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LA diary: Fighting Back Like Mickey Rourke |
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Friday, 03 October 2008 |
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Lisa Marks in Guardian UK: Who cares if Hollywood sinks into a decline during the global economic meltdown? I do. But the gloves are off. |
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Opinion: NY Times on Vudu |
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Friday, 03 October 2008 |
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New York Times: Vudu provides instant delivery of thousands of movies, and some can be rented the same day they are released on DVD. Mr. Hollywood looks up and says, “I did.” Granted, that joke isn’t ha-ha funny. All right, it’s not funny at all. But what a great metaphor for the downloadable movie business, eh? These days, anyone born after 1980 expects instant delivery of entertainment. But the Internet movie scene is still dismal: the movies are overpriced, heavily copy protected and lacking subtitles, commentaries or extras. The selection is thin. And even if you go to the trouble of downloading, each movie deletes itself 24 hours after you start playback. This is not how you win over movie lovers’ hearts, especially when free, unencumbered alternatives like BitTorrent are one click away. Into this landscape comes the Vudu movie box ($300), which, even a year after its debut, hardly anyone has ever heard of. It’s a small, black set-top box that offers instant playback of 10,000 movies and TV shows. (The first 30 seconds of each are on the hard drive; as you start watching, the rest downloads in the background.) The four-button remote control has an ingenious clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse. So why hasn’t the Vudu become more of a hit? You know, apart from the fact that there’s been no advertising? |
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Sam Mendes Tells His Best Paul Newman Stories |
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Friday, 03 October 2008 |
 Sam Mendes: He was 76 when I worked with him on Road to Perdition. Conrad Hall was the cinematographer. He was about Paul’s age, maybe slightly younger, and he’d also shot Harper, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy, so he had seen Paul from the age of 40, and there they were in their seventies, still shooting together. It was very moving. At one point he was shooting a close-up of Paul looking into a fire, and I turned round and Conrad was crying as he lit the shot. I asked him what was the matter, and he just said, “He was so beautiful.” And I said, “Well, he’s beautiful now!” And he said, “Yeah, but he was so beautiful.” I think he was crying for both of them. |
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Boston: Return To The Grindhouse |
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Friday, 03 October 2008 |
Boston's Brattle Theatre embraces the scuzz with a season of lowdown and dirty grindhouse classics. Screening at the Cambridge, MA, theater this Sunday will be Rolling Thunder, Sweet Sugar and Chained Heat. Visit the theater's site for more info. |
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Video Tour: $35 Ticket Movie Theater |
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Friday, 03 October 2008 |
 SlashFilm: Earlier this year, we asked you if you would spend $35 on a movie ticket. We told you that Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinema would be opening a bunch of 40-seat-maximum premium movie theaters with a high-end atmosphere, with food or alcohol purchases not included in the $35 ticket price. Now take this video tour of one of these premiere theaters. |
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Would Apple Really Shut Down iTunes? |
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Thursday, 02 October 2008 |
 The Copyright Royalty Board is set to rule tomorrow on the National Music Publishers' Association’s requested increase in royalty rates from nine to fifteen cents per track for online music stores — an increase that could lead Apple to close down iTunes, according to a statement released last year from iTunes V.P. Eddy Cue. "If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the … royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss — which is no alternative at all … Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably,” Cue said at the time. The dominant iTunes controls 85 percent of the online music market but still operates on pretty thin margins — on top of the nine cents currently going to publishers, an additional 70 cents of a song’s 99-cent price tag heads to the record company that owns the rights. But could iTunes really not operate with increased costs? Or, as seems more likely, is Apple using a position of power to bluff away a royalty hike? |
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What to Watch and Where to Watch it |
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Wednesday, 01 October 2008 |
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Chris Thilk on Blogspout.com: This past weekend I attended BlogOrlando, the wonderfully enjoyable and educational social media conference. I had attended last year and this year Josh asked me to lead a session on social media and entertainment.
One question that came up, and which I wanted to focus on now, was this: When everything is available how do you decide what to watch? Let me explain. Right now if I decide I’m in the mood for a comedy my options are: * Go to a theater (Options: Ghost Town, Burn After Reading, Tropic Thunder, etc. But more expensive and dependent on scheduling working out.) * Rent a movie through Netflix (Options: Almost unlimited. Just about whatever I want to find I can find) * Rent a movie through iTunes (Options: More limited than Netflix, but more immediate gratification since I don’t have to manage a queue and wait for the mailed envelope) * Find something streaming online (Options: Cruise to Hulu.com, Fancast.com or other site, but dependent on what studios have decided are essentially expendable) * Find something in my own DVD collection (Options: Largely Marx Bros., Kevin Smith, Monty Python and some other favorites that are comfortable to me but which I still enjoy.) |
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Anthony Kaufman on New American Auteurs: Lance Hammer and Antonio Campos |
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Wednesday, 01 October 2008 |
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Just when you think bold, challenging, artful filmmaking has left the Amer-indie landscape altogether, there's always a film or two every year that comes along to re-energize your faith in domestic cinema. And I'm not talking about those film festival breakouts that cross over into the mainstream or into Academy recognition. I'm talking about films that aspire to and even attain the heights of international art film -- rarefied, perhaps, but groundbreakers all the same. (Past year's examples include In Between Days, Day Night, Day Night, Munyurangabo, Chop Shop, et. al. -- all directed by filmmakers I'm happy to say have delivered or are in the process of delivering similarly uncompromising follow-ups). |
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MPAA Spokeslawyers Insist that They Not Be Identified by Name in Reports from Press-Conference |
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Wednesday, 01 October 2008 |
Boing Boing: The MPAA is suing RealNetworks for making a product that will rip a DVD, crap it up with DRM, and store it on your hard-drive. The MPAA says that only their stupid DRM, and not RealNetworks' stupid DRM, can be used to cripple DVDs. My take? A pox on both their houses. Except this: Lawyers for the MPAA, in a teleconference with reporters, said Kaleidesape and RealDVD are circumventing "technology designed to prevent copying." The lawyers, who asked that their names not be published, said they were concerned "Consumers will think this is a legal product...when in fact it is totally illegal." Wait wait wait wait: what? These unnamed lawyers are on a press-call with the media, as spokespeople for their company, and they "asked that their names not be published?" And journalists complied? Truly, this is a new low in chickenshittery that has me scraping my jaw off my chest. These lawyers aren't deep-throat whistle-blowers sneaking information out of their employers' filing cabinets: they're the official spokespeople for the firm. And they get anonymity? So what happens in the future -- after the MPAA gets its ass handed to it by the court -- if we want to argue that the MPAA's lawyers have a long history of going around saying that software is "totally illegal"? Do the MPAA get to deny it, because no one can name the spokesperson who said it? And why on earth would the journalists honor such a request? "Unnamed MPAA lawyer says stupid thing" fails one of the important Ws of reporting: Who said it?  |
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Hollywood on the Huron: Michigan Now a Film Mecca |
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Wednesday, 01 October 2008 |
First it was Louisiana. Then it was New Mexico and New York.  |
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