restlessjack.bsky.social
"Don't complain, this is free."
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If your response is this move might crush the indies, consider that even Moonlight played in 135 theaters prior to Oscar noms, 582 theaters in the run-up to the Oscars, and expanded to 1,500 theaters after winning BP. There's a huge gulf between a small indie run and a bare-minimum Netflix one.
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Might get some pushback for saying this, but we need to change the Oscar rules to require more than a cursory NY/LA theatrical run to qualify. If you go straight to Netflix you should be a TV movie at the Emmys.
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Just curious: have you read Alan Moore's What We Can Know About Thunderman?
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On the one hand, I don't know that any massive text-based social-media platform was ever going to be fun: every post runs a huge risk of getting yelled at by ppl who misunderstand the context. On the other hand.... there's nowhere else left to go!
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I just watched this movie on the big screen yesterday (at Vidiots in Eagle Rock), and on the line "We've got the best public transportation system in the world!" the crowd cheered.
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At least it ends on one of the greatest closing lines in literary history:
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Interesting that Leonardo DiCaprio's advice he gives to young actors when he talks to them -- including Chalamet -- is: "no hard drugs and no superhero movies."
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Sorry if I sound pedantic, but if this movie is losing money (and it clearly is) it's hard to count that as a win by any possible metric?
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It didn't make back its production budget. Rule of thumb: need to earn approx. 2.5x budget to break even (since profits are split with theaters & stated budget doesn't include marketing). Budget is $180m, needs about $450m to break even, has made $272m after 2 weeks = not close to profitable yet.
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I think sometimes about how Pierce Brosnan played James Bond, the ultimate symbol of badass masculinity, and he just has a pretty normal physique in those movies that probably didn't require a personal trainer and nobody in the 90s cared at all.
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I'm a freelance writer with work published in Slate, Salon, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Men's Health (among other places) - wrote MH's obit for Sean Connery when he passed. Also have 15+ years of experience as a copy writer/copy editor. Consider me if you have any work!
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Paul Verhoeven-ass reality
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Yeah, the X-Files reboot seems like the most perfect example of how these things are doomed to fail (creatively at least). What made the X-Files great is how it really captured something about the zeitgeist of the '90s & the chemistry of Duchovny/Anderson, two things impossible to replicate.
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It felt like a lot of people already wrote their "banality of evil" intro paragraphs before even setting foot in the theater.
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I think so many of our problems can be boiled down to the fact that it's tougher and tougher for new ppl to break through the noise in this media environment. Much easier for ppl who established themselves (if that's the word) in the Before times to simply coast on their name recognition.
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A friend pointed out that in both politics and entertainment, the biggest names are getting older and older: the result of how it's vastly easier to capitalize on a decades-old following than try to build one from scratch today. (Also: I think the Internet's impact on this stuff has been awful.)
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Yeah totally, it's a really self-critical film and in no way a straightforward account of Lawrence being a hero who makes the lives of the Arabic people he meets any better. And it was the highest grossing movie of 1962, which would just be unthinkable today.
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Yeah, that's a good question. I guess Stallone was just a huge draw for action movies at that time? Honestly I did not remember it being such a huge hit either..........
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And I'm curious why you picked 1860. Was the publication of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White the beginning of pop culture's downfall or something?
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This isn't true: here's a list of the biggest movies of 1993 - the difference is just night and day with the list for 2025. That's not to say all of these are good movies or are all that smart, but *some* of them are, and even the lesser ones are at least made for adults.
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Not to sound like a crank, but I feel like there's some correlation between our political situation and living in a world where almost the entirety of our mainstream pop culture are simple-to-understand stories for children about "good guy fights bad guy, good guy wins."
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The geek-centric websites that replaced it were less fanboy-ish in some ways, but they also clearly didn't care about anything but the latest blockbuster. No more "you're not a real movie buff if you haven't seen 1938's THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD."
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Something that strikes me about AICN is that for all of its toxic aspects, it still cared about the larger history of film far more than its descendants. I first learned about a bunch of canonical films from the site (I watched BRAZIL bc I think Moriarty/Drew McWeeny kept raving about it.)
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In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt says that cults of personality are not transferable and attempts to do so almost always fail. Obv. I don't believe the GOP will see the light after Trump's gone, but any effort to coalesce around a new leader will be chaotic at best.
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I can't tell you how much I miss living in a media environment where smart people were excited to tell you about new things you would like, rather than just hearing nerds screech about how they want more content based on their childhood obsessions.
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Glad to see a movie doing well so theaters can survive, but I'm waiting for something that you can call a "movie for adults" with a straight face to become a hit.
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Yes, I know, not a lot of modern movies in the vein of LA CONFIDENTIAL and TITANTIC. That's why we need to support them more when they do come out. Letting my generation huff the paint fumes of nostalgia forever has been a disaster.
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Make kids' movies for actual kids, not kids' movies designed to flatter the nostalgia of fortysomethings. Meanwhile, people in their 40s need to go to movies made for actual adults (stuff like LA CONFIDENTIAL or TITANTIC) and not spend the rest of their lives rehashing their childhood memories.
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Makes me think of Terence Davies' movie Benediction, where Sassoon has to think of something to tell a friend with a terrible play and comes up with: "You've done it again!!!"
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MASTER AND COMMANDER underperforming at the box office feels in retrospect like a huge turning point in pop culture. (Oh, and I just watched CHOOSE ME for the first time this past weekend too!)
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The budget for this thing has to be astronomical, which wouldn't have mattered much in the past when they made like almost $3 billion, but I honestly wonder if it this might end up making closer to $1 billion and managing to lose money.....
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If I'm remembering correctly, in The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt says that Nazi party members who were sent to the death camps did not turn on Nazism bc abdicating your ability to think for yourself isn't a side effect of embracing fascism but the whole bag.
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Hey, are you looking for new writers at all? I have 20 years of experience doing pop-culture writing!
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But if that happened and actually worked well..... doesn't that mean those meetings didn't need to happen in the first place? If I had to give a presentation at work and I knew most ppl would only read an AI summary of it, I'd just skip to writing 2-3 paragraphs myself.
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These ppl are obviously idiots, but there's a real myopia to understanding how AI would change things even *if* their wildest predictions came true. Ex: I've seen a lot about AI summarizing work presentations as a 2-3 paragraph synopsis, which would allow ppl to handle multiple meetings at once.
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Haven't seen that, but sounds about right for the world's dullest fanboys.
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It's telling that the cast for the movie is pretty diverse - there's even a trans man! - but the fanboys aren't frothing at the mouth over its wokeness bc Nolan is their god.
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Something I keep thinking about all of today's handsome actors who want to play weirdo freaks: they're all Cary Grants who want to be Peter Lorre, in an industry that no longer hires actual Peter Lorre's.
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Yeah, all around it's a movie with a surprisingly complicated idea of heroism and knowing what the right thing to do is.
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Sure, but at the end of the day, losing a hand to save your friends might be worth it. (Yoda and Obi-Wan do not come off as particularly caring in their mentorship of Luke - they're cold-blooded in a lot of ways, right to down to Yoda saying "I got another chosen one if this doesn't work out.")