The Death of Cinema pt. 94

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.

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.

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/

good article, thanks for posting that

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.

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.

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.

Brody takes up Frederik's argument to get Harris off the ledge

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/no-genius-system

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.

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

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

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?”

a creeping suspicion

https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/710139908250324992

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?

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...

tl;dr: Arthouse economics are weird.

"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.

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/

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

it's not the films, it's the relentless blather around them

http://webpages.shepherd.edu/ECARBO01/Pictures/gloria%20swanson,%20Norma%20Desmond.jpg

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.

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

in the era before home video you would see a movie on the tv 2 years after it came out in the theatre

xp of course it's a bad thing, what a moronic thing to say

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.

what if you had to go to London to read Shakespeare? it's just a crazy thing to say...

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...

my wish to god

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

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.”

"political controversy" ffs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gazNwzC4H0

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.

Horrible decision

reversed!

yay

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

Yeah, there aren't going to be theaters at this time next year, so rule away, judges.

i wouldn't dismiss any scenario, but your certainty is intriguing

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.

of course no theaters would be worse than pre-48 monopoly theaters, come on

bcz many pre-48 theaters showed some studio films not aimed at children

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

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

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.

my local theater is back open and what a lineup

A Quiet Place 2
F9
Peter Rabbit 2
The Boss Baby 2
The Conjuring 3
Black Widow
The Hitman's Bodyguard 2

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.

It's streaming from a couple of weeks, but go see it in the cinema, it is a fantastic, fantastic movie.

Cosign. People waited through the end credits and applauded at my screening! (And were rewarded with an extra Stevie bit.)

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)