okay so sight and sound has a big feature this month on the Death of Cinema, and it coincides with the death of bergman and antonioni... and it's completely wrong about everything.
the dead hand of canon-makers and masterpieces-hunters is slightly slipping, which is a good thing.
but at the same time cinema is dead, y/n? european cinema anyway.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 11:59 (sixteen years ago) link
Why is it dead?
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:03 (sixteen years ago) link
No. Can't imagine why anybody would think it was.
― Noodle Vague, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:13 (sixteen years ago) link
it's dead because
1) no-one goes to the cinema 2) physical medium film is dead 3) lack of auteurs 4) us cinema increasingly targetted on (global) youth market 5) lack of enthusiasm 'out there' 6) kidnapping of avant-garde film by the art world
i've mixed up qualitative with quantitative things.
1 people not going to the cinema is happening and it is affecting the way films look, but exhibition conditions have always done that. the notion of the 'cinematic' (ie bigness) mostly comes from the 1950s-60s when film was trying to compete with television.
2 film the physical thing being on the way out is hard to argue with.
3 is slightly qualitative, slightly quantitative, in a number of senses. exhibition/distribution is more of an issue for me than individual eurauteurs.
4 doesn't make too much difference. i would feel worse about the decline of indie cinema if it was something i'd cared about
5 i think older critics just don't approve the kind of enthusiasm there is for, say, 'anchorman'.
6 thrown in for provocation
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:44 (sixteen years ago) link
LOL box office figures are considerably up this year in the UK.
― Mark C, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:46 (sixteen years ago) link
Yes I'm not sure about 1. Was 6 thrown in by you or "them"?
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:46 (sixteen years ago) link
yeah cinema attendances should be down but they are not.
likewise the BPI reported record-breaking album sales for British music earlier this year.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:48 (sixteen years ago) link
i looked at Facebook London network's favourite films - Anchorman is extraordinarily high up (like 4th behind Shawshank etc.)
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:49 (sixteen years ago) link
As long as we've got Danny Dyer, the UK film industry will be fine.
― Dom Passantino, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:50 (sixteen years ago) link
He's the new Stanley Holloway
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:51 (sixteen years ago) link
6 is mine.
1 is more a matter of long-term decline, and is linked to 2: shoddiness of the physical space 'cinema'. i don't so much agree with that -- or at least just think you could say cinemas became boring when they had to sack live musicians, or when they abandoned having short programmes, or the b-feature, or continuous play...
xpost
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:52 (sixteen years ago) link
The death of the physical medium is probably true but I doubt that it matters that much to anyone other than a handful of cineastes. The way cgi, digital colour correction etc is being used by most filmakers now , mourning the loss of celluloid will seem as quaint as mourning the loss of wax cylinders. To paraphrase Hitchock, it's not how it's filmed, it's what's on the screen that counts.
― Billy Dods, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:52 (sixteen years ago) link
1) no-one goes to the cinema - people go the cinema but it may be that tastes have narrowed so there's less range of films on offer?
2) physical medium film is dead - is this relevant? doesn't stop more and moer films being made - the opposite in fact
3) lack of auteurs - and in such politically fraught times too - what gives?
4) us cinema increasingly targetted on (global) youth market - ban apatow
5) lack of enthusiasm 'out there' - by studios? like record companies they lose controld daily. among the public? not sure why this would be (see pop again).
6) kidnapping of avant-garde film by the art world - BY the art world? wha?
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:53 (sixteen years ago) link
truth is the golden age of european art cinema (ie: wide distribution of european cinema) coincided with/was maybe part product of the collapse of cinema as a mass medium in the '50s. that pattern went forever before most of the nostalgists were even born. and things were worse in the '80s than now, numbers-wise.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:56 (sixteen years ago) link
i don't remember there being multiplexes in the 80s. came over here at the very end maybe.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:57 (sixteen years ago) link
2 is very weak -- the argument runs that the celluloid strip is sort of like an actual physical impression of the world, that it takes a bit of the world into it. it's pretty mad but i think that's what they think. they need to see 'miami vice' for real.
yeah i was wondering if multiplexes were brought in to solve the problem of declining audiences. they are part of the 'white flight' phenomenon in america, perhaps -- obviously cinemas were first built in city centres; the multiplexes on ringroads.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:59 (sixteen years ago) link
Given yr poopooing of masterpiece-hunters, how the fuck do you measure aesthetic advances then, quitit? Most avant-garde films I've seen recently are, as usual, fucking empty.
I'm trying to make a list of the best films of the decade thus far, and I'm hard-pressed to find more than 6 or 7 I consider 'excellent,' let alone great. I think the even SOMEWHAT trad narrative feature... well, almost everything's been done. Even more than ever.
And speaking of the D.O.C., see M Dargis column in TIFF thread.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:12 (sixteen years ago) link
Run Fatboy Run is the no 1 film in the UK this week.
― acrobat, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:16 (sixteen years ago) link
srsly, it beat 'atonement'?! lol.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:17 (sixteen years ago) link
Run Fatboy Run vs. Act Thingirl Act
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:18 (sixteen years ago) link
Pegg's Fatboy tops UK box office Pegg (r) won rave reviews for zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead British comedy Run, Fatboy, Run has sprinted to the top of the UK box office in its opening week. The film, directed by former Friends star David Schwimmer, took more than £2m at the box office beating Oscar hopeful Atonement into second place.
Starring Simon Pegg and Thandie Newton, the low-budget film outshone Hollywood heavyweights including The Bourne Ultimatum and US comedy Knocked Up.
Stephen King thriller 1408, starring John Cusack, rounded out the top five.
Pegg co-wrote Run, Fatboy, Run, which sees him playing an overweight security guard trying to win back the girlfriend he abandoned at the altar five years before.
UK BOX OFFICE 1. Run, Fatboy, Run - £2.01m 2. Atonement - £1.63m 3. The Bourne Ultimatum - £1.09m 4. Knocked Up - £756,339 5. 1408 - £550,538 Source: Screen International
The comedy, which marks Schwimmer's directorial debut on the big screen, also features Simpsons star Hank Azaria and comedian Dylan Moran.
Atonement, based on the best-selling book by Booker nominee Ian McEwan, entered the charts at number two, with box office takings of £1.6m.
Both films open in the US later in the year.
Meanwhile Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, remains in the top 10 - at number eight - nearly two months after it first opened.
The success of the fifth instalment has seen the Potter film series become the most successful in box office history, beating James Bond and Star Wars.
― acrobat, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:19 (sixteen years ago) link
This thread died quickly
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:21 (sixteen years ago) link
faster than cinema is, anyway
What makes a film empty?
― Noodle Vague, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:25 (sixteen years ago) link
you kind of answer yourself there. what aesthetic advances do you see in art-house cinema? i sort of think it's hard to separate technological from aesthetic questions, personally, though that can lead to hyping sheer novelty.
the avant-garde i'm thinking of is bunuel, franju, marker, that kind of tradition. not empty at all. but not really thriving now either.
i don't understand this impulse, to treat cinema like this. why can't it be as ephemeral as music or theatre or literature?
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:25 (sixteen years ago) link
because ephemeral = worthless.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:27 (sixteen years ago) link
no it isn't.
to shakespeare's audiences, his plays were ephemeral. they changed through the run and were then forgotten, except by the performers.
why is that a bad model for other media?
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:28 (sixteen years ago) link
Film has always had a difficulty straddling the importance it desires academically, and the cold hard fact that it is run as a business AND HAS TO RUN AS A BUSINESS cos it costs a lot of money to make.
Why cinema isn't dead. Because it no longer costs quite as much money to make. This is still in its infancy though of being exploited because the word cinema also means exhibition IN THE CINEMA. But as the study of cinema likes to think of its subject preserved in aspic (Celluloid, or if a bit modern DVD), they miss out on the importance of the ephemeral. Same as it ever was.
Same Sight & Sound has a terrific suggestion on how the multiplex could be used to the casual viewers advantage as exhibition costs go massively down. Get fifty friends, or (fifty facebook people - social networking possibly being the cornerstone of this idea) who want to see a film, any film avilible for digital projection, go see the film in a cinema. Hopefully a clever inner city cinema (with a good bar) will toy with this suggestion, as it strikes me that there is plenty of money in them thar hills (particularly money over the bar which is pretty much pure profit in a good cinema).
― Pete, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:43 (sixteen years ago) link
I think I've said it before and I'll say it again: Inland Empire saved my cinephilia for the time being. I'm not even positive it was a great movie, but it did that much.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:46 (sixteen years ago) link
I don't think of Bunuel as being avant-garde
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:48 (sixteen years ago) link
(x-post) That's ed, I'm still trying to work myself away from the sort of cinephilia that ebbs and flows with the whole "summer movies/Oscar season" calendar.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:48 (sixteen years ago) link
re the Shakespearean model, because cinema is an inherently repeatable experience now. And we have indoor plumbing.
IE did something similar on a smaller scale for me, even moreso (maybe) The Joy of Life.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:49 (sixteen years ago) link
'chien andalou' and 'l'age d'or' are sorta avant-garde, tom.
i can take or leave his other stuff.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:49 (sixteen years ago) link
The E in the R is HBO as the new studio system, 8 pages on the Sopranos in the NYRB, hi-def tvs larger than many minor multiplex screens etc etc etc.
Apatow is just fine, but he's never going to be involved in anything as good as 'Freaks & Geeks' unless he goes back to telly...
― Stevie T, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:50 (sixteen years ago) link
But those are more about the art world than cinema! To use your phrases.
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:51 (sixteen years ago) link
the golden age of TV is over.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 13:57 (sixteen years ago) link
otm
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:02 (sixteen years ago) link
R.I.P. Maude
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:04 (sixteen years ago) link
tom -- no way, not when they came out. they played in cinemas, not art galleries.
-- Stevie T, Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:50 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
for the true believers multiplex screens and tv screens just don't compare with the big screen. they also have a thing for the communal experience, etc.
it isn't just about quality of transferable "content."
but the ending of 'the sopranos' and 'the wire' within 12 months of each other is a bit of a marker too.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:06 (sixteen years ago) link
Oh, Enrique, btw, you still haven't explained to me why Repulsion isn't shit.
― Just got offed, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:07 (sixteen years ago) link
try explaining to us why it IS, goofus.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:08 (sixteen years ago) link
I don't believe "the big screen communal experience" is coming back as anything other than charming nostalgia outdoor summer screenings etc.
― Stevie T, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:11 (sixteen years ago) link
except more people are going to the cinema than ever before. so what exactly do you base that on
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:12 (sixteen years ago) link
no, i agree. but that's one reason why people think the thing is dying.
s1ocki that's not true. or, not within the west. people went to the cinema habitually once or twice a week up to the '40s.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:13 (sixteen years ago) link
more people are going to the cinema and acting like they're in their living room than ever before.
re the Dargis article in the TIFF thread, the problem of cinephilia gaining sustenance from the likes of Inland Empire is that it's marginalized. Culturally discerning [sic?] 25-year-olds who would've seen and discussed every Godard film in the mid '60s now reserve their passion for Knocked Up.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:14 (sixteen years ago) link
ya but that's because they all worked there. xp
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:14 (sixteen years ago) link
-- Dr Morbius, Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:14 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Link
what is the evidence for this exactly
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:15 (sixteen years ago) link
I did, on that London movies thread.
― Just got offed, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:15 (sixteen years ago) link
Get fifty friends, or (fifty facebook people - social networking possibly being the cornerstone of this idea) who want to see a film, any film avilible for digital projection, go see the film in a cinema. Hopefully a clever inner city cinema (with a good bar) will toy with this suggestion, as it strikes me that there is plenty of money in them thar hills (particularly money over the bar which is pretty much pure profit in a good cinema).
had a similar idea a while back but more based around small indie cinemas AND a range of viewable material not constrained to films (think TV, live sport/events).
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:16 (sixteen years ago) link
Why not just invited your mates round to your house and bring yr own booze?!
― Stevie T, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link
but morbs those godard fans were also the first-gen auteurists, going to hawks and hitchcock retrospectives. i don't see that as any more mature or whatever than digging on 'knocked up' (a far more mature, if less formally interesting, film than anything lunatic maoist godard has done).
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link
houses and screens/systems in houses are not as big. not so much '50 friends' anyway but '50 people who want to see this', as it is now. essentially what has already been happening for years with some bars showing a film in the back room.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:22 (sixteen years ago) link
i saw Vanilla Sky in some bar in Brighton with about 20 people. it was a cool experience.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:24 (sixteen years ago) link
watching vanilla sky could never be a cool experience.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:25 (sixteen years ago) link
predictable ;)
and there's those guys in NYC who showed films on a projector on a building roof in Summertime. nice.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:26 (sixteen years ago) link
ya, rooftop films? i saw their mtl show.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:26 (sixteen years ago) link
i have done lots of public screenings in bars/show venues/etc. mostly of my own stuff tho, i guess that's diff.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:27 (sixteen years ago) link
democratisation of viewing films as well as making films
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:27 (sixteen years ago) link
(Funnily enough, I spoke to Lynch about all this stuff when he was in town earlier this year, and though he very much still thought of cinema as the big screen in the dark room, he thought that more and more this was likely to be in the form of home/private projection or large screen entertainment systems...)
― Stevie T, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:27 (sixteen years ago) link
Lynch would never make a film for outdoor big screen heh
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:29 (sixteen years ago) link
'knocked up' (a far more mature, if less formally interesting, film than anything lunatic maoist godard has done)
If mature equals boring, sure.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:29 (sixteen years ago) link
ILX
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:31 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah the key is that you'll know 15 of the 50 ppl so if the other 35 are twats you'll still have as good a time as just going to the cinema w/friends, BUT if they're not you know you've got at least 1 thing in common and you've got a readmade conduit for meeting and chatting - it's a good idea and someone not wasting their time on ILX might make a bit of fake dotcom money out of it. (xpost)
― Groke, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:31 (sixteen years ago) link
ILX is not cinephilia, tho, or do the stats at ILF mean nothing?
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:31 (sixteen years ago) link
ILX has 'ruined' Comedy for me because ILX can be as funny as/funnier than anything else out there. As long as I don't start reading THIS IS MY VLOG on a cinema-sized screen, film will prevail.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:32 (sixteen years ago) link
oh, I wasn't saying the Apatow monks of ILX were cinephiles. They might've been in a different cultural moment.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:33 (sixteen years ago) link
where's Southy with the 'it HAS to be grainy, you cannot watch it on cellphone' rockismo
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:34 (sixteen years ago) link
Ooooooohhhhhh, bitch! (xp)
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:34 (sixteen years ago) link
-- blueski, Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link
haha indeed.
fwiw i will chip in with: CRT televisions >>>> pwn the shit out of >>>> digital bullshit.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:37 (sixteen years ago) link
well cinema may be dead, but so is the novel, poetry, the fine arts, classical music.....or maybe it's just dispersing itself into smaller and smaller audiences, all part of the inevitable march of modernity surely?
what sight and sound and the like seem to be yearning for is a whitman-esque "return to the common people" aesthetic that will find some way of bridging the increasing distance we all feel between each other and our values and experiences. a super film that will unite us all!
whitman aside, this is not a new desire, and it's always been utopian.
― ryan, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:37 (sixteen years ago) link
and like all utopian desires it projects itself into the past as much as the future.
― ryan, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:39 (sixteen years ago) link
i don't get morbs on this score. the "original cinephiles", the parisians in the 50s, were crazy for uncomplicated, populist filmmaking.
no sight and sound don't think the golden age can return. it's not a new lament, but it's not that old either. your line of thinking tends to say nothing ever changes, but of course it does.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:40 (sixteen years ago) link
What was "uncomplicated, populist filmmaking" in the heyday of French cinephilia was also filled with solid formalism that is basically not even in the equation w.r.t Apatow.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:43 (sixteen years ago) link
yeees, i.e. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?is a superior example of uncomplicated, p*pulist (GODDAMN YOU) filmmaking, and that Napoleon Dynamite is a horrid one.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:44 (sixteen years ago) link
there were bad movies lots of ppl liked in the old days too dude
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:45 (sixteen years ago) link
not that knocked up is even bad
i hate 'napoleon dynamite' and it isn't populist. but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden, it's sheer cineaste myth-making.
i like 'knocked up' a lot.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:46 (sixteen years ago) link
me too it's great
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:47 (sixteen years ago) link
We noticed
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:47 (sixteen years ago) link
(I used ND as I haven't seen any Apatow films, but substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema")
Was there popular trash in the '50s? Of course. Was there a higher % of watchable studio films? Fuck yes.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:50 (sixteen years ago) link
substantial critics who've liked his stuff have generally said "well, this isn't cinema"
name names
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:50 (sixteen years ago) link
sigh
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:50 (sixteen years ago) link
you might want to try actually watching movies sometime morbius.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:51 (sixteen years ago) link
but both of you are mental to think late '50s hollywood was particularly golden
Who is arguing that? Nobody's claiming every last studio film between 1953-1958 was blindly accepted as an artistic breakthrough.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:51 (sixteen years ago) link
As this thread proves, the real problem with cinema is that cinephilia refuses to fucking die.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:52 (sixteen years ago) link
this is an interesting discussion and i'm sorry to say i don't have much to add to it, except that whenever e.g. godard pops his head out of his hole to proclaim the d"eath of cinema" every two years or so my kneejerk reaction is usually "stfu"
― impudent harlot, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:53 (sixteen years ago) link
what do you call cinephilia when it doesn't actually involve watching the movies you're talking about
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:53 (sixteen years ago) link
'napoleon dynamite' isn't populist
Yeah, that's why I see VOTE FOR PEDRO tees on the street
I will watch Knocked Up when it hits DVD shortly. Given the track record of people who love it, I'll send the universal $11 cost of a NYC film ticket to my creditors instead, thanks.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:53 (sixteen years ago) link
great attitude.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:54 (sixteen years ago) link
YES
― impudent harlot, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:54 (sixteen years ago) link
Every cinephile I know does this. We're not all working critics, after all.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:55 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, attitude? It's hardcore personal economics.
also stfu w/ "populist" forever and ever and ever
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 14:56 (sixteen years ago) link
at this point i don't think a Hollywood youth-orientated comedy can ever appeal to me again. too late for Zoolander 2.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:03 (sixteen years ago) link
tonight hollywood weeps
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:03 (sixteen years ago) link
they'll get over me, in time.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:04 (sixteen years ago) link
s1ocki, I have been writing a little about film for just over 8 months (for the first time since college) without benefit of a single free screening or DVD screener, so tell me who's supposed to subsidize my seeing all the 'important' films like KU.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:07 (sixteen years ago) link
Culturally discerning [sic?] 25-year-olds who would've seen and discussed every Godard film in the mid '60s now reserve their passion for Knocked Up
Are you ever going to let this go, Morbs? Like "cinephiles" didn't love Mazursky or Blier.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:10 (sixteen years ago) link
whatever dude, if you can't afford to see it, maybe hold back on criticizing it
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:11 (sixteen years ago) link
i could care less if you ever see an apatow film but if you're going to talk shit about them i might take your opinions a little more seriously if you had a clue what you were talking about
As for the topic at hand: most critics find sentimentality irresistable (every Gore Vidal essay bemoaning the Death of the Novel to thread)
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:12 (sixteen years ago) link
So ... the death of cinephilia = the price of tickets
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:13 (sixteen years ago) link
That's not the only reason, but is a contributing factor to my being well over the cinephilia as gluttony thing.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:14 (sixteen years ago) link
it's not difficult to identify things about a film you either know you dislike or strongly suspect you will dislike esp. now you can read fairly detailed synopsis on wikipedia ;)
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:14 (sixteen years ago) link
it's dead where it used to be alive and vice versa.(thank you asian cinema for keeping the light) but generally speaking,there are less good movies per year compared to the past,imo.
― Zeno, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:16 (sixteen years ago) link
All this talk about the Golden Age of Foreign Films is merely a bunch of critics fetishizing the act of going to a Bleeker Street theatre or whatever and having long arguments afterwards about Bergman's use of dwarfs in The Silence. These communities still exist and the discussion continues.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:17 (sixteen years ago) link
the thing is,Bergman was shown in smaller,less central places than nyc, and now,"art directors" like him are shown ONLY on cities like nyc. there are less audience for that "art" movies.
― Zeno, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:20 (sixteen years ago) link
Maybe we should stop thinking that the medium had a golden age, then. Mourn the lack of enthusiasm, or maybe its transition into something else. (Something very annoying.)
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:20 (sixteen years ago) link
i think we should just keep talking ourselves in circles forever.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:21 (sixteen years ago) link
Knocked Up's postrelease prestige print ads featured a scintillating line about how marriage differs from Everybody Loves Raymond as an example of its Wilder-caliber screenwriting. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I like it, but I know the way to bet.
I've seen one episode of The Sopranos, let's talk about that now.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:22 (sixteen years ago) link
"Wilder-caliber screenwriting" often didn't even meet Wilder's standards.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:23 (sixteen years ago) link
Whatever keeps us from actually watching movies, right?
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:24 (sixteen years ago) link
That "Everybody Loves Raymond" line was v. lame
― Tom D., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:24 (sixteen years ago) link
I bet it'll be the clip for its Best Original Screenplay nom
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:26 (sixteen years ago) link
Irony: I am going to see Knocked Up tonight for $2 at the awesome cheap theater near where I live. Well, no, I guess that's not really ironic at all.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:27 (sixteen years ago) link
ok i am not going to have this argument again, if your really think you don't actually have to watch movies to pass judgment on them, i dont think we have much to talk about
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:31 (sixteen years ago) link
To be fair, he wasn't passing judgement on Knocked Up but an archetype that overlaps with a perceived fanbase for that film.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:35 (sixteen years ago) link
food critics, Christ
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Morbs contructs these phony binarities: if you love Apatow films, you're a meathead who will ignore a Tsai Ming-Liang release.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Can't one hate both?
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:38 (sixteen years ago) link
I mean, wtf, a Renoir or pre-American Lang film wasn't getting the George Cukor Radio City treatment.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:39 (sixteen years ago) link
no, I actually don't believe that particular phony binary
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:40 (sixteen years ago) link
-- Dr Morbius, Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:37 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
haha
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:41 (sixteen years ago) link
-- Eric H., Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:35 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
and ya whatev, it's all ill-informed sophistry to this food critic.
xp
(That 'binary' is, of course, true 99% of the time; check the b.o. tallies)
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:42 (sixteen years ago) link
actually lang was pretty well distributed in the '20s. renoir, no; but shit, hollywood brought over just about all the major talents, front and behind camera, from germany in the early '20s.
lang was not an art-house director: he was making big-budget films in a studio as big as any in california.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:43 (sixteen years ago) link
The b.o. discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that people who would be into TML movies are all paying off their grad student loans.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:44 (sixteen years ago) link
oh, and buying every new Criterion DVD sight unseen.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:45 (sixteen years ago) link
i'm not going to say Knocked Up (or numerous other youth-orientated Hollywood flicks) is a bad film (because i haven't seen it) but i stand by my 'this looks like i will hate it' thing and still find it interesting to look at why that is (not here tho). morbs probably doing a different thing ala momus vs tarantino.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:46 (sixteen years ago) link
and i def wouldn't bother making judgement about apatow fanbase - esp. not when his films get the love they do on ILE.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:47 (sixteen years ago) link
like the people on their forum? (actually if you think ILE/F threads are bad...)
― impudent harlot, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:48 (sixteen years ago) link
i don't think TML is very good. doesn't much to speak to my experience, doesn't much create forms that interest me.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:48 (sixteen years ago) link
like the people on their forum?
Like all cinephiles in flyover country.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:49 (sixteen years ago) link
is Knocked Up YOUTH-oriented? Appears aimed squarely at 21-34 to me. But that is the New Adolescence, I guess.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:50 (sixteen years ago) link
hah i was gonna say "speaking to my experience" = why i rate apatow highly (well, not the only reason)
― impudent harlot, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:50 (sixteen years ago) link
its all KNOCKED UP's fucking fault.
― pisces, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:53 (sixteen years ago) link
But that is the New Adolescence, I guess.
kinda but i concede that Apatow, even with Superbad, has cracked it with getting people 16, 26 AND 36 roffling in the aisles
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:55 (sixteen years ago) link
is Knocked Up YOUTH-oriented?
It's het-oriented, and those hets who secretly fantasize about kissing Paul Rudd.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:55 (sixteen years ago) link
My only peeve about Knocked Up sight unseen is how it was being sold as some sort of sleeper when it had as big a promotional push as any other summer blockbuster of the Michael Bay ilk.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:55 (sixteen years ago) link
so you had a problem with the marketing of the marketing.
― s1ocki, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:57 (sixteen years ago) link
I don't believe I'm the one that's been bitching about Knocked Up on this thread.
― Eric H., Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:58 (sixteen years ago) link
look, if something valuable and good about past cultural arrangements (in this case, smart/euro/avant/classy movies being more widely loved or just more widely available -- if this was even true, but let's just say, for argument, it was) is dying, we just have to grit our teeth and let it die, frankly. why? cos there's no solution to the "problem" that's feasible let alone right.
what do you do, other than submit all production to some kind of morbs-approved board of culture? how does one prevent apatow films from getting to their audience? or insist that same audience go to a bergman retro instead?
― gff, Thursday, 13 September 2007 15:59 (sixteen years ago) link
-- impudent harlot, Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:50 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
yeah me too! i was saying that taiwanese guy wasn't my stuff.
damn me for being het, i guess.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:01 (sixteen years ago) link
look, I wouldn't at all be surprised if KU turns out to be superior to the whole of 'mumblecore.'
The solution, as always, involvbes voting with your wallet. And The People are doing so with the same perspicacity they have in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:02 (sixteen years ago) link
that is specious bullshit
― gff, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:06 (sixteen years ago) link
perhaps! It's even worse in the other popular arts. Britney gave a trainwreck performance?? How could they tell?
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:08 (sixteen years ago) link
(cuz it sounds way more interesting than her stellar past)
look there's more to the huge industrial/cultural changes afoot than demonstrating, again, typical little-manhattan handwringing about the great unwashed. if you want to make some connection between Apatow and GWB, go ahead, but it's gotta be something more substantial than "ppl other than me, dr morbius, famed internet complainer, are retards"
― gff, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:10 (sixteen years ago) link
Britney gave a trainwreck performance?? How could they tell?
oh COME ON
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:11 (sixteen years ago) link
forget Apatow.
"we" like movies and presidents that go BOOM. The End.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:12 (sixteen years ago) link
socialism
― acrobat, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:16 (sixteen years ago) link
Great thread.
― Dom Passantino, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:21 (sixteen years ago) link
Irony: I am going to see Knocked Up tonight for $2 at the awesome cheap theater near where I live.
Possible irony: I am finally going to see the Mexican gay art film (and Armond White fave) Broken Sky tonight, which I rented from Kim's Video. And if you fellas wanna see some REAL snobs, meet the staff there.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:22 (sixteen years ago) link
enticing
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:25 (sixteen years ago) link
one half of Coldcut made the remark in an interview once that he was totally okay with the whole Ninjatune thing having a very limited audience, because "most people don't care about music!" and pointed out some woman walking by with a baby carriage as an example "they've got lots of other stuff on their mind." etc.
People are always going to make and consume twatty bullshit, that doesn't mean the slightly more sophisticated and exploratory entertainments have to die. If anything the modern marketplace has and will continue to provide the Long Tail stuff with more lucrative rewards and a more widespread audience than we've ever experienced in our lifetime.
― El Tomboto, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:31 (sixteen years ago) link
That's true. It makes me happy to think that "Mon Oncle" is still making money!
― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:33 (sixteen years ago) link
http://infocult.typepad.com/infocult/2007/01/la_jete_on_yout.html
― El Tomboto, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:36 (sixteen years ago) link
If the work of any of these directors is analagous to Ninja Tune I will happily let the whole fucking shebang die.
― Matt DC, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:44 (sixteen years ago) link
(I have no opinion on the subject in question, just wanted to get that shot in)
― Matt DC, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:45 (sixteen years ago) link
They've been calling Broadway theatre The Fabulous Invalid for about 40 years now, perhaps we just need a similarly agreed-upon handle for cinema to stop these endless Death waves.
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:48 (sixteen years ago) link
you're just not cool enough for Coldcut, Matt.
― blueski, Thursday, 13 September 2007 16:56 (sixteen years ago) link
i'd like to thank everyone on this thread for avoiding quoting film critics
― J.D., Friday, 14 September 2007 00:17 (sixteen years ago) link
This thread is a lie told 94 times per second.
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 14 September 2007 00:31 (sixteen years ago) link
But... but genres only get interesting after they die! Why the hand-wringing?
― Casuistry, Friday, 14 September 2007 00:47 (sixteen years ago) link
OK, so now I have seen Knocked Up and I can say that it's just inappropriate to bring it up in this particular conversation.
― Eric H., Friday, 14 September 2007 04:37 (sixteen years ago) link
Which is to say I liked it fine (true, it speaks somewhat to my experience even though I don't recognize myself in any of the characters), but what sort of conversation forces this against Buñuel? Who gains from the comparison?
― Eric H., Friday, 14 September 2007 04:39 (sixteen years ago) link
Peter Greenaway just texted me about this thread.
― admrl, Friday, 14 September 2007 04:44 (sixteen years ago) link
Peter Greenaway!
― admrl, Friday, 14 September 2007 04:45 (sixteen years ago) link
I hope he said something scathing and big-breasted.
― Eric H., Friday, 14 September 2007 04:45 (sixteen years ago) link
He VJ'ed a defiant middle finger at me.
― admrl, Friday, 14 September 2007 05:06 (sixteen years ago) link
but what sort of conversation forces this against Buñuel? Who gains from the comparison?
Ask Morbs.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 14 September 2007 05:19 (sixteen years ago) link
People also be having babies much later in life, go fig.
― Eric H., Friday, 14 September 2007 05:37 (sixteen years ago) link
by youth-oriented i meant 'transformers' rather than 'knocked up'.
greenaway really does love the vjing. he also likes cd-roms.
― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Friday, 14 September 2007 09:12 (sixteen years ago) link
Shut up everybody I'm trying to watch the fucking film.
― Ned Trifle II, Friday, 14 September 2007 09:25 (sixteen years ago) link
Buñuel vs The Sunshine Boys
Ask Greenaway when the goddamn Tulse Luper Suitcases are going to show (or be available) in the States. (he's a big Death of Cinema guy, btw)
― Dr Morbius, Friday, 14 September 2007 13:21 (sixteen years ago) link
he killed it
― s1ocki, Friday, 14 September 2007 14:49 (sixteen years ago) link
Greenaway killed the Cinema Stars
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, 14 September 2007 15:02 (sixteen years ago) link
went to see a MATINEE yesterday and it cost me 7.50. no wonder attendance is down (im assuming it is down). plus it was that 500 days of summer film which was dissappointing.
― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Saturday, 19 September 2009 09:03 (fourteen years ago) link
The other reason is the multitude of entertainments (to add to the six at the top of the thread) (maybe added later I only read the beginning of this).
kidnapping of avant-garde film by the art world
Stuff like Zidane? When it was screened on TV I was like 'oh damn wish I saw this at the cinema, its perfect for that space'. Guys like Mark Kermode HATED IT for its art worldliness: lame.
Some days I could really do with going 2-3 times. See you at the last screening.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 19 September 2009 11:26 (fourteen years ago) link
i'm not sure if attendance is "down". compared to when, is the question. iirc the nadir of attendance was the early 1980s. and the whole period from the late 50s till then was of continuing decline. attendance "now" (i.e. the 2000s rather than autumn 2009) is "up" on 25 years ago, and, i think, even on fifteen years ago. it's still a precarious bidness, at the moment because the bottom has dropped out of dvd sales and yeah i guess also piracy. oh right yeah and the industry's suicidally tight demographic gearing towards the very young.
― history mayne, Saturday, 19 September 2009 11:40 (fourteen years ago) link
i think its staying level compared to alot of media industries at the moment - people still enjoying/willing to shell out for the cinema in hard times etc - but i cant imagine its what it once was. youd think theyd try and steer prices down a bit to get more bums on the seats at the moment or maybe that just doesnt make economic sense.
― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Saturday, 19 September 2009 12:20 (fourteen years ago) link
Other than weekends before noon, most of the NYC 'plex shows are $12.50.
― A Patch on Blazing Saddles (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 19 September 2009 15:23 (fourteen years ago) link
AO Scott still wondering why foreign films are next-to-invisible in America:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/movies/awardsseason/30scott.html
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:39 (thirteen years ago) link
there's an essay in the most recent GQ titled 'when the movies died' or something -- it's about how hollywood is stifling creativity & will only greenlight comic book movies, sequels and adaptations -- i haven't finished it yet but it's pretty good
― lilwayne.quizrewards4u.com (J0rdan S.), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:41 (thirteen years ago) link
who wrote?
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:42 (thirteen years ago) link
weird article by a.o. was there a time when it was not this way for foreign films?
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:44 (thirteen years ago) link
bergman-fellini era [via every article on this topic ever]
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:45 (thirteen years ago) link
yes, the '50s thru '70s. xp
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:45 (thirteen years ago) link
morbs: a guy named mark harris -- story isn't online tho
― lilwayne.quizrewards4u.com (J0rdan S.), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:46 (thirteen years ago) link
xp what was different then?
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:46 (thirteen years ago) link
Oh, he wrote Pictures at the Revolution
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:46 (thirteen years ago) link
there's an essay in the most recent GQ titled 'when the movies died' or something -- it's about how hollywood is stifling creativity & will only greenlight comic book movies, sequels and adaptations -- i haven't finished it yet but it's pretty good― lilwayne.quizrewards4u.com (J0rdan S.), Monday, January 31, 2011 6:41 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark
― lilwayne.quizrewards4u.com (J0rdan S.), Monday, January 31, 2011 6:41 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark
i hear this a lot, but you know, bad timing. the oscar front-runners do not match this description. i guess they were greenlit two-odd years ago but still.
mark harris is chill though
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:47 (thirteen years ago) link
xp what was different then?― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:46 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark
― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:46 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark
educated people had heard of bergman and fellini; they haven't heard of ___________________
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:50 (thirteen years ago) link
I've mentioned this before: since I live neither in NYC nor LA I rely on Netflix and one local art theatre for foreign films. It was the same situation ten years ago. Nothing's changed here.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 January 2011 18:51 (thirteen years ago) link
i reckon that with dvd it's technically easier to see foreign films now than 40 years ago (tony probably says this, can't remember). in england it hasn't changed much in about 25-30 years, so far as i can tell -- there were more repertory cinemas then, but video and tv have replaced them. which is a shame but there we are, and most of them were inly in london anyway.
i have a theory that in this country at any rate (not just a theory, there is evidence, but i haven't got into it enough yet) the reason for the reach bergman et al had was that the cinemas in the late 1950s had a real fight on their hands when tv came along and tried all kinds of things. and foreign films were routinely sold on the basis of (female) nudity, no matter how highbrow. but that was very much a phase.
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:56 (thirteen years ago) link
kind of a lazy post
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 31, 2011 1:51 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark
yeah this is why i'm confused--the sitch hasn't changed in my city for at least the last ten years. i guess a.o. is saying this is a "golden age," i def don't know enough to say whether that might be true.
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 18:58 (thirteen years ago) link
theatrical runs for foreign flicks have definitely declined (a lot) in LA over the last 10 years
― buzza, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:00 (thirteen years ago) link
i guess a.o. is saying this is a "golden age," i def don't know enough to say whether that might be true.― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:58 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark
― call all destroyer, Monday, January 31, 2011 6:58 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark
this is the real crux, yeah. he's not the only person saying it. i dunno. i don't think the EOD lists for the 2k0s really justify the claim, but i think it's partly the lack of a 'narrative'.
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:10 (thirteen years ago) link
Harris is also Tony Kushner's partner, btw, iirc.
― Tyler/Perry's "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" (jaymc), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:11 (thirteen years ago) link
it's kind of lol that his example is a film that's five fucking hours long, i don't care how good it is.
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:11 (thirteen years ago) link
cad, you watch TV series, don't you?
ppl are less interested in world cinema. it's easier than ever to see most of these films, thanks to Netflix etc, if there was demand.
also I believe foreign films grossed more (adj for inflation) and got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar more often. (The last two years there was what, District 9?)
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:12 (thirteen years ago) link
not really morbs, why?
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:13 (thirteen years ago) link
it's kind of a trilogy. and given most will see it on dvd anyway the run-time isn't a thing. it's kind of up to you! if you don't want to be interested in modern cinema, no-one is forcing you, it's just a bit of a shame that widely acclaimed movies don't get very much shine.
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:16 (thirteen years ago) link
90-110 minutes each night in 3 parts isn't that tough.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:18 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah i hear ya, it's just that 5-hour movies are a tough sell when they're made here too!
tbf i didn't realize it was split into three parts; it was not really presented that way in reviews i read.
― call all destroyer, Monday, 31 January 2011 19:19 (thirteen years ago) link
There is also a 2:45 theatrical cut.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:31 (thirteen years ago) link
morbs half otm here... I think ppl are actually more willing to watch a "foreign film" on demand because the barrier to entry is so low, just click play and it starts
I'm not the best example cuz I'm big on world cinema, but there are a bunch in my queue I prolly would've never tracked down if it weren't so damn easy to click add/play (e.g. the maid)
― ^ probably more bullshit self-aggrandizement and non-essential info (Edward III), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:43 (thirteen years ago) link
District 9 was mostly in English. If your point is that it was non-American, then there have been no shortage of British films nominated for Best Picture in recent years, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_language_films_nominated_for_Academy_Awards
Based on above link, it looks like four of the eight foreign-language (not foreign) films nominated for Best Picture have come within the last 16 years. In several other categories, foreign-language films have actually done better in the past 20 years than they had before (e.g., Best Cinematography and Best Song).
I'd say the one category in which foreign-language films do worse among the Academy now than they used to is screenplay. Between both Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay categories, foreign-language films score 37 writing nominations in the 1960s and '70s alone and only 20 since.
― Tyler/Perry's "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" (jaymc), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:46 (thirteen years ago) link
The one category in which they unequivocally do worse, that is. You could make an argument for a couple other categories, like director, as well.
― Tyler/Perry's "Dude (Looks Like a Lady)" (jaymc), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:49 (thirteen years ago) link
I like this.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 31 January 2011 19:55 (thirteen years ago) link
I believe I have seen this theory before and more than once- I believe it is floated in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for example.
― Never Make Your Moog Too Soon (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 31 January 2011 20:05 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm not gonna say that wasn't a thing, but there's a pretty long stretch of non-erotic bergman films between monika (1953) and the silence (1963), some of his most famous films
― ^ probably more bullshit self-aggrandizement and non-essential info (Edward III), Monday, 31 January 2011 20:25 (thirteen years ago) link
the guy's rep was built on this string of films, not a lot of hot stuff in there... 1963 Winter Light1961 Through a Glass Darkly1960 The Devil's Eye1960 The Virgin Spring1958 The Magician1958 Brink of Life1957 Wild Strawberries1957 The Seventh Seal
― ^ probably more bullshit self-aggrandizement and non-essential info (Edward III), Monday, 31 January 2011 20:30 (thirteen years ago) link
I've always wanted to see brink of life after john waters wrote about it in an essay on his favorite foreign films, he said his local theater would bring it back every time a movie bombed, supposedly it's some hyper-histrionic tale about a maternity ward
― ^ probably more bullshit self-aggrandizement and non-essential info (Edward III), Monday, 31 January 2011 20:33 (thirteen years ago) link
he said his local theater would bring it back every time a movie bombed
ok, so I mixed up brink of life with a cold day in august here
but does this not sound grebt
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/brink_of_life_john_waters.jpg
― ^ probably more bullshit self-aggrandizement and non-essential info (Edward III), Monday, 31 January 2011 20:38 (thirteen years ago) link
clemenza to thread!
nitpicking: It's an essay on his favorite art films which include American films like A Cold Wind in August and Interiors (!). i have a theory that in this country at any rate (not just a theory, there is evidence, but i haven't got into it enough yet) the reason for the reach bergman et al had was that the cinemas in the late 1950s had a real fight on their hands when tv came along and tried all kinds of things. and foreign films were routinely sold on the basis of (female) nudity, no matter how highbrow.
There already is evidence for this. See Mark Betz. “Art, Exploitation, Underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, eds. Mark Jancovich et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 202-222.
― Kevin John Bozelka, Monday, 31 January 2011 21:01 (thirteen years ago) link
I believe I have seen this theory before and more than once- I believe it is floated in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for example.― Never Make Your Moog Too Soon (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, January 31, 2011 8:05 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark
― Never Make Your Moog Too Soon (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, January 31, 2011 8:05 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark
sorry, yeah, i know it's kind of out there -- i guess i mean 'rigorously proven thesis' not theory, and in the uk-sphere specifically. i've heard it said but not seen it gone into. the smallness of the uk makes it a different question here. you go back to the 30s, though, and like not a single renoir (sound period) got shown till 1937. 'boudu' was not given a run in a british cinema till 1965. so far as i can tell dreyer's 'vampyr' didn't get a cinema release before the 70s (it debuted at a film society in 1935). so this is kind of what i mean wrt the 50s-70s being blippy.
xpost cool will check out, know some of betz's stuff if he's the 'small books' guy
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 21:04 (thirteen years ago) link
OT but that book was a brilliant read
― ensuing thread does not enlighten (stevie), Monday, 31 January 2011 21:31 (thirteen years ago) link
Is this the same kind of thing as a 50s version of a 'midnight film'?
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 31 January 2011 21:38 (thirteen years ago) link
the betz chapter is on google books -- it's interesting. depending on your point of view on the value of research in this area, there's more ground to cover.
it's not unrelated to the midnight movie, i'd guess, or to the whole grindhouse phenom, which is, what?, delapidated cinemas showing spicier fare than you get elsewhere, european films included
idk, idk, 'very different in the uk' (wonder where kung-fu, exploitation, etc pix did play here)
― history mayne, Monday, 31 January 2011 21:45 (thirteen years ago) link
here's a thing from an actual distributor about the state of international distribution:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=448095905772&id=712161205
― marios balls in 3d for 3ds (Princess TamTam), Monday, 31 January 2011 22:50 (thirteen years ago) link
a large number of exploitation pics - particularly from europe - did actually get a release on the british circuit in the 60s and (especially) the 1970s, though they were generally censored, dubbed, retitled and given 'saucy' new soft porn titles. back issues of the monthly film bulletin are prob the best and most reliable guide for this kind of thing. plenty of kung fu flicks got shown over here in the same way, tho the bbfc had a particular aversion to nunchucks, for some reason, so even the classic bruce lee movies had whole sequences snipped by the censor.
again in the uk my guess is that the decline of the university film club, showing 16mm prints of classic arthouse fare, has played a part in all this.
― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 1 February 2011 01:46 (thirteen years ago) link
Mark Harris on the new heights/depths of risk aversion in Hollywood; cites Top Gun as the start of the death spiral.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201102/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, 18 February 2011 18:33 (thirteen years ago) link
ie, the article J0rdan talked about above is now online
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, 18 February 2011 18:35 (thirteen years ago) link
I agree for the most part, but then there's the success of The King's Speech (still in the top five, and closing in on $100 million), The Fighter, Black Swan, True Grit, The Social Network. It's been an unusual season, which Harris himself acknowledges:
During one remarkable stretch last fall, the box office was dominated, on successive weekends, by The Town, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and The Social Network
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:06 (thirteen years ago) link
Hollywood has always churned out garbage based on existing properties afaict
― ice cr?m's world of female people (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:08 (thirteen years ago) link
aflack?
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:08 (thirteen years ago) link
The quality of the garbage has deteriorated. Why else are The Fighter, The Town, and True Grit overpraised?
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:10 (thirteen years ago) link
As Far As I Can Affleck
― ice cr?m's world of female people (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:10 (thirteen years ago) link
I am skeptical of such claims. it's amazing how many shitty films just disappear, never to be rereleased or remembered by anybody
That's an irrelevant point. Even Jack Warner and Harry Cohn had enough middlebrow ambition to approve a few Movies of Quality a year. The point of the article is that the bar is set so very low now (and I write as a critic of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls).
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:13 (thirteen years ago) link
dude, it's all in b&w in the Harris piece. The studios are now reluctant to film ANYTHING that doesn't have comic heroes/CGI/under-30s as leads. (and he even considers goddamn Inception an expressive personal film)
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:14 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't get how this statement: I agree for the most part, but then there's the success of The King's Speech (still in the top five, and closing in on $100 million), The Fighter, Black Swan, True Grit, The Social Network.
fits with this one:
It seems in the first post that you think those films contradict Harris' point, but then in the second point you say those movies aren't really good so... I don't get what your point is exactly.
The studios are now reluctant to film ANYTHING that doesn't have comic heroes/CGI/under-30s as leads.
I get this and yet they are still making those movies like the ones Alfred listed, so...? If he's complaining about the phenomenon of summer blockbusters, okay, that's one thing, but those aren't the only kinds of movies being made.
― ice cr?m's world of female people (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:17 (thirteen years ago) link
summer blockbusters are shitty popcorn wallpaper no surprise there. they have been since they were invented - let's not pretend that Flash Gordon serials from the 30s are somehow superior to Kung Fu Panda II cuz they aren't.
― ice cr?m's world of female people (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:18 (thirteen years ago) link
It seems in the first post that you think those films contradict Harris' point, but then in the second point you say those movies aren't really good so..
All I said was that they were overrated: Henry Hathaway and Cukor cranked out movies like those routinely.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:30 (thirteen years ago) link
At this point I have seen a large number of "A" pictures from all Hollywood eras -- top budget, stars, publicity -- and imho the ratio of shit among THOSE is higher than ever.
Flash Gordon serials were cheapo filler by Universal (a "minor" major) for a theater's 4-hour program of features, shorts and newsreels. KFP2 is a big-studio feature.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:31 (thirteen years ago) link
eh fair enough
― ice cr?m's world of female people (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:34 (thirteen years ago) link
The reason The Social Network, The Fighter, The Town, and True Grit are singled out are they are nearly the ONLY big-studio 'prestige' pics that got made last year, all the projects of heavy hitters (Fincher, Wahlberg, Affleck, Coens). I didn't hate The Town, derivative as it was, but it got talked about like it was some exceptional 'adult drama' instead of a formula crime pic. That just illustrates the dearth of non-presold material aimed at adults.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, 18 February 2011 19:41 (thirteen years ago) link
'the town' is dope but dope like 'the seven-ups' was dope, which is to say i wish there were more like it movies cranked out regularly and were not considered risky and exceptional, you know?
― omar little, Saturday, 19 February 2011 00:42 (thirteen years ago) link
"there were more movies like it cranked out regularly"
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, February 18, 2011 2:06 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark
well that's kind of the point isnt it - audiences are hungry for adult dramas, hwood just isnt particularly interested in supplying them
― Princess TamTam, Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:12 (thirteen years ago) link
tbh i think many people working in hollywood are too growth-stunted to even deal w/attempting adult dramas, and one piece of advice i received ten years ago when i moved out here ultimately rang true: don't be surprised at how dumb a lot of the decision-makers are, not to mention the weird combination of being ambitious with their own career and therefore terrified of taking a single risk with the creative product. folks are crippled by fear of taking chances or using the extra $1 or $2 million they have lying around for anything edgier than, i dunno, s. darko. the successful people i know here are not successful on a large scale but in niche stuff like indie horror and aren't exactly living large. a friend of mine has had four horror screenplays made into films in 10 years with a fifth on the way and he's scuffling despite being totally frugal.
― omar little, Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:39 (thirteen years ago) link
based on personal experience and from what others have shared, i can say that writers are at almost every single turn discouraged from attempting anything original and the process itself is done so much by committee and in an almost focus group style that lots of stuff just ends up utterly predictable and following a well-trod formula.
― omar little, Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:42 (thirteen years ago) link
Irving Thalberg is not my idea of a hero, but from reading The Genius of the System I'd say when he was running production at MGM around '23-36 he was way more 'creative' than any exec in the biz today. And that was filmmaking by committee! But then moviegoing is not central to people's lives anymore.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:42 (thirteen years ago) link
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The L:ast Tycoon to thread!
The lead character in it is an aging whiz-kid studio head (in his late 30s or early 40s) who, rather incidentally to the main plot, green lights a few "prestige" films, mainly because he thinks the general public pours enough money into the company that they deserve a bit of thanks by trying to make something with a bit more depth, nuance and substance.
― Aimless, Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:50 (thirteen years ago) link
well Fitzgerald wrote (rather unsuccessfully) for MGM and that was clearly Thalberg -- who greenlighted Freaks, btw
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 19 February 2011 01:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich: "In the hated studio system there was always room for a tiny Orson Welles picture."
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 19 February 2011 02:35 (thirteen years ago) link
Is that why he spent years scrounging up foreign investors for many of his pictures? Not to mention using money from his own acting gigs to help get shit done.
― Princess TamTam, Saturday, 19 February 2011 02:58 (thirteen years ago) link
Welles' fate was sort of his own choosing. if he'd wanted to make films in Hollywood he could've.
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 19 February 2011 03:00 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm not apologizing for him -- just pointing out that room existed for even a Touch of Evil or butchered Ambersons in the old system.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 19 February 2011 03:22 (thirteen years ago) link
Cinema is dead. Matt Seitz on the ceasing of the production of motion-picture film cameras:
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/r_i_p_the_movie_camera_1888_2011/singleton/
― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Friday, 14 October 2011 11:38 (twelve years ago) link
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_3S0adMfn1iM/S7-xk6s2o9I/AAAAAAAAAG8/3FJXjqlR5nQ/s400/laszlo_panaflex.gif
― Race Against Rockism (Myonga Vön Bontee), Friday, 14 October 2011 13:47 (twelve years ago) link
Good thing digital looks good on Blu-ray.
― michael assbender (Eric H.), Friday, 14 October 2011 13:50 (twelve years ago) link
I've been comforted by seeing stuff like Le Havre projected via celluloid at the NYFF. Oh look, a MOVIE!
― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Friday, 14 October 2011 13:55 (twelve years ago) link
ending that article w/ a brakhage piece was inspired
― the boy with the gorn at his side (Edward III), Friday, 14 October 2011 14:29 (twelve years ago) link
David Bordwell on how preference for digital (along w/ hardware issues) is hastening the end of 35mm projection at festivals, etc.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/05/pandoras-digital-box-at-the-festival/
― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 5 January 2012 17:33 (twelve years ago) link
I was at the Tate Modern (to see the Richter) and while waiting for my friend had a look at Tacita Dean's thing and it had the whole 'cinema is dying bcz digital is killing it theme'. Problem is the film ws a real drag..
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 5 January 2012 22:00 (twelve years ago) link
i'm bummed to have missed the dean (& richter actually) but might buy the catalogue, the essays sound p good
― quick brown fox triangle (schlump), Friday, 6 January 2012 01:04 (twelve years ago) link
The Dean is around till March, don't know where you're at but there's a longer windown than the Richter, which shuts this w/end.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 6 January 2012 21:05 (twelve years ago) link
oh cool, actually thought the dean ended at new year, will possibly make it still
― quick brown fox triangle (schlump), Friday, 6 January 2012 21:33 (twelve years ago) link
Bordwell's latest, on what the art theaters will have to do to survive:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/30/pandoras-digital-box-art-house-smart-house/
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Monday, 30 January 2012 17:10 (twelve years ago) link
Bordwell: "It seems likely that digital projection has, in unintended and unexpected ways, put the history of film in jeopardy."
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/13/pandoras-digital-box-pix-and-pixels/
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 16:42 (twelve years ago) link
good riddance
― Banaka™ (banaka), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 16:47 (twelve years ago) link
may your glottis be stopped with reels of decaying celluloid.
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 16:54 (twelve years ago) link
defenders of the analog shall have no mercy from us.
― Banaka™ (banaka), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 17:03 (twelve years ago) link
maybe you should read the fucking thing, eh
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 17:11 (twelve years ago) link
the advantage of digital is its impermanence. mistakes can be corrected and revised with little effort. we wish to apply these principles to human society.
film is finite, "organic" and beautiful. it must be destroyed.
― Banaka™ (banaka), Tuesday, 14 February 2012 17:22 (twelve years ago) link
yeah the only thing standing between us and utopia is your vinyl record collection.
― ryan, Tuesday, 14 February 2012 18:00 (twelve years ago) link
I am starting to wonder if Tacita Dean's preciousness is not really helping the celluloid cause. Still like her films but interviews with her are a little insufferable at times. She used to be kind of my hero =(
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Monday, 27 February 2012 17:43 (twelve years ago) link
Wow at that article.
― Averroes's Search Engine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 27 February 2012 18:07 (twelve years ago) link
yeah... I'm hearing unpleasant rumors about the future of 35mm projection at an NYC repertory mainstay, too.
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 00:34 (twelve years ago) link
the advantage of digital is its impermanence.
nope.
― Prince Rebus (donna rouge), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 00:36 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah totally. People think their images will last forever as files? Get real
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 00:45 (twelve years ago) link
I do think that. I think you're imagining a hard drive crashing and losing everything, but there's easy methods of backup to guard against that sort of thing.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 00:54 (twelve years ago) link
I'm imagining files that become corrupted and/or file formats that become obsolete.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 01:07 (twelve years ago) link
More the latter, I guess
maybe there will be a generation of cyberwars in which china & america strive to delete each others' venerable cinematic histories
― john-claude van donne (schlump), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 10:57 (twelve years ago) link
There was some Hollywood Reporter/Variety article recently on how cavalier people are about the potential lifespan of digital formats and how even films shot digitally are printed onto celluloid for archival purposes. I am a bit sick of this argument, but when people speak of HD as being "better quality" than film it drives me fucking bananas.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 17:10 (twelve years ago) link
I was shooting with an Arri SR2http://i00.i.aliimg.com/photo/105097422/Arri_SR2_S_16_Camera.jpgin a touristy part of New Mexico and all of these 5D sunday photographers were asking disparagingly why I would bother shooting "old film" (I told them I bought it straight from the fridge at Fuji the week before) when my images would look so much better with their cameras.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 17:15 (twelve years ago) link
any "format" digital or otherwise can become corrupted or obsolete.
― da croupier, Tuesday, 28 February 2012 17:19 (twelve years ago) link
Of course, but there is no reason to think that digital files are more or less subject to this, or that their lifespan is anything close to other formats. At the very least, you can see an analog image so long as it isn't utterly degraded.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 17:21 (twelve years ago) link
5D sunday photographers
ILP's 'tumblr whites'
― john-claude van donne (schlump), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 17:36 (twelve years ago) link
Adam otm
― Averroes's Search Engine (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 18:13 (twelve years ago) link
File corruption is easy to prevent and doing so can be automated. File format worries are a real issue.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 18:25 (twelve years ago) link
Obv I have a preference for analogue but I do try to be realistic. I actually deal with HD footage most days for work and the abundance of formats and how to and not to convert them is constantly an issue. I will miss 35mm projection but I did also just get HDTV and Blu Ray and it's been fantastic to see some of the digital preservation work that has been done on classic films. I was never much of a DVD-hoarder/criterion dude but Blu Ray is changing my position on all that.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:33 (twelve years ago) link
Also as per corruption/backup I have had enough awful moments where I have a pretty good regimen in terms of backing up my projects, but then archiving files from old projects, transferring from drive to drive, switching on drives every couple of months to make sure they are still ticking over drives me nuts.
The biggest editing job I ever did (on someone else's films) was totally saved by the hard-drive-in-a-grocery-bag-in-the-freezer-for-a-couple-of-hours trick.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:36 (twelve years ago) link
And when I say archiving files, I am not just talking about video files, but all of the other data that comes along with a finished, outputted project.
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:37 (twelve years ago) link
i have regular 8mm films sitting in a freezer, they've been there for months :/
― althea and (donna rouge), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:39 (twelve years ago) link
exposed film or raw stock?
― dollar eye twinkling (admrl), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:41 (twelve years ago) link
exposed
― althea and (donna rouge), Tuesday, 28 February 2012 19:42 (twelve years ago) link
Apparently the last in Bordwell's series on the Big Switch. I had no idea 35mm reels were now made w/ mylar, not celluloid.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/28/pandoras-digital-box-from-films-to-files/
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Friday, 2 March 2012 18:58 (twelve years ago) link
I suppose the death of cinema thread is as apt a place as any to ask if I should finally watch Auntie Mame.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 2 March 2012 19:00 (twelve years ago) link
Just wait for a revival of the musical at a dinner theater near you. And as I have no intention of watching Mommie Dearest anytime soon, Fight the Fag Canon.
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Friday, 2 March 2012 19:25 (twelve years ago) link
Celluloid exceedingly flammable which is why, no? I guess I should read article.
― Why Does Blecch People Never Want To Redd? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 3 March 2012 03:08 (twelve years ago) link
"The Fag Canon" (and esp. Mommie Dearest) >>>>> Woody Allen's entire filmography
― Kevin John Bozelka, Saturday, 3 March 2012 07:46 (twelve years ago) link
well, if you're including all of Fassbinder, sure. ;)
My roommate from nearly 20 years ago remembers a live Scorsese interview we saw at NYU where he talked about the switch to mylar, so there's another thing I didn't know I'd known.
― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 3 March 2012 08:50 (twelve years ago) link
more about the likely death of 35mm and the dubious 'permanence' of digital work:
"If I spend," [UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher] Horak says, "as we did on one restoration, $750,000 to preserve one film digitally, and then it goes into a computer somewhere and it disappears, that money's gone."
Think it doesn't happen?
It does.
Five years after the first Toy Story came out, producers wanted to release it on DVD. When they went back to the original animation files, they realized that 20 percent of the data had been corrupted and was now unusable. Granted, digital was new at the time. Surely advances have made digital storage much less problematic?
Not really.
Fast-forward to Toy Story 2, which was almost erased from history. Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine. One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive. The movie started disappearing. First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.
Imagine the horror: 20 people's work for two years, erased in 20 seconds. Animators were able to reconstitute the missing elements purely by chance: Pixar's visual arts director had just had a baby, and she'd brought a copy of the movie — the only remaining copy — with her to work on at home.
In the digital realm, the archivist's mantra, "Store and ignore," fails. If you don't "refresh," or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can't just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, "You're shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing."
http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 12 April 2012 15:45 (eleven years ago) link
> Pixar stored the Toy Story 2 files on a Linux machine.> One afternoon, someone accidentally hit the delete key sequence on the drive.> The movie started disappearing.> First Woody's hat went. Then his boots. Then his body. Then entire scenes.
computers do not work like this.
― koogs, Thursday, 12 April 2012 17:29 (eleven years ago) link
should store these films as Lossless files
― stay in school if you want to kiw (Gukbe), Thursday, 12 April 2012 17:34 (eleven years ago) link
Koogs otm. That Pixar stuff is str8 up bullshit; even in 1999 the TS2 *original* files would be many terabytes in size, there is no fucking way that their art director would be able to "take it home". Total bollocks.
― that mustardless plate (Bill A), Thursday, 12 April 2012 19:45 (eleven years ago) link
I heard they put some Pop Rocks in the disc drive and that is what caused the meltdown.
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 12 April 2012 19:48 (eleven years ago) link
TS2 original files would just be 3d models, shaders, and the movement data. If someone was working on just animation, it's possible they'd not have the textures, so the file sizes could be reasonable.
This "omg digital film could disappear" thing is complete bullshit. I mean, unless you think banks use paper money all the time or credit cards don't actually work or that... oh hell, anything digital
― mh, Thursday, 12 April 2012 19:55 (eleven years ago) link
and cmon, pixar probably had a pretty good backup routine in place by then. unless they were completely and totally insane.
― original bgm, Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:22 (eleven years ago) link
asking my friends at ILM and Pixar about this
― Jilly Boel and the Eltones (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:28 (eleven years ago) link
Jefchak works at the New Beverly, which is owned by Quentin Tarantino. A regular at the art-house cinema, Tarantino bought the place in 2007, when it was in danger of closing. The New Beverly still plays traditional reel-to-reel 35mm, and Tarantino has said that the day the cinema puts in a digital projector is the day he burns it to the ground.
I lol'd
― Jilly Boel and the Eltones (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:42 (eleven years ago) link
he made a movie documenting how he'd do that iirc
― mh, Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:44 (eleven years ago) link
all I know about tech stuff is what I read in LA Weekly
This "omg digital film could disappear" thing is complete bullshit
however, ppl who allegedly understand this stuff have told me the opposite of this.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:46 (eleven years ago) link
It all comes down to whether people think it's economically viable to keep original artifacts. With film, a ton of material was lost because film degrades or warehouses of material were just torn out or because the worth of materials was deemed more than the worth of keeping the film. With digital, the only major risk is if someone believes something is worth archiving and not keeping in a live system.
In an archive, it's possible that a digital film could be on backup tapes, a hard drive, whatever. If that's the case, then it's possible that even with two copies, they'd both degrade -- a dead hard drive is a dead hard drive, unlike film where you can replace frames, clean it up, etc.
If they're "archived" by using network-attached storage, or a film cloud, or whatever else, then you're not going to lose it. If you don't differentiate between the files added this week -- those with active demand -- and the "archived" ones, then your backup strategy is going to cover them all.
Again, it's just a matter of how much effort people are going to put into archived materials. But with digital, you gain a lot by the factor of the long tail -- newer films are going to take much more space, so archiving older ones becomes an exponentially smaller burden.
― mh, Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:52 (eleven years ago) link
Example given just now is simplified, cooked up but nonetheless it does seem like there could be a problem
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:55 (eleven years ago) link
ditto my film editor (and former projectionist) bandmember/buddy at ILM ("the more we rely on digital, the less we'll preserve. 1's and 0's are less precious/more unstable" - she says)
― Jilly Boel and the Eltones (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:55 (eleven years ago) link
Sorry, I xposted with mh, who makes some good points
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 12 April 2012 20:57 (eleven years ago) link
Oh, certainly. The problem is that with physical materials you just put it in a room, hopefully climate-friendly, and leave it there. With digital, you have to keep things moving, and people are less likely to care.
― mh, Thursday, 12 April 2012 21:00 (eleven years ago) link
The larger point in that article is tons of films are not going to be converted to DCPs.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 12 April 2012 21:02 (eleven years ago) link
For them will be back to the old days of watching a 16mm print projected on a sheet or in an amphitheater with a hump in the middle.
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 12 April 2012 21:07 (eleven years ago) link
even with decent backup in place you're still susceptible to format shifting and dependencies like codecs falling out of use. the bbc doomsday project, for instance. were hundreds of copies around the country but they had to scrabble around for working hardware to read it after only 20 years. with film the required working hardware is a lightbulb.
― koogs, Friday, 13 April 2012 09:44 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah, this. Giovanna Fossati's From Grain To Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition is a useful text on the subject, according to my partner (who works in film preservation/curation).
― etc, Friday, 13 April 2012 10:11 (eleven years ago) link
even with decent backup in place you're still susceptible to format shifting and dependencies like codecs falling out of use. the bbc doomsday project, for instance. were hundreds of copies around the country but they had to scrabble around for working hardware to read it after only 20 years. with film the required working hardware is a lightbulb.― koogs, Friday, April 13, 2012 5:44 AM (1 hour ago)
― koogs, Friday, April 13, 2012 5:44 AM (1 hour ago)
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 April 2012 10:45 (eleven years ago) link
only films liked by "olds" will disappear forever, so no worries. rock on, ILX.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 April 2012 11:30 (eleven years ago) link
waiting on an apology, mh, lol
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ib7bo-wKtVA/TWcEdJqEA7I/AAAAAAAAAGg/d-iLBp_KsMU/s320/chimesat.jpg
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 April 2012 11:32 (eleven years ago) link
tbh it would be kind of awesome if toy story disappeared and ppl in 20 years time were trying to reconstitute it from exterior evidence
― thomp, Friday, 13 April 2012 11:40 (eleven years ago) link
I wouldn't necessarily count on employees of Pixar confirming/denying such story. About 20 years ago a friend at Sony swore me to secrecy about the original soundtrack elements of Dr Strangelove being lost forever, tho I've since seen this fact published.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 April 2012 11:52 (eleven years ago) link
more on this topic from C Nolan (ye gods, right) and others:
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/christopher-nolan-on-the-digital-switchover-and-3d
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 April 2012 14:20 (eleven years ago) link
morbs' greatest allies, christopher nolan and quentin tarantino
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Friday, 13 April 2012 14:39 (eleven years ago) link
i don't know if digital will make it more likely or not for old films to be lost; studios sure did a pretty great job of losing/destroying them when they were on film
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Friday, 13 April 2012 14:40 (eleven years ago) link
the more things change etc.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 April 2012 14:52 (eleven years ago) link
For things to remain the same, everything must change
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 April 2012 15:28 (eleven years ago) link
Although the way I heard it before was "Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same."
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 13 April 2012 15:37 (eleven years ago) link
apology for what? I think that there's great possibility for long-term preservation with digital means, but I really doubt anyone's done it.
I campaigned for movies for the olds on recent polls, too, Morbs!
― mh, Friday, 13 April 2012 23:38 (eleven years ago) link
you can say that all you want but i dont think he'll ever believe it :D
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Friday, 13 April 2012 23:52 (eleven years ago) link
It's ok, I'd never join any club that would have me as a member
― mh, Friday, 13 April 2012 23:56 (eleven years ago) link
ok, you just sounded like a digital needs no archiving guy
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Friday, 13 April 2012 23:59 (eleven years ago) link
stop being such a DNNAG
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 14 April 2012 00:04 (eleven years ago) link
c'mon dude, if that's a parody acronym i haint got a prayer.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 14 April 2012 00:06 (eleven years ago) link
o i c
nah I said it needs CONSTANT archiving, not just throw it on a hard drive and forget it
― mh, Saturday, 14 April 2012 00:06 (eleven years ago) link
well i'm sure that's what folx will do with a digitized History Is Made at Night
(not that there currently is one)
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 14 April 2012 00:10 (eleven years ago) link
Uh, anything can be lost if no one pays attention to making sure it survives. Even films that once earned millions of dollars for someone. If it isn't anyone's job to preserve it, it disappears. It really doesn't matter what the medium is.
― Aimless, Saturday, 14 April 2012 02:02 (eleven years ago) link
Um
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 14 April 2012 02:17 (eleven years ago) link
Thought experiment: far future being digs through the rubble, breaks into a cave, unspools a reel of film, says "what's this?" shines his flashlight on it and sees tiny little pictures. Same guy shines light on another object, says "ah, a storage disk. EBCDIC,ASCII, ...? Windows, Linux, ...? SmallTalk, Eiffel, ...? ...? No problem, I'll run my handy little universal bit decoder to figure out what it is"
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 14 April 2012 02:27 (eleven years ago) link
Far future film stored in cave rubble won't have much, if any, emulsion left on it. Such emulsion as it has will be scratched, clouded or faded to indecipherability. Certainly digital is less easily retreived than analog, but even brass doesn't last forever.
― Aimless, Saturday, 14 April 2012 02:39 (eleven years ago) link
OK, cut it back to 100 years. Or even twenty
― Thunderword ESQ (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 14 April 2012 02:53 (eleven years ago) link
Saving something twenty years old from oblivion is a lot easier if it is analog than if it is digital, but even then it's going to depend largely on the format used and how widespread it was when the digital copy was made. For example, PDF, MP3 and JPEG will be decipherable a lot longer than HD-DVD formatted stuff.
In the bleeding-edge world of Pixar and other digital studios, the formats are much more likely to be highly specialized to the hardware and proprietary, therefore much more vulnerable to loss.
― Aimless, Saturday, 14 April 2012 03:32 (eleven years ago) link
all these jpegs lost in time
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 14 April 2012 16:10 (eleven years ago) link
In the future, rep theatres will just be a small blue square with a white ? In the center. Attendance will be limited.
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Saturday, 14 April 2012 16:23 (eleven years ago) link
Yep
― i just believe in memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 14 April 2012 16:57 (eleven years ago) link
Mr. Johnson, it happened again!
Wednesday morning, Indiewire film critic Eric Kohn set off a flurry of retweeting and favoriting on Twitter when he reported an accident at a movie screening:
http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/26/the_avengers_deleted_at_a_press_screening_how_the_digital_age_makes_it_easier_to_lose_movies/jcr%3acontent/body/image_9f9f.img.jpg/1335475789509.jpg
Three hours later, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwartzbaum corroborated Kohn’s report, joking:
http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/26/the_avengers_deleted_at_a_press_screening_how_the_digital_age_makes_it_easier_to_lose_movies/jcr%3acontent/body/image_edf.img.jpg/1335475789547.jpg
How easy is it for a digital projectionist to delete an entire film? Slate asked Steve Kraus, whom Roger Ebert has called one of “the best projectionists in the nation.” Kraus told us that it’s as easy as deleting any important file from your computer. “It’s click to delete from the server and an ‘Are you sure?’ confirmation,” he explained over email. “Of course, as with most computers it's not really gone … but probably only a real computer geek could get into the system to ‘undelete.’”
The lack of real computer geeks—or serious techies of any kind—behind digital projectors was one of Ebert’s plaints when he wrote about the visual pitfalls of digital projection last year. His main concern: Many people employed as digital projectionists lack the skill and training to switch out 3D lenses when projecting 2D films, an oversight that results in dim projections. Whereas film projectionists are skilled workers—and used to be compensated accordingly—digital projection requires the bare minimum of menial tasks, and movie theaters may be tempted to hire (and pay) their new projectionists with that in mind.
According to a fascinating story about the death of 35mm film published in L.A. Weekly earlier this month, “Playing a movie on a DCP [Digital Cinema Package] projector involves plugging the hard drive into the projector, creating a playlist, as you would on an iPod, and pressing a button to play.” Though digital projection equipment is costly—up to $150,000 per screen—theaters are increasingly happy to shell out the upfront cost in the hopes of long-term savings (which may include not employing projectionists at all). Studios, meanwhile, save money on printing and shipping when they use DCPs instead of 35mm film. It’s win-win for everyone—except the projectionists who have lost their jobs and the audiences who occasionally endure mishaps like dark screens and deleted movies.
― i love the large auns pictures! (Phil D.), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 19:00 (eleven years ago) link
lol dumbass
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 19:57 (eleven years ago) link
I mean, no one ever fucked up a reel or had the wrong lens on or etc etc
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 19:58 (eleven years ago) link
^^^things that don't take hours to fix
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:04 (eleven years ago) link
oh i see the digital dillema was being talked about upthread. was thinking of starting a thread about that a couple weeks ago
Uh, anything can be lost if no one pays attention to making sure it survives. Even films that once earned millions of dollars for someone. If it isn't anyone's job to preserve it, it disappears. It really doesn't matter what the medium is.― Aimless, Friday, April 13, 2012 10:02 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark
― Aimless, Friday, April 13, 2012 10:02 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark
sorry but thats insanely reductive (and to what purpose??)
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048861?refcatid=1009
"The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."
Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault. Even when they take such steps, however, filmmakers and producers are up against an insurmountable problem: The only reliable method for archiving digital images is to go analog. The best archiving solution today is to print out to film, ideally with a three-color separation printed onto black-and-white archival film. That's a very expensive solution.
The Academy is doing what it can to help address the problem, said Andy Maltz, director of the Sci-Tech Council. "One of the keys to preservation is to have file-format standards, so if you can recover the zeros and ones, you'll know what they mean and know what they're supposed to look like on the screen." The Acad's Image Interchange Framework project is helping create such standards. SMPTE will be publishing the first of them later this year.
The Acad is coordinating Hollywood's efforts to work with the Library of Congress and with other industries to find a method for archiving digital data. But, said Maltz, "It's up to the manufacturers to incorporate archival lifetimes into their products." Fortunately for the entertainment industry, it's not alone in facing this issue. Banking, medicine, energy and other fields all need to preserve digital data for more than a few years, and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.
The report says that unless preservation becomes a requirement for planning, budgeting and marketing strategies, it will remain a problem for indie filmmakers, documentarians and archives alike. "These communities, and the nation's artistic and cultural heritage, would greatly benefit from a comprehensive, coordinated digital preservation plan for the future."
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:14 (eleven years ago) link
and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.
quick! better switch to digital!
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:19 (eleven years ago) link
True, this is what I was trying to say in this thread.
Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault
See, I don't completely buy this because FILM DEGRADES. Yes, you could theoretically lose a movie on a hard drive or a backup of a movie's production assets, but if I put a digital file in a well backed-up system, it is there in the exact same format later. If I put a film on a shelf, it degrades and needs restoration.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:24 (eleven years ago) link
but if I put a digital file in a well backed-up system, it is there in the exact same format later.
hope you still have software that can read the file
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:27 (eleven years ago) link
digital totally degrades, it's just in a different way from film. hard drives crash, files become corrupt, software changes too quickly etc.
The fules who pooh-pooh the problems with digital should look at some of the threads about "how can I store my digital music collection" or "remastering digital recordings"
― Stars on 45 Fell on Alabama (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:34 (eleven years ago) link
^^^
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:38 (eleven years ago) link
what do you mean I can't get my .wav files off this outdated minidisc format
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:39 (eleven years ago) link
I saw The Five Year Engagement Digital today, and it didn't look very good (a bit dim, a little fuzzy maybe). Then again, I went to see War Horse on film and it didn't work at all. Wound up waiting 90 minutes before they said they couldn't fix the projector. Got two passes for other films though.
― GoT SPOILER ALERT (Gukbe), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:53 (eleven years ago) link
^ exactly, and that's only going back a decade or two. challenge for archiving digital film & cet is to make sure it's still accessible a century from now.
― Choc. Clusterman (contenderizer), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:56 (eleven years ago) link
punch cards dudes
― a la bouquet marmoset (Austerity Ponies), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:57 (eleven years ago) link
You can just scan punch cards and OCR them! The holes are big!
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 20:59 (eleven years ago) link
I like that the basic argument here is that equipment changes
when what that basically boils down to is "film has been this 35mm bulky format for so fucking long"
I mean, yeah, it works, but.....
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:00 (eleven years ago) link
Like I said before: the ability to view films, long-term, is completely contingent on someone curating and preserving the work, regardless of physical medium. Anything beyond that is quibbling.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:01 (eleven years ago) link
if it ain't broke let's spend a bajillion dollars to maybe fix it or make it worse!
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:10 (eleven years ago) link
Anything beyond that is quibbling
some mediums are simpler and more cost-effective than others, is the issue
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:11 (eleven years ago) link
― Stars on 45 Fell on Alabama (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:12 (eleven years ago) link
yes, that is the exact intention and there are absolutely no pluses to this from an audience, theater, or film archivist standpoint
cinema's dead, lock thread
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:13 (eleven years ago) link
keeping up on projector tech is pricey
shipping huge-ass film reels made out of expensive materials all the time? no prob!
btw I have no real horse in this and just like prodding Shakey and Morbs, so you can dismiss me at will
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:14 (eleven years ago) link
watch out guys, digital might take over and celluloid will go the way of the VINYL AUDIO RECORD
― mh, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:14 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark
if we all 'dismiss' you will you leave the thread
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:16 (eleven years ago) link
lol this is a really lazy/inaccurate parallel and you know it.
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:19 (eleven years ago) link
Yes, there were still be a place for vinyl records and physical books and other great analog technologies, but the much smaller scale of the these things and their production allows them to keep going alongside their digital equivalents whereas the enormous cost involved in the making, distribution and preservation of motion pictures is a game changer.
― Stars on 45 Fell on Alabama (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:24 (eleven years ago) link
Yes and no, I do think there will be boutique/specialty theaters that always have maintained film equipment, but it's a risk.
If anything, I think the real risk coming from widespread digital is the loss of talent and respect for theater. The thing lost in home viewing, or in some cheaper theaters (which sadly is what art house ones tend to be) is the lack of craft and attention to viewing conditions, setting, and attention to the equipment and presentation of the film.
That's less of an issue in smaller theaters showing small-run or art films, in that they usually show a lot of care for the material, but I've been in a number of those places that were also just chain places that didn't get refurnished and they wanted to make a few bucks without any more investment. So we're left with crackling stereo sound and seats that are falling over.
Digital projectors are a risk in that the theory is you turn the thing on, push a button, and the film plays itself so you can just have one of the kids from the concession stand go up and push the button. That lack of care is going to kill the presentation value if anything even starts to go wrong. The main issue I've heard with that is Ebert's issues with theater owners not properly swapping lenses when going from a 3d to standard feature and occasional system glitches, but it's probably the tip of the iceberg.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:31 (eleven years ago) link
If anything, I think the real risk coming from widespread digital is the loss of talent and respect for theater
― Stars on 45 Fell on Alabama (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 22:47 (eleven years ago) link
I should have said cinemas, mea culpa
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:26 (eleven years ago) link
digital totally degrades, it's just in a different way from film. hard drives crash, files become corrupt, software changes too quickly etc.― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:27 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:27 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Hardware crashes and corruption can be prevented. Basically you put multiple copies in different locations and compare them to each other regularly.
Software changes are not degradation, although they are a significant problem.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:29 (eleven years ago) link
aren't theater digital systems really expensive though? i suspect most of my local megachains are still using film, unless they've digitally added scratches and pops somehow
― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:33 (eleven years ago) link
Hardware crashes and corruption can be prevented.
film decomposition and degradation can also be prevented. QED.
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:34 (eleven years ago) link
They can be mitigated, but not prevented, if the film is actually played.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:35 (eleven years ago) link
yes they are really expensive, and no all theaters have not converted, because the studios are insisting that the theaters absorb the costs entirely.
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:35 (eleven years ago) link
thought we were discussing archiving/storage, not things being shown regularly
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:37 (eleven years ago) link
afaik all the megachains near me have switched over to digital in all their main theaters, which isn't a backwater. I want to go to the independently-owned chain nearby to check that out. The couple local small indie theaters are definitely film-only.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:37 (eleven years ago) link
film decomposition and degradation can also be prevented. QED.― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalinkthought we were discussing archiving/storage, not things being shown regularly― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:34 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
and then a warehouse burns down and you need to make another copy...
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:41 (eleven years ago) link
and then a virus eats your backups and your files are gone
I don't see what the point of going around like this is
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:44 (eleven years ago) link
just stop pretending like there are no issues with digital, okay? There are.
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:45 (eleven years ago) link
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 7:45 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark
mh admitted that he's just trolling the thread. i wouldn't even bother if i were you
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:46 (eleven years ago) link
I never said there were no issues! And I'm not trolling the thread, I was prodding Shakey and Morbs' cynical-at-all-accounts ideas of digital.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:48 (eleven years ago) link
it's not an all-accounts sort of idea, it has to do with the amount of money involved. whenever someone insists that I buy a SHINY NEW product that is SUPER EXPENSIVE but offers nothing beyond eliminating people's jobs and offering up a different set of problems than the ones we already have I'm inclined to be suspicious.
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:50 (eleven years ago) link
like, "here's this shiny new toy that does the work of 10 people! Except it doesn't always work. Also it costs 1 jillion dollars."
it's always illuminating to see which rubes want to be the first in line
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:51 (eleven years ago) link
There are shitloads of problems with digital, the largest of which being that there's no body establishing good baseline standards. The HDTV standard was started in the early - mid 1980s and took until recent years to gain implementation after adoption. On the theater front, if there is a similar body, I'm not aware of it (MPAA lol?). 2K projectors are standard and 4K are being pushed. 3D is 'standard' but I kind of doubt it is, although others probably could speak to that. Peter Jackson wants to project in 48 fps -- does existing hardware support that? I mean, making theaters jump through hoops constantly is more of an issue than people squawking about their moving looking 'too smooth'
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:52 (eleven years ago) link
Can we all just accept as a given that cinema was, from the beginning, an incredibly fragile medium with little potential for lasting permanence?
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:53 (eleven years ago) link
I don't see anyone here complaining about movies looking too smooth
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:54 (eleven years ago) link
Point of evidence, it looks like the locally-owned theater chain that exists in the suburbs/smaller communities has all 4k, bright-lit 3d-capable projectors, but only at their three largest locations.
― mh, Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:55 (eleven years ago) link
― mh, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:13 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark
― mh, Tuesday, May 1, 2012 5:01 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark
i mean what the christ is this. nobody's calling for the death of digital, the upsides of it are obvious to everyone, and even if they werent it wouldn't matter because it's here to stay. even nolan isn't anti-digital, he's advocating for the director's choice. theater owners want to make their own choices about how they exhibit movies, not be bullied into changing at massive expense and at the expense of programming options. and quibbling? it would be convenient for you if that were so, but the specific differences do matter hugely. you're just being wildly disingenuous all over the place
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 1 May 2012 23:56 (eleven years ago) link
No, I just felt, perhaps wrongly, that "The Death of Cinema" and the general tone of articles posted is all nay-saying and speaking about the problems, where in the long term many of these changes could make some archiving easier for film from here on out.
It just kind of rings to me like the entire threads of Dr. Morbs naysaying on anything made fewer than 30 years ago. I agree that it'd be a horrible tragedy if we lost even one film from that era due to an inability to project an old reel, a distributor only shipping in a new format that film had not been converted to, or if we end up with fragmentation of the market and an inability to just, you know, watch a movie.
The point is that the upsides are _not_ obvious to everyone and that there is a lot of naysaying on digital, not just due to the effect it is having on traditional filmgoing.
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 00:00 (eleven years ago) link
I do appreciate the call-out, though. "quibbling" and the like was overreaching, sorry on that
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 00:01 (eleven years ago) link
i would think it is in mega-chain/studio's interests to make digital as cumbersome and high-barrier as possible -- as soon as a low-cost, low-maintenance format/system is entrenched, this would effectively put every dork with a fancy camera rental and a kickstarter project on the same playing field as brett ratner.
― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 00:09 (eleven years ago) link
Good point. Can we just burn the MPAA to the ground?
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 00:12 (eleven years ago) link
yeah sorry i didnt wanna be mean it was just frustratin to read. i do feel like the truly anti-digital partisans are a pretty miniscule minority at this point, ten years ago it was more of a thing but it seems that just about everyone has accepted it, some with more misgivings than others - everyone knows now that you can make some amazing looking movies on digital, and everyone knows that top shelf digital projection looks pretty darn good. these weren't taken as a given a decade ago.
i mean part of the thing with the academy's digital dilemma 2 study is that basically every filmmaker they surveyed was totally ignorant about or unconcerned with the archival issues related to digital, and when it comes to documentarians and indie filmmakers, those are the guys who arguably benefit the most from the digital revolution and also stand to get hit the hardest re: these archival issues
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 00:19 (eleven years ago) link
from the 55 new answers I figured celluloid musta been banned today.
Two years from now (or less) the studios aren't even gonna be sending out film prints.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 02:22 (eleven years ago) link
and then a virus eats your backups and your files are goneI don't see what the point of going around like this is― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:44 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, May 1, 2012 8:44 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I don't want to continue this either, but: not a degradation issue. (also not something that has ever happened to a bank or other financial institute)
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 02:50 (eleven years ago) link
Reductive, but true. BTW, the great advantage of digital over analog is the ridiculous ease of making as many copies as you like. If arguments are being made that analog is durable, then the counter argument is that digital is reproducable. You can put all your eggs in one master analog copy in cans in a vault, or you can distribute your eggs in a hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or more digital copies for amazingly little cost in money or effort.
But, as I said so reductively, anything can be lost if no one pays any attention to saving it. Digital or analog makes no difference to that part of the equation. And it is desire and attention that make up the lion's share of any archival effort. It actually helps if it is in a cheap and easy to reproduce medium, tbqf, so long as the desire to save it exists.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 03:22 (eleven years ago) link
Fair enough. But there is also a question of what is passed around and saved in the multiple copies- is it the YouTube version, the DVD version, the Blu-Ray version, the constituent elements that were mixed down to make all of the above? You may say this is gilding the lily, but there it is
― Stars on 45 Fell on Alabama (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 03:54 (eleven years ago) link
It is kind of amazing that studios are both pushing digital projection at all costs, really kind of bullying theaters into it (offering help upgrading only if they trash their old 35mm systems etc) while at the same time being so terrified of piracy, I mean do they really not see no potential crossover there
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 10:11 (eleven years ago) link
With the way some piracy has been done, specifically by theater insiders, I think there's not much of a difference. I've never seen a pirated direct dump from a production house hard drive, and I think that there's probably some sort of DRM on the system. If anything, that would be the fear for archiving -- I can't think of any digital video format that's no longer decodeable, especially given the fact you can go to a reference implementation in the worst case and just compile up a new version for your computer, but once the original hardware goes by the wayside, it may be a total bitch to "unlock" the movies on those drives.
Completely hypothetical since I have no idea what they're doing in that aspect, but that would be my fear.
As for what's in the multiple copies -- at the very least, the version that was sent to be screened at movie theaters. Production houses, especially the likes of Pixar where the entire process is computer assets, would be wise to keep all their materials, but in the end, it's the movie that counts.
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 14:22 (eleven years ago) link
For a long time studios saw no profit in archiving, because the only venue for watching movies was the movie theater and the theaters only wanted to show new material. Television was at first viewed only as a dumping ground for old stuff, but that eventually changed. Ever since cable and the VCR arrived, the profit in archiving has been obvious. I'm pretty sure this will continue.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 16:33 (eleven years ago) link
This gives a pretty good summary of how (at a cinema level at least) digital film files are stored and delivered:
Digital Cinema Package
If that's tl;dr then it's worth noting that the files are encrypted at all stages, and decrypted via a key transmission method to the cinema, so piracy at this point in the chain looks unlikely (and would doubtless be traceable to the cinema that the files originated from). Even with compression the bit-rate for DCP files is still about 8 times that of blu-ray too, so the files are going to be in the order of hundreds of GBs as well.
― that mustardless plate (Bill A), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 16:58 (eleven years ago) link
"The profit in archiving" applies most to the "top of the mountain" titles, though.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:04 (eleven years ago) link
Thanks, Bill! I was kind of wondering how they did it.
I was actually brainstorming this last night and came up with a pretty godawful DRM scheme they could use. I hope such a thing never comes to pass, because... you could get pretty crazy.
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:15 (eleven years ago) link
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aMB-u3dedB8/T6ErwzESf6I/AAAAAAABWe4/pB_nbxqE_JQ/s1600/deleted1.jpg
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:20 (eleven years ago) link
I posted that way the hell upthread but it's behind the "more messages" now.
― i love the large auns pictures! (Phil D.), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:21 (eleven years ago) link
yeah that's what kicked off this revive
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:21 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah, I don't get that at all because how the fuck are the hard drives they send out even writeable?
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:47 (eleven years ago) link
Ever since cable and the VCR arrived, the profit in archiving has been obvious. I'm pretty sure this will continue.
― Aimless, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 12:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
its probably less obvious in the age of internet piracy?
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:51 (eleven years ago) link
lol, we don't need profit now, we have people running torrent-seeding systems for scene "cred" or for ratio
― mh, Wednesday, 2 May 2012 17:54 (eleven years ago) link
From a CNET article it looks like that Avengers screening booboo was because it had been downloaded, rather than sent as a disk, so it's feasible that someone could delete it from the DCP server by accident I guess.
On a thread related note, this blog entry about the benefits of digital distribution for small-time filmmakers is quite an interesting read. Some good snaps of a typical DCP set up too:
http://wearecapture.com/blog/?p=238
― that mustardless plate (Bill A), Wednesday, 2 May 2012 18:09 (eleven years ago) link
Eerie.
http://news.doddleme.com/news-room/and-so-it-begins-20th-century-fox-to-end-film-distribution/
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Saturday, 5 May 2012 15:03 (eleven years ago) link
Getting ready to make up crazy facts about film projection for the grandkids.
― a la bouquet marmoset (Austerity Ponies), Monday, 7 May 2012 14:11 (eleven years ago) link
So, everyone saw Hugo in digital projection, right?
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Monday, 7 May 2012 14:15 (eleven years ago) link
caught a glimpse of what looked like a windows 98 desktop for a split second after I saw the raid: redemption yesterday, lol
― original bgm, Monday, 7 May 2012 15:22 (eleven years ago) link
in a chain theater
David Bordwell on James Cameron's presumptive agenda:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/04/22/its-good-to-be-the-king-of-the-world/
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 19:39 (eleven years ago) link
Off topic, but this quote:
Second, if these guys are so passionately committed to quality, why don’t they make better movies?
― a la bouquet marmoset (Austerity Ponies), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 19:51 (eleven years ago) link
― (⊙_⊙?) (Alan N), Monday, May 7, 2012 11:22 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark
ive seen that a few times. also when i saw A Separation, the first 5 minutes or so played without subtitles because the projectionist forgot to turn them on - like when you're watching a DVD.
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 19:56 (eleven years ago) link
yeah for some reason i thought that bordwell article had been posted. its good, but i still cant muster any sympathy for the conscience-free big chain exhibitors who have been bilking theatergoers ever since the multiplex era began. i mean at fucking cinemacon this year the big chains were batting around ideas about allowing texting during movies to lure in teenage customers. there is no low they won't stoop to in the name of profits. of course, independent theaters are getting shafted by cameron's 'all stick' approach too...
― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, 8 May 2012 20:03 (eleven years ago) link
Chris Nolan, defender of celluloid:
http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-12/film-tv/35-mm-film-digital-Hollywood/
― polyphonic, Wednesday, 9 May 2012 18:40 (eleven years ago) link
third time's the charm
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 9 May 2012 18:44 (eleven years ago) link
haha, sorry, didn't see it until I showed the hidden posts. mea culpa
― polyphonic, Wednesday, 9 May 2012 18:46 (eleven years ago) link
THE MOVIE VANISHES
http://youtu.be/EL_g0tyaIeE
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 15 May 2012 14:34 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob
They almost lost 2 months worth of work, but then they redid everything anyway so it wouldn't have mattered. Still scary.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 00:34 (eleven years ago) link
i should also point out that it incredible that
rm -rf *
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 00:41 (eleven years ago) link
it's
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 00:42 (eleven years ago) link
it's not a problem, it's a valid operation - you can't remove the ability to delete stuff, or change how it works.
decent permissions will stop anyone being able to delete anything but their own files (yeah, ok, that can be catastrophic enough).
― koogs, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 08:45 (eleven years ago) link
tbf Orson Welles lost two whole reels of footage when he ran out of desk space and set them on top of the trash can and the janitor threw them out
― mh, Wednesday, 16 May 2012 13:47 (eleven years ago) link
I think he actually misplaced them in a pizza box
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 14:17 (eleven years ago) link
I think he actually ate them
― Roger Barfing (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 17:14 (eleven years ago) link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm_(Unix)
A command so dangerous shouldn't be so easy to use. This page has a bunch of different solutions, which most linux distributions don't use.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Wednesday, 16 May 2012 20:04 (eleven years ago) link
most of those (3) solutions won't work with the above because of the fact that it explicitly used -f to force removal. and the Protection of the filesystem root doesn't apply because it's not necessarily /
(ubuntu enforces -i by default, i think. but that's dangerous as it just leads to people typing -f by rote, to bypass all the y y y y y y y y that needs doing if you're deleting more than one file)
backups.
― koogs, Thursday, 17 May 2012 07:55 (eleven years ago) link
tbf Windows has the same issue, it's just that no one uses the command line
I have, in the past, had the charming habit of holding down shift while deleting in Windows to do a real delete all the time, though.
Backups!
― mh, Thursday, 17 May 2012 14:27 (eleven years ago) link
oh, a digital troubleshooting thread! let's kill cinema now.
― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 17 May 2012 14:39 (eleven years ago) link
decent source control is probably the first step though. more difficult with large binary files (textures) but...
― koogs, Thursday, 17 May 2012 14:40 (eleven years ago) link
=D
― mh, Thursday, 17 May 2012 14:41 (eleven years ago) link
so there's a new doc opening in a few cities and playing on VOD where Keanu interviews filmmakers about the digital changeover! Plenty for Lucas- and Cameron-haters to chew on.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/side-by-side/6454
― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Monday, 13 August 2012 21:08 (eleven years ago) link
I'm interested in seeing that, actually. Do you know when it's available on VOD?
― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Monday, 13 August 2012 21:27 (eleven years ago) link
week from Wednesday.
http://sidebysidethemovie.com/
It covers a lot of the issues discussed above, esp re archiving toward the end, but often in "It's like this / No it's not" fashion.
― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Monday, 13 August 2012 21:40 (eleven years ago) link
morbs did you read david bordwell's 'pandora's digital book,' its great
― Author ~ Coach ~ Goddess (s1ocki), Monday, 13 August 2012 22:40 (eleven years ago) link
dude, the last 'serious' book I read was Nixonland and it took me a year.
― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Monday, 13 August 2012 23:35 (eleven years ago) link
it's a quick read!
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/05/17/pandoras-digital-book/
and i guarantee more insight than keanu reeves' documentary.
― Author ~ Coach ~ Goddess (s1ocki), Tuesday, 14 August 2012 00:39 (eleven years ago) link
some outtakes from that doc here
http://www.tribecafilm.com/videos/?sortBy=-startDate&11963=1030576
― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 15 August 2012 17:45 (eleven years ago) link
Neil Young: "Once there was a friend of mine/who died a thousand deaths." (Haven't read this yet, haven't decided if I will.)
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/28/is_movie_culture_dead/
― clemenza, Friday, 28 September 2012 22:43 (eleven years ago) link
"there's a lot of handwringing about the death of cinema so here is an article where i handwring about the death of the cinema."
really it's just a blender of TV IS MORE DISSCUSSED and that NYFF doesn't matter anymore and the cultural elites don't dictate the wider discussion
― Legendary General Cypher Raige (Gukbe), Friday, 28 September 2012 22:54 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-hungry-hungry-hippos-action-man-monopoly-movie-20121004,0,4066248.story
― let's keep this board about feet, please. (latebloomer), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:37 (eleven years ago) link
Just noticed that our Landmark franchise here--which resides in perhaps Houston's last movie palace that actually still shows movies--has gone all digital for new releases.
― 50 Shades of Greil (C. Grisso/McCain), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:55 (eleven years ago) link
Hungry Hungry Hippos, which debuted in 1978, is a game in which players compete with plastic hippos to swallow marbles off of a board.
shit i've been playing it wrong
― thread lock holiday (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:55 (eleven years ago) link
ha
― Number None, Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:56 (eleven years ago) link
My twitter feed these days has basically become a daily report of digital/DLP critics' screenings gone awry.
― Ham Lushbaugh (Eric H.), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:57 (eleven years ago) link
do tell!
― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:58 (eleven years ago) link
Every day, digital/DLP critics' screenings go awry.
― Ham Lushbaugh (Eric H.), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 19:58 (eleven years ago) link
― there is no dana, only (goole), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 20:07 (eleven years ago) link
great story
― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 20:10 (eleven years ago) link
It's even better in yfrog form.
― Ham Lushbaugh (Eric H.), Wednesday, 10 October 2012 20:12 (eleven years ago) link
"Old" movies to look like video forevermore....
In June, director Martin Scorsese tried to show his 1993 film The Age of Innocence at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor for the past 40 years and a three-time Oscar winner, called Grover Crisp, the senior VP of asset management at Sony, for a 35mm print. But Sony not only didn't have a print, it couldn't even make one.
"He told me that they can't print it anymore because Technicolor in Los Angeles no longer prints film," Schoonmaker recalled. "Which means a film we made 20 years ago can no longer be printed, unless we move it to another lab—one of the few labs still making prints."
..."I was used to hearing, oh well, maybe films made in the '40s or '50s, but our film?" Schoonmaker said, referring to titles that have become unavailable. "And it's not the only one of our films that is in this situation. What really worries me are the lesser-known movies."
And film buffs are worried not just about the lack of digitized titles, but how they are being converted. Schoonmaker for one has been appalled by some of the digital "restorations" she's screened.
"I saw a digitized version of a film that David Lean made during World War II, and it looked just like a TV commercial that was shot yesterday," she said. "It was wrong, the balance was completely off. Originally it had a slightly muted look, and now here were all these insanely bright blues."
Schoonmaker believes that the colorists who have been trained in the last 10 or 15 years "have no idea what these movies should look like anymore."
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/with-35mm-film-dead-will-classic-movies-ever-look-the-same-again/265184/
― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Monday, 26 November 2012 16:00 (eleven years ago) link
I don't want the endless stream of those articles over the years to get me down, but boy do they get me down.
― Gukbe, Monday, 26 November 2012 16:11 (eleven years ago) link
Countdown to the death of "the death of Cinema" articles.
― Bobby Ken Doll (Eric H.), Monday, 26 November 2012 16:20 (eleven years ago) link
Not really about the "death" of cinema, but Steven Spielberg thinks the Hollywood system is about to "implode," and everyone has some thoughts...
http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-spielberg-lucas-and-that-imminent-implosion
― ballin' from Maine to Mexico (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 15 June 2013 18:26 (ten years ago) link
just read this annoyingly-written snippet of a memoir and it seemed relevant: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/15/lynda_obst_hollywoods_completely_broken/singleton/
― Gukbe, Sunday, 16 June 2013 07:18 (ten years ago) link
http://online.wsj.com/articles/kodak-movie-film-at-deaths-door-gets-a-reprieve-1406674752
― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 30 July 2014 19:38 (nine years ago) link
I had no use for it but RIP anyway
― Dr. Winston O'Boogie Chillen' (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 31 July 2014 01:42 (nine years ago) link
Seitz interviews Godfrey Cheshire, 15 years after the Death of Film/Decay of Cinema articles:
http://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/death-of-filmdecay-of-cinema-at-15-a-conversation-with-godfrey-cheshire
― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Friday, 1 August 2014 05:10 (nine years ago) link
Great dialogue there; I've always loved G.C. to death.
For starters, I definitely read Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television at the start of the '80s, maybe for a media class.
― son of a lewd monk (Dr Morbius), Friday, 1 August 2014 19:33 (nine years ago) link
Nick Pinkerton on the ramping up of the war for 35mm Survival:
I won’t deny that there is a sentimental element to 35mm partisanship, for this is a format that will age and show wear, as we do, and finally die, as we must. For a moment, watching Deathdream in Yonkers, I even indulged in the fancy that I might be watching the same print I’d seen 14 years ago at Dayton’s Neon Movies, when Dr. Creep still crept among the living. Certainly there was nostalgia aplenty in the first round of eulogies for film which came in 2011, when the first-run theatrical changeover was already well underway and Ebert declared “my war is over, my side lost, and it’s important to consider this in the real world”—but also a fair amount of cautious optimism. I even expressed as much at the time.
My optimism has lessened in direct proportion to my practical experience of the Brave New DCP World. For all the rep calendar ballyhoo about “glorious,” “stunning” new 4K restorations, we seem to be about on par with the Victorians when they started restoring Renaissance paintings to blindingly bright palettes meant, quite inaccurately as it happens, to reflect their original splendor. (Wiseman’s National Gallery is instructive viewing on this matter, and on the matter of contextualizing exhibition.) League writes, “With digital presentation, the movie looks as good at the first screening as it does after playing for months,” but this presupposes that the movie looks good in the first place, as opposed to merely freshly scrubbed. If it doesn’t? Tough titties, you’ll be looking at it on DCP for the foreseeable future anyways, because any print is safely sealed away miles beneath the earth’s crust.
http://filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-35-stayin-alive
― this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis (Dr Morbius), Monday, 27 October 2014 16:05 (nine years ago) link
last 35mm lab in NYC shuts down
http://www.playboy.com/articles/last-nyc-film-processing-lab-closes-end-of-an-era
― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 6 November 2014 16:58 (nine years ago) link
Yes, 2014 movies shot on film look amazing. But movies from the '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, and '10s need 35mm to survive. Dean Plionis, director of operations for Colorlab, a New York City-based film company that processes 35mm in its Maryland facility while specializing in film archiving and restoration, believes that when it comes down to the scientific facts of degradation and human error, film trumps digital. Remember Zip Drives? That storage method that spiked in popularity in the late '90s? Imagine finding one today. Could you get the information off? Can you imagine mining its data in another 50 years? It's hard to imagine losing the digital files of The Avengers, but evolving encodings, algorithms, and proprietary software could make them impossible to read in 100 years.
^^^this is the biggest issue imo
― Οὖτις, Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:12 (nine years ago) link
It's hard to imagine losing the digital files of The Avengers
But we can all try nonetheless.
― Eric H., Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:38 (nine years ago) link
yeah the instant obsolesence of digital media and the need to keep shifting among formats and storage hardware is a major issue for archives in the present and future
― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:40 (nine years ago) link
whereas, you make a print, and keep it in climate-controlled storage, you're good for a century or longer
btw can i just say how much i hate the neologism "digital print"?
as in, "we're showing a restored digital print of 'jaws' next week!"
also, the debasement of the word "restored"
― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:41 (nine years ago) link
"i ran this movie through one of those computer things—it's restored!"
^ agreed with all that.
with film dying (or dead already), the future belongs to colorists.
― Van Horn Street, Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:44 (nine years ago) link
put a fork in it, it's done
― Thackeray Zax (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:46 (nine years ago) link
the future of film now depends on Jay Jay Abrams and a new Star Wars sequel. hope it's a home-run in that regard. i'm ok with digital behind the dominant method of production in the industry, but it doesn't mean film has to die completely.
― Van Horn Street, Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:49 (nine years ago) link
Eric, best post ever
― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:50 (nine years ago) link
Remember Zip Drives? That storage method that spiked in popularity in the late '90s? Imagine finding one today.
This guy should come work in my office. Not that I've ever been enabled to open one.
― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 6 November 2014 19:51 (nine years ago) link
Watched Reggio's Visitors today. Digital copy. Not good enough resolution, distracting throughout the whole film. Then went and saw The Emperors Naked Army Marches On in a 35mm print flown in from Japan. Boy, did that look amazing, even though it was old. Dunno, at times I'm a format fascist. It really isn't the same.
― Frederik B, Thursday, 6 November 2014 23:10 (nine years ago) link
i like the shimmer of 35mm in projection; it's hard to recreate in digital projection even when the film was shot/post analog
― I dunno. (amateurist), Friday, 7 November 2014 01:22 (nine years ago) link
hmm, i cant decide whether to see a 70mm screening of 2001 at the BFI next month, or the new digital 'restoration'. for some reason i imagine a film like 2001 might benefit from DCP. sci-fi was surely meant to be seen as pristinely as possible, no?
― StillAdvance, Friday, 7 November 2014 11:36 (nine years ago) link
I'd go for 70 mm. Can't imagine the warm colours of 2001 will be helped by digital.
― Frederik B, Friday, 7 November 2014 11:43 (nine years ago) link
i want to see it the way the maker made it
― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Friday, 7 November 2014 13:11 (nine years ago) link
Actually, I reconsider. I love digital. Saw a few digital films, Konchalovsky's The Postman's White Nights and the new one from the Harvard Ehtnography/Sensory Lab, The Iron Ministry, and I love how they look. Postman's White Nights capture a beautiful northern russian light, cold and strange, and Iron ministry has the grains, the hues, and the shakes of cheap digital almost guerilla filmmaking. I absolutely love it. On the other hand, I saw a film promotes as 4K, transcendental, overwhelming, and it just looked like a nature program on bbc. Mainstream digital, supposedly more clear, more clean, is horrible, all character removed to create smooth, vanilla, blandness. So mediocre, so dull.
― Frederik B, Sunday, 9 November 2014 19:22 (nine years ago) link
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/11/21/paul_schrader_interview_filmmaker_talks_dying_of_the_light_absent_friends.html
Paul Schrader:
You made a movie recently, The Canyons, which was funded through Kickstarter and released on demand, as well as in theaters. Do those new avenues make you more optimistic about the future of film?PS: Everything’s up for grabs. It’s exciting in that way—unless you’re wedded to the 20th-century concept of a projected image in a dark room in front of a paying audience. If you’re wedded to that concept, you’re in trouble, because that concept is dead.I’m guessing you’re not wedded to that concept. Some filmmakers seem nostalgic and very invested in 35mm projection.PS: I’m not. It’s all revanchist claptrap. The goal of art is not to tell people what tools they want to use, but to use whatever tools are around. The tools are always changing and the artists need to change with the tools. We didn’t have movies 100 years ago, and we did quite fine without them, and now they’re going to become something else again.
PS: Everything’s up for grabs. It’s exciting in that way—unless you’re wedded to the 20th-century concept of a projected image in a dark room in front of a paying audience. If you’re wedded to that concept, you’re in trouble, because that concept is dead.
I’m guessing you’re not wedded to that concept. Some filmmakers seem nostalgic and very invested in 35mm projection.
PS: I’m not. It’s all revanchist claptrap. The goal of art is not to tell people what tools they want to use, but to use whatever tools are around. The tools are always changing and the artists need to change with the tools. We didn’t have movies 100 years ago, and we did quite fine without them, and now they’re going to become something else again.
― slam dunk, Saturday, 22 November 2014 19:47 (nine years ago) link
http://grantland.com/features/2014-hollywood-blockbusters-franchises-box-office/this is a good article but seriously is it completely impossible that audiences will burn out on dc/marvel/etc, leading to successively lower box office tallies and leaving executives desperate to throw money at other stuff?
― slam dunk, Friday, 19 December 2014 23:01 (nine years ago) link
What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied. Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.
this is a very salient point imo
― Οὖτις, Friday, 19 December 2014 23:13 (nine years ago) link
eg. The ILX Star Wars thread will only die once the film is actually released and everyone realises that they don't even wanna go and pay money to see this piece of shit garbage film for kids.
― everything, Friday, 19 December 2014 23:35 (nine years ago) link
wishful thinking but yea that is not happening
― johnny crunch, Saturday, 20 December 2014 00:33 (nine years ago) link
Day after it comes out there's going to be a spike of activity in the "Depression and what it's really like" thread. Guaranteed.
― everything, Saturday, 20 December 2014 00:58 (nine years ago) link
Not to nitpick, but that is an article on the death of Hollywood, not Cinema ;) Cinema will do just fine, prob even better if you remove all the American prestige crap. Like, when it gets to that list of films started by one billionaire or something, and that list includes American Hustle and Zero Dark Thirty, well, I'm not going to miss those things.
The thing is also, Marvel is really, amazingly good at what they do. I don't really like what they do, but you kinda have to give them credit, they did sorta reinvent the wheel, and keeps a level of basic competence, which is almost unique in the business. When I watch a Marvel Movie there is almost always up to several seconds of the film which was funny and awesome and vine-worthy. And that is probably enough to keep the businessmodel going, especially when all the competitors are so fucking useless.
― Frederik B, Saturday, 20 December 2014 01:02 (nine years ago) link
i think that grantland article has some good points but it also misses a lot of nuance and it's more than a little ahistorical
david poland posted a smart response to it: http://moviecitynews.com/2014/12/the-sky-continues-not-to-fall/
― I dunno. (amateurist), Saturday, 20 December 2014 01:16 (nine years ago) link
good article, thanks for posting that
― slam dunk, Saturday, 20 December 2014 02:37 (nine years ago) link
yeah, i mean things aren't exactly great, but i think folks can mistake cycles for permanent changes, and they can also overstate shifts that have taken place but aren't as dramatic as harris seems to think.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Saturday, 20 December 2014 03:05 (nine years ago) link
Like, when it gets to that list of films started by one billionaire or something, and that list includes American Hustle and Zero Dark Thirty, well, I'm not going to miss those things.
Mark H, like any writer who covers the Oscars, has far more mainstream taste than he's willing to admit.
― Eric H., Saturday, 20 December 2014 03:28 (nine years ago) link
yeah, there's kind of reflexive promotion of one type of film over one another. he seems to be implying, "well, even if you didn't /love/ this or that adult drama, you must admit it's better than /this here franchise film/." which is probably a good encapsulation of a lot of critics' tastes, but there's a complacency to it that's not particularly refreshing.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Saturday, 20 December 2014 03:38 (nine years ago) link
Brody takes up Frederik's argument to get Harris off the ledge
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/no-genius-system
― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Monday, 22 December 2014 18:13 (nine years ago) link
surprised to agree w/ a lot of what brody writes there, although i can't share his enthusiasm for a lot of the "adult" pictures he names.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Tuesday, 23 December 2014 04:55 (nine years ago) link
Kodak has finalized a deal with the major Hollywood studios that will allow film to remain alive in certain instances, at least for the near future. This marks the completion of the deal that Kodak said was near-final last summer, when negotiations began....
According to Wednesday's announcement from Kodak, the deal means that the company will continue to manufacturer camera negative, intermediate stock or postproduction, and archival and print film. It also said Kodak would pursue "new opportunities to leverage film production technologies in growth applications, such as touchscreens for smartphones and tablet computers."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/kodak-inks-deals-studios-extend-770300
― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 4 February 2015 23:39 (nine years ago) link
Really terrific FC piece on the major H'wood studios, how they finagle their annual film slate's "profits," and how they've muffed digital streaming / Blu-ray etc:
http://www.filmcomment.com/article/a-specter-is-haunting-hollywood
― the increasing costive borborygmi (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 19 March 2015 16:18 (nine years ago) link
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/jurassic-world-box-office-franchise-movies-hollywood/
If Jurassic World follows recent box office patterns — and with a warm reaction from first-weekend audiences, there’s no reason to think it won’t — a swift ascent to a billion-dollar worldwide gross is a foregone conclusion, and a substantially bigger number than that is well within reach. Furious 7 has now grossed $1.5 billion; Avengers: Age of Ultron is right behind it with $1.35 billion. It is not a stretch to suggest that in a matter of a few weeks, Jurassic World will join them. By Labor Day if not sooner, we could be looking at a movie universe in which three of the six highest-grossing films in history have opened since April.Some box office analysts will say these movies represent a statistical blip, and they could be right, but here’s the thing: Events dismissed as blips change the course of history all the time. Three gigantic films have defined 2015 for some; for others, they’ve been the exceptions within an ongoing narrative about the slow death of theatrical business for movies. We won’t know whether this was an odd year or the shape of things to come until about 2018, but in practical terms, it won’t much matter, because by then, the mere idea that this kind of money can be made and then built upon will have substantially reshaped the way Hollywood studios plan their slates and define themselves. In fact, it’s happening already, and Universal, fifth in market share last year and vying for first in 2015, knows it. Twenty years ago, “blockbuster,” at its most hyperbolic, meant a franchise big enough to give you a park. Now it means a franchise big enough to give you a world.So the Jurassic conversation, I’m guessing, will be less “What’s the next movie?” than “How do we turn this into a semi-permanent enterprise?”
Some box office analysts will say these movies represent a statistical blip, and they could be right, but here’s the thing: Events dismissed as blips change the course of history all the time. Three gigantic films have defined 2015 for some; for others, they’ve been the exceptions within an ongoing narrative about the slow death of theatrical business for movies. We won’t know whether this was an odd year or the shape of things to come until about 2018, but in practical terms, it won’t much matter, because by then, the mere idea that this kind of money can be made and then built upon will have substantially reshaped the way Hollywood studios plan their slates and define themselves. In fact, it’s happening already, and Universal, fifth in market share last year and vying for first in 2015, knows it. Twenty years ago, “blockbuster,” at its most hyperbolic, meant a franchise big enough to give you a park. Now it means a franchise big enough to give you a world.
So the Jurassic conversation, I’m guessing, will be less “What’s the next movie?” than “How do we turn this into a semi-permanent enterprise?”
― Norse Jung (Eric H.), Tuesday, 16 June 2015 19:42 (eight years ago) link
a creeping suspicion
https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/710139908250324992
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 March 2016 18:32 (eight years ago) link
not sure what the right post for this is, but anyway, is there any country, apart from the US, and india, where directors feel like their cinema is appreciated, or more importantly, just SEEN by their national audience?
in the new S&S (which has some good pieces on changing cinema fates), Athina Rachel Tsangari says the greek audience dont see her films. the other week i saw romanian directors at a BFI talk say the same thing about their films. im sure even british directors like clio bernard would say the same thing.
obv this doesnt apply to more mainstream directors/titles (eg in india, independent movies dont have mainstream success like bollywood titles, ditto the US, where alex ross perry isnt exactly competing with star wars, and in the UK andrea arnold isnt really likely to bother richard curtis or the inbetweeners), so i wonder why this is still a point of contention. no one anywhere is watching these films in huge numbers. and perhaps it has always been thus. BUT if no one in their own country is seeing them, where ARE they being seen? is it only festivals?
― StillAdvance, Monday, 25 July 2016 14:53 (seven years ago) link
Well, that's complicated. But yeah, there's definitely an ecosystem based around film festivals. In a lot of European countries, film financing is done in collaboration with the government, and much of that money isn't being spend on what the audience wants. In Denmark, for instance, it's even split in two, a consultant/prestige bag of money, and a market bag of money, which should go to perceived popular films.
At times, it seems a bit like prestige tv series. No Romanian New Wave film will get a financial return on it's investment (I guess). Especially not in Romania, where the moviehouse infrastructure is still really bad, and many people simply won't get the chance to watch these films. But the continued artistic succes of these films paint a picture of Romania as an artistically vibrant place, so to some extent they will keep on being financed.
And then there's all the co-funding being done all over the place. France is financing much of Francophone African cinema, and did so even when there were close to no cinemas in the countries where the films were being made. The Jeonju film festival in South Korea is doing some financing of directors who has participated in the festival before, for instance Argentinian director Mattias Pineiro. Many directors from the Icelandic film boom were educated in Denmark, and there's a whole lot of Danish money involved - so why Danish film continues to be so crap is a mystery to me...
― Frederik B, Monday, 25 July 2016 16:09 (seven years ago) link
tl;dr: Arthouse economics are weird.
― Frederik B, Monday, 25 July 2016 16:10 (seven years ago) link
"film financing is done in collaboration with the government, and much of that money isn't being spend on what the audience wants"
i wouldnt mind if more british film money was spent on 'what the audience DOESNT want', rather than half the stuff you see shown on bbc 1/2 late night/early mornings (or things like the awakening, which has to be one of the most inspid horrors of recent memory). dont want to turn into one of those 'in my day...' bores, but when you see a lot of the stuff that got funded in the 80s, it does boggle the mind.
― StillAdvance, Monday, 25 July 2016 20:30 (seven years ago) link
Bordwell asks if "movies" are any deader than they were in '66.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2016/09/18/its-all-over-until-the-next-time/
― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius), Monday, 19 September 2016 16:43 (seven years ago) link
When critics treat what’s buzzy as valuable, they agree with marketers, and cooperate with them. How many critics who loved The Dark Knight had been prompted by the campaign that played up “Why So Serious?” and other memes that publicists thought would stick? Kristin has documented how The Lord of the Rings marketers set the agenda for journalists by means of junkets and Electronic Press Kits (above), while wooing fans with carefully judged opportunities to participate online (a “pop-cultural conversation,” for sure). The typical big film is positioned by the marketing campaign, and even unanticipated responses, especially if the film is strategically ambiguous, can feed ticket sales.
The People don’t start the cultural conversation; they react to what they’re given. The conversation is started by the studios, and they try to channel it. They generate the “controversies” about making the protagonists of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens a woman and an African American man. The critics pick up the story. (Remember: column inches.) Viewers dutifully enter their opinions on blogs, tweets, and comments columns–which the critics then re-spin. As Brody points out of Quality TV, it’s all about expanding discourse, indefinitely. Criticism begets “comments” which beget chitchat. This less a conversation than a perpetually chattering flashmob.
this is v interesting, it puts words to something i've been arguing with my son about for a while, why i feel a weariness about the big movies he gets excited for that's deeper than whether i think those films are mildly entertaining for a couple of hours
― you can't drowned a duck (Noodle Vague), Monday, 19 September 2016 16:55 (seven years ago) link
it's not the films, it's the relentless blather around them
― you can't drowned a duck (Noodle Vague), Monday, 19 September 2016 16:56 (seven years ago) link
http://webpages.shepherd.edu/ECARBO01/Pictures/gloria%20swanson,%20Norma%20Desmond.jpg
― Gravity Well, You Needn't (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 19 September 2016 17:05 (seven years ago) link
xp otm
It's enjoyable to walk into a movie knowing nothing other than the basic premise and, at most, the opinion given in a brief review or trailer you saw at another showing. Going to the theater to cement your opinion on how this summer action film's director treated the source material, to be debated at length, is painful. Especially if it's a relatively lightweight action film.
― dr. mercurio arboria (mh 😏), Monday, 19 September 2016 18:05 (seven years ago) link
We seem to be heading back to the era before home video, when you actually had to wait to see a film at a museum or a revival house, instead of expecting it to be instantly available. Not sure this is a bad thing.— Dave Kehr (@dave_kehr) October 30, 2019
My ex-ilxor pal who has downloaded 9000 films will scoff at this, of course
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 31 October 2019 15:32 (four years ago) link
in the era before home video you would see a movie on the tv 2 years after it came out in the theatre
― ت (jim in vancouver), Thursday, 31 October 2019 16:43 (four years ago) link
xp of course it's a bad thing, what a moronic thing to say
― flappy bird, Thursday, 31 October 2019 16:57 (four years ago) link
Very much a bad thing for the majority of the world who don't have access to revival theatres or film festivals, and whose accessible theatres are clogged with Marvel crap.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Saturday, 2 November 2019 00:50 (four years ago) link
what if you had to go to London to read Shakespeare? it's just a crazy thing to say...
― flappy bird, Saturday, 2 November 2019 03:11 (four years ago) link
What if there was a nonprofit rep house in every major city? In 1971 it was close(r) to true. The *guvmint* could make it more likely if it wanted to...
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 2 November 2019 04:38 (four years ago) link
my wish to god
― flappy bird, Saturday, 2 November 2019 04:47 (four years ago) link
I'm seeing Birds of Prey and I s2g a guy here alone just clamped an arm onto his seat to hold his phone pointed at his face. An employee spoke to him and then was ok with it so he's not filming the screen. I. I think he's filming his face reacting to the entire movie— Jenny Nicholson 🔜 Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) (@JennyENicholson) February 8, 2020
― j., Sunday, 9 February 2020 02:05 (four years ago) link
literal death of cinema(goers)
Variety reports:
AMC Theatres, the world’s largest exhibitor, has unveiled plans to re-open after coronavirus forced it to close its more than 600 venues in the U.S. for nearly four months. The company is expected to resume operations in 450 of those locations on July 15 and expects to be almost fully operational by the time that Disney’s “Mulan” debuts on July 24 and Warner Bros.’ “Tenet” bows on July 31.
AMC will not mandate that all guests wear masks, although employees will be required to do so. “We did not want to be drawn into a political controversy,” said Aron. “We thought it might be counterproductive if we forced mask wearing on those people who believe strongly that it is not necessary. We think that the vast majority of AMC guests will be wearing masks. When I go to an AMC feature, I will certainly be wearing a mask and leading by example.”
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 19 June 2020 12:20 (three years ago) link
"political controversy" ffs
― Ivan Scampo (Noodle Vague), Friday, 19 June 2020 12:24 (three years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gazNwzC4H0
― Colonel Radle (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 19 June 2020 12:30 (three years ago) link
Cool, I'm sure the inner city rep theaters I patronize will be forcing me and everyone around to me to wear a mask and, similarly, won't subject me to Christopher Nolan's latest film.
― Dirty Epic H. (Eric H.), Friday, 19 June 2020 13:00 (three years ago) link
Horrible decision
― flappy bird, Friday, 19 June 2020 17:09 (three years ago) link
reversed!
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 19 June 2020 18:34 (three years ago) link
yay
― flappy bird, Friday, 19 June 2020 18:46 (three years ago) link
significant, the legal eagles assure us
As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1948 decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, the studios had to divest themselves of their exhibition holdings. A court-approved settlement then established rules governing the licensing relationship between certain studios such as Paramount and Warner Bros. and theater owners. Other studios such as The Walt Disney Company weren't part of the original case, but have nevertheless been guided by those Paramount Consent Decrees.
But with some deregulatory fervor, the Trump-era DOJ has been taking a hard look at long-lasting behavioral remedies for older antitrust abuses. Last November, the DOJ moved to terminate the decrees. In the government's estimation, total bans on practices like "block-booking" (bundling multiple films into one theater license) and "circuit dealing" (the practice of licensing films to all movie theaters under common ownership, as opposed to licensing each film on a theater-by-theater basis) had outlived their usefulness. It was time to sunset them and get rid of other rules. Some indie theaters warned the move would usher in new consolidation with tech giants like Amazon swooping in to acquire theaters.
U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres agrees with the government that times have changed, and so must the rules....
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/judge-agrees-end-paramount-consent-decrees-1306387
For those wondering, one particular bench in SDNY (where Ruth Bader Ginsberg first clerked) has been responsible for reviewing all elements of the consent decrees since 1948. A lot of film companies + theater companies applied for exceptions and things since the mid-50s. If the..— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) August 7, 2020
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 7 August 2020 18:22 (three years ago) link
Yeah, there aren't going to be theaters at this time next year, so rule away, judges.
― Get the point? Good, let's dance with nunchaku. (Eric H.), Friday, 7 August 2020 18:24 (three years ago) link
i wouldn't dismiss any scenario, but your certainty is intriguing
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 7 August 2020 18:26 (three years ago) link
In a scenario where there are no theaters or theaters owned by monopolies, I'm still naive enough to think the former is the worse outcome.
― Get the point? Good, let's dance with nunchaku. (Eric H.), Friday, 7 August 2020 18:28 (three years ago) link
of course no theaters would be worse than pre-48 monopoly theaters, come on
― flappy bird, Friday, 7 August 2020 18:32 (three years ago) link
bcz many pre-48 theaters showed some studio films not aimed at children
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 7 August 2020 18:42 (three years ago) link
For those wondering what's next, I wrote a story for @Polygon in November looking at four possible futures of moviegoing. Today's ruling was essentially a last technical step. The biggest worry is what happens when block booking returns in 2022: https://t.co/pFmZYUE0Hm— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) August 7, 2020
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 7 August 2020 19:02 (three years ago) link
bcz many pre-48 theaters showed some studio films not aimed at children― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, August 7, 2020 2:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, August 7, 2020 2:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
I know, and Netflix or Amazon would fill that gap in this mitigated nightmare scenario. I don't like it but it's better than no theaters at all.
― flappy bird, Friday, 7 August 2020 19:47 (three years ago) link
my local theater is back open and what a lineup
A Quiet Place 2F9Peter Rabbit 2The Boss Baby 2The Conjuring 3Black WidowThe Hitman's Bodyguard 2
― wasdnuos (abanana), Thursday, 8 July 2021 08:22 (two years ago) link
Haha yeah the mainstream releases have been pretty dire. But I'll admit Summer of Soul is the first thing that isn't streaming (in the UK) that's got me tempted to go back to the cinema.
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 8 July 2021 09:59 (two years ago) link
It's streaming from a couple of weeks, but go see it in the cinema, it is a fantastic, fantastic movie.
― burnt hombre (stevie), Thursday, 8 July 2021 13:05 (two years ago) link
Cosign. People waited through the end credits and applauded at my screening! (And were rewarded with an extra Stevie bit.)
― eatandoph (Neue Jesse Schule), Thursday, 8 July 2021 13:52 (two years ago) link
I'll admit I wept a couple of times during it (also it was my first trip into central London since lockdown began, and also my first time in a cinema since Covid)
― burnt hombre (stevie), Thursday, 8 July 2021 14:32 (two years ago) link
Summer of Soul is fucking incredible.
― MoMsnet (calzino), Thursday, 8 July 2021 15:40 (two years ago) link
the banana’s point was not so much that cinema is being killed bcz the films are dire, as that literally every film is a sequel, involving characters who are not under the control of their creators
― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Thursday, 8 July 2021 15:46 (two years ago) link
okay it's Yelp time people. i went to the Vue at the Westfield a few days ago with my boys, to see One Piece: Red. (they are One Piece megafans.) i've found Vue to have excellent picture and sound, and they are absolutely atrocious at everything else. just buying popcorn takes 20 minutes minimum, every time. so this time I popped my own microwave popcorn, bought three Fantas for £3.30 at the corner shop, and went in. the lights go down and the previews start. the sound is truly bone-rattling, but i love that. the subwoofers are SERIOUS in this place. by the time the second or third preview has come on, though, i'm noticing that it's just.... too fucking loud. like, REALLY loud. distractingly loud. hard to even focus on the screen visually for the noise. i'm lie "i'm going to go say something" and the kids convince me not to, that i'll get used to it. they could be right, who knows. the picture starts. it is EAR-SPLITTING. it doesn't help that the whole movie is insane, no intro, no lead-in, doesn't take place on the high seas, it all seems to be about a singing contest? anyway none of us can even think it's so loud, and the kids start complaining too, so i go off to find someone. i do, and she asks to come with me to see for herself. the second we open the door to the screening room she's like "whoah, yeah. that's crazy." she says she'll go find a manager. do i need to come with you? no no, we'll take care of it. 5, 10 minutes go by, it's still the same, i walk back down to the front of the cinema. she's not there. i ask where a manager is, he's pointed out to me, and i tell him the story. we can't change it, he says. what?? i convince him to come with me. he does, and of course it's a quieter section of the movie, and he says listen, we can't just change things because one person doesn't like it. nobody else has complained. this motherfucker. the kids are asking to leave now. we do, i ask for my money back, to his credit he does it. he tells me they have no control over anything locally. they have to call a phone number just to change the air conditioning.
anyway, first time i've ever had an issue with this (my hearing sucks - usually i think things are too quiet!) - however, the Picturehouse, the other local alternative to Vue, consistently screens their movies too dimly. (this is apparently very common - cinemas save ££ on electricity over the longrun, even though they're contractually obligated to screen at a certain luminance(
I mean, i really try to support my local cinemas. Even though I now have a shit-hot TV that makes everything look great. but if they're going to deliver such a subpar, fucked up experience (not to mention the wait times and prices for concessions) it really does deserve to die.
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 25 November 2022 17:29 (one year ago) link
In other news, Rian Johnson had to fight with Netflix to get Glass Onion released in theatres, and they only agreed 1 week on 650 screens.
It's currently outselling Wakanda Forever on a per-screen basis.. If it had opened as widely as WF it would be grossing close to the mythical £100M mark for the first week
― Tracer Hand, Monday, 28 November 2022 11:48 (one year ago) link
Did someone say something about the death of cinema?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UeGXB2NjR8
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, 28 November 2022 16:35 (one year ago) link
wtf is that sad ass nonsense
― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 30 November 2022 21:59 (one year ago) link
Next year:Ant-Man 3, Creed 3, Shazam! 2, John Wick 4, Dungeons & Dragons, Super Mario Bros., Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast 10, Spider-verse 2, Transformers 7, The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Mission: Impossible 7, Barbie, The Marvels, Dune 2, Hunger Games 5, Ghostbusters 5, Aquaman 2
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 16 December 2022 22:20 (one year ago) link
i'm considering re-upping my membership at IFC for the upcoming year and camping out there
― “Cheeky cheeky!” she trills, nearly demolishing a roadside post (forksclovetofu), Friday, 16 December 2022 22:22 (one year ago) link
hey, don't lump Barbie in with that junk
― Piven After Midnight (The Yellow Kid), Friday, 16 December 2022 23:28 (one year ago) link
Bring back the “Blondie” and “Andy Hardy” series you cowards.
― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Friday, 16 December 2022 23:38 (one year ago) link
spiderverse 2 will be goodbut i mean, y’know
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 16 December 2022 23:43 (one year ago) link
I will see 8 of those in the theater.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 16 December 2022 23:45 (one year ago) link
doing your part to keep the cinema alive!
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 16 December 2022 23:46 (one year ago) link
John Wick will be good and Barbie might be but other than that... yikes
― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, 16 December 2022 23:50 (one year ago) link
i will of course see MI
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 16 December 2022 23:56 (one year ago) link
Raise your standards everyone.
...
... I will see Indiana Jones 5.
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Friday, 16 December 2022 23:59 (one year ago) link
doing your part to keep the cinema alive!I will see at least five of them but at least one of those I will swipe for another movie and go into the “wrong” theatrealso but: I will have seen 120 films in a cinema during 2022 (counting repeat viewings)
― more crankable (sic), Saturday, 17 December 2022 00:59 (one year ago) link
Don't know where else to put this: I recently read there was a 90s Disney film with Gérard Depardieu and Katherine Heigl. He plays her dad but he pretends to be her pimp boyfriend. I checked and this really does exist.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 17 December 2022 20:59 (one year ago) link
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/amc-theaters-to-change-ticket-prices-based-on-seat-location/
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Monday, 6 February 2023 22:38 (one year ago) link
I've taken to chiding that movies/cinema are entering their "opera phase," in that it's moved from being a mass culture art form to a specialized taste.
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Monday, 6 February 2023 22:40 (one year ago) link
Oof, let them at least be poetry or the novel before going straight to opera.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 6 February 2023 22:57 (one year ago) link
As I posted on a different thread, Searching for Mr. Rugoff (on the Criterion Channel, or $4 from YouTube) is a very good Death of Cinema film.
― clemenza, Monday, 6 February 2023 23:00 (one year ago) link
Bring back the “Blondie” and “Andy Hardy” series you cowards.― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Friday, December 16, 2022 6:38 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink
― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Friday, December 16, 2022 6:38 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink
Gritty reboots in 3...2...1...
https://postlmg.cc/zyC68HLk
― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Tuesday, 7 February 2023 01:05 (one year ago) link
Yeah Vue cinemas have been doing this in the UK for awhile. "Premium" seats in the middle that are wider, covered in leather, I think they cost £2 more per seat. Of course the cinema's hardly ever more than like a quarter full so you can just go sit up there on a normal ticket if you want. There's no premium seat police who come around checking tickets.
― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 8 February 2023 01:13 (one year ago) link
this is going to change the old canard to "aw, u can't pay your rent? maybe skip going to the movies"
― waiting for a czar to fall (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 8 February 2023 02:34 (one year ago) link
The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income.— Elijah Wood (@elijahwood) February 6, 2023
― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 8 February 2023 13:39 (one year ago) link
last night i saw a movie at IFC and they have seat arms that lift and the house was mostly empty so i was able to make my own couch. i recommend it!
― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 9 February 2023 08:14 (one year ago) link
IFC is such a weird space, I don’t really like it
― And Your Borad Can Zing (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 9 February 2023 08:17 (one year ago) link
I have made it my main weird space for many years.
― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 9 February 2023 15:03 (one year ago) link
There is a theatre by us with wide reclining comfy chairs that also have heaters. Like they want me to fall asleep and miss the movie.
I think picking seats is such a PIA, period. Throw in price ranges and ... fuck that. How are they even going to enforce it?
― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 9 February 2023 15:53 (one year ago) link
The IPIC theater in Maryland has had some form of seat surcharges as long since it opened. I've never been there (for that and other reasons), so I can't say to what degree it works.
― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Thursday, 9 February 2023 17:25 (one year ago) link
they enforce it for real at Nitehawk and Alamo but that's because they are selling you food
― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 9 February 2023 18:59 (one year ago) link
Saw this trailer yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tDrxxjumYA
The similarity to both The Fabelmans and Empire of Light in the "light becomes stories/stories become films" bit--a variation on scenes in the other two--jumped out. I'm sure there'll be more of these elegies-for-a-vanishing-art in the near future.
― clemenza, Sunday, 14 May 2023 16:13 (ten months ago) link
In an Oppenheimer pre-show that must have lasted 30 minutes, we had to put up with a bunch of those non-trailers where they interview cast members on the movie instead of an actual trailer. In two of them, people (David Harbour one of them) made the same point: how amazing and courageous it was because you think this thing that you're watching--car crash, explosion, whatever--is CGI, but it was real people doing real stunts.
Not actually depressing, but somewhere on that continuum. This is what amounts to the new Italian neo-realism: hey, it's real people, not CGI.
― clemenza, Tuesday, 8 August 2023 14:17 (seven months ago) link
Yeah I'm sure that's not the first time I've seen that kind of thing used as a selling point.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 8 August 2023 19:16 (seven months ago) link
Hence why I show up 15-20 minutes before start time. I don't wanna watch pre-shows or trailers -- gimme the movie.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 8 August 2023 19:41 (seven months ago) link
lol AFTER start time
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/martin-scorsese-urges-filmmakers-fight-010914512.html
get 'em!
related, my 12 year old has tapped out on Marvel and Star Wars now (though we'll likely watch Andor S2 whenever that premieres, which is fine by me.) he was really into watching Hangover Square and M Hulot's Holiday recently, i think they really just worked for him as immersive and surprising viewing experiences. having been immersed in watching a lot of green screen films with dumb quips and slumming actors over the last few years, i hope this trend continues. we're gonna try to dig into some classic spookfests this month, maybe some Karloff/Lugosi classics, Hammer horror, etc.
― omar little, Tuesday, 26 September 2023 19:52 (five months ago) link
I think the enemy is franchises in general and if people are genuinely sick of Marvel and DC superhero films I fear huge IP owners will just use whatever they own that is in different genres and maybe be very discreet about being Marvel, Disney films. Huge IP owners and studios might give more creative freedom, maybe make some genuinely great films and then take away creative control when they think they can milk a formula or milk nostalgia for that time they made good films of Jonah Hex and Willie Lumpkin. Apparently big studios only let people try new things when the formulas stop working.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:09 (five months ago) link
i'm trying to think of a franchise i'm not sick of, maybe Mission Impossible but I haven't seen #7 yet.
also probably the minority opinion here, by some distance, but after the last John Wick film i just wondered what the point of the whole thing was. the "world-building" didn't really add up to much in the end, just a lot of flourishes that were interesting but not a lot more, the style of the thing and the aesthetic was so impressive but i didn't feel anything except impressed. zero emotional attachment to any character, really. they just milked that first film for everything it was worth, created a new type of action genre in a way, all this creative talent largely for naught. i can't say i wasn't mostly entertained but the last one was as long as The Godfather and started to feel like it. i think this last one for whatever reason made me question the whole series and why i should bother watching movies along those lines with the limited time i've got.
― omar little, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:18 (five months ago) link
(speaking of non-Marvel/SW stuff above)
I enjoyed the action scenes and that was mostly enough for me. Just like any other martial arts series I'm interested in. Of course filmmakers should aspire to more than that but 3 and 4 were still impressive feats to me in a genre I like that typically doesn't have amazing stories.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:29 (five months ago) link
Universal Monsters and Hammer Horror are much the same: I come for certain things but I know I'm unlikely to get a full package.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:31 (five months ago) link
it just seemed like diminishing returns after awhile to me, the first film is a masterpiece and the second is close, but it felt like they were padding them out in the last two and they felt emptier even as they drew to some kind of attempted emotional close. i think the best part of the last pair was the opening of #4, up to the point where the story arc of Rina Sawayama's arc finished (not counting the vv end.) i almost found the repetitiveness impressive after awhile but not enough.
― omar little, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:36 (five months ago) link
i think though the Disney industrial complex stuff is worse in terms of dominating the industry and the conversations and the talent, though JW has a couple spinoffs and maybe yet another sequel. JW at least did not set out to please the crowds, it's a much more difficult and relentlessly creative and original thing, even if it started to feel empty.
― omar little, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:44 (five months ago) link
I'm sure there will be a Funkopop movie. And then a coca cola movie about sentient coke bottles and cans. And a Ronald McDonald movie. Then a Kellogs movie about the evils of masturbation, wholesome cereals combating the urge, then a porn parody with people jizzing in their cornflakes.
Still amazes me that Fist Of The North Star has made more money than James Bond, but I'm told that's mostly due to pachinko machines.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 20:56 (five months ago) link
It's not on the list anymore so maybe that wasn't so reliable, but there are still surprises on here if this thing is to be trustedhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:01 (five months ago) link
I'm quite perturbed by the amount of YouTube videos of film commentary titled things like "audiences hate it when movies do these things", as if they can speak for everyone.
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:13 (five months ago) link
hmmm is this conversation not more "death of hollywood" really
not that other national cinemas are exempt from the lure of franchises but
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:16 (five months ago) link
there was already a Kellogg's movie, Matthew Broderick i wanna say... yeah Road to Wellness https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/
― koogs, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:28 (five months ago) link
I've seen a bit of it.
I did wonder if there's even the possibility that a different film industry could attract all the big American stars by saying "come over here, we'll treat you better"
― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:29 (five months ago) link
It was a different situation, but obviously Europe did that for a number of folks from Hollywood during the era of blacklisting. Not that escaping franchise work is akin to that.
I have several friends who are either writers or directors or both, and one by one they've been sucked up into franchise work and for me it is a little bit depressing to see considering where they started. Much similar to how virtually everyone I know from the cinema program at my school wound up working in reality television. The latter is much more depressing I think though.
― omar little, Wednesday, 27 September 2023 21:36 (five months ago) link