Repeat after me: M.I.C.K.E.Y. M.O.U.S.E.
Still, if I were on the lower left coast, I would definitely want to see it.
After 12 years of silence, Whit Stillman, to young American haute bourgeoisie what Akira Kurosawa was to ronin samurai, has returned to feature film directing. Damsels in Distress, theoretically released in 2011 in order to qualify for various cinema awards is about to start showing in the theaters.
The New York Times’ description sounds exactly like a Whit Stillman flick.
“Damsels in Distress” follows four college girls, Heather, Lily, Rose and Violet, as they grapple with problems ranging from love troubles to toxic frat-house odors and suicide attempts by education majors who insist on throwing themselves off two-story buildings. (“If they can’t even destroy themselves, how are they going to teach America’s youth?” Rose asks.) The students at Seven Oaks, the fictional college, have a lot in common with the preppies and patricians of “Metropolitan” (1990), “Barcelona” (1994) and “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), the autobiographical trilogy that prompted reviewers to call Stillman “the WASP Woody Allen” and “the Dickens of people with too much inner life.” They grope for direction but are seldom lost for words, and beneath their barmy crotchets and pretentious dissertations there’s heartache and yearning. Stillman is the knight-errant of sneered-at bourgeois values. He extols the overlooked merits of convention and the hidden virtues of the status quo. Inveighing against “cool people” and the social cachet of “uniqueness, eccentricity, independence,” the transfer student Lily asks: “Does the world really want or need more of such traits? Aren’t such people usually terrible pains in the neck? What the world needs to work properly is a large mass of normal people — I’d like to be one those.”
Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman Sachs via a denunciatory letter to the New York Times editorial page yesterday provoked Jim Geraughty (via his emailed Morning Jolt) to imagine the same letter composed by a fed-up Dark Lord of the Sith.
Today is my last day at the Empire.
After almost twenty years, first as a summer intern, then as the Emperor’s spy on the Jedi Council, then as his apprentice and Dark Lord of the Sith, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of the Empire’s culture, its people (both cloned and non-cloned) and its role in bringing order to the galaxy. I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it, and I don’t mean destructive in its traditional, positive connotation.
This used to be an institution based upon facing one’s foes eye-to-eye, like a room full of younglings. Or betraying longtime brothers-in-arms in the middle of battle, when they least expect it. But instead, management meetings are dominated by the boasting and taunting of Imperial officers whose lack of faith is disturbing, all too proud of the technological terrors they’ve constructed. They fail to see that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
I have attempted to reach out and make a gripping argument to those who disagree, but the old, all-too-complacent top management insists these whippersnappers be released and that this assessment is dismissed as “pointless bickering.” Time and again, middle management proves itself as clumsy as it is stupid. Outside consultants are dismissed with a sneer, “we don’t need their kind.” Managers expect us to ignore delays in construction projects by sniveling that our presence is an “unexpected pleasure” and how honored they are by our presence. We can dispense with the pleasantries.
People who care only about making the same super-weapon, again and again, with more or less the exact same weakness and design flaw, will not sustain this Empire—or the fear of its people—for very much longer.
It seems generally agreed that the best thing about last night’s Academy Awards was Angelina Jolie’s right leg. Here are the ten best pictures of the starring limb.
The film industry is totally dependent financially on huge draw Superhero action flicks that fill theaters for weeks with popcorn-crunching adolescents. Some industry executives were so desperate that they decided to do a Spiderman re-make opening next summer with a new cast and an “untold story” angle.
Two boys debate attending the American Theater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 1938.
Roger Ebert explains why movie theater revenues are in free fall. Only blockbuster movies are currently keeping the whole system afloat.
I guess that’s just how things work.
You have the movie theater business, an industry whose pioneer days were a century ago. That business prospered and bloomed, but for decades now what was once a luxurious escape experience has been subjected to the careful ministrations of bean counters and corporate optimizers who have turned movie theaters, once palaces, into cheap industrial warehouse spaces operated robotically and understaffed with inadequate contingents of the bitter and indifferent working for the minimum wage.
It takes hundreds of millions for special effects, movie star salaries and blowing up all those expensive cars, but at the actual delivery end the industry has whittled every possible penny out of quality of service.
Their problems are compounded by the aging US population. Even hard-core cineastes like myself (I ran a film society at Yale) today feel out-of-place in today’s theaters. Adults buy videos or watch films on cable or the Internet these days. Teenagers go to movie theaters for the same reasons teenagers always went to movie theaters.
The film industry is being confronted by the same kinds of changes in technology and the arrival of handier and more competitive methods of product delivery that confronted the music industry, and it seems that these dinosaurs are no more able than the other dinosaurs to cope positively with new challenges and opportunities.
Old industries wind up being run by rentiers, but dramatic innovation requires visionaries and risk-takers. The motion picture industry today is run by corporations, what changing times need are the equivalent of the aggressive businessmen, recently off the boat from Poland and Lithuania, the Warners, the Zukors, the Goldwyns, and the Mayers, who created the studios and the industry in the first place. But that kind of leadership is not going to come from inside today’s industry establishment.
