“The illusion you’re doing something to help yourself helps you. You somehow feel a little better, a little less despondent. You pin your hopes on a Godot who never comes, but the thought he might show up with answers helps you get through the enveloping nightmare. Like religion, where the illusion gets one through. And being in the arts, I envy those people who derive solace from the belief that you’re doing something to help yourself helps others. The work created will live on and be much discussed and somehow, like the Catholic with his afterlife, so the artist’s ‘legacy’ will make him immortal. The catch here is that all the people discussing the legacy and how great the artist’s work is are alive and are ordering pastrami, and the artist is somewhere in an urn or underground in Queens. All the people standing over Shakespeare’s grave and singing his praises means a big goose egg to the Bard, and a day will come—a far-off day, but be sure it definitely is coming—when all Shakespeare’s plays, for all their brilliant plots and hoity-toity iambic pentameter, and every dot of Seurat’s will be gone along with each atom in the universe. In fact, the universe will be gone and there will be no place to have your hat blocked. After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.”
Woody Allen, “Apropos Of Nothing”

“Dow Jones reports that DOJ and states are likely going to bring antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet, focused on its advertising business and search dominance”

A Jiffy Gift: Facebook Lays Out $400 Million For Giphy

“It feels like a betrayal on multiple fronts: of values my partners and I hold dear, of a filmmaking community who embraced him, and most of all of a young woman who trusted him. I’m grateful to her for bringing this matter to light; she has our support, and I hope she’ll find justice.”
Dallas Film Figure Adam Donaghey Accused Of Sexual Assault Of Teenage Girl On 2017’s A Ghost Story, Which He Co-Produced; Cinestate And Other Concerns Sever Affiliations

“We’re Living Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men”

“Without the baggage of printing presses and gray-haired readers, the retreat of BuzzFeed and other digital natives including Quartz, which on Thursday cut half its workforce, shows the extent of an industry car crash already piled high with newspaper closures and job losses. Even before the crisis, it felt far from a new golden age for the media.”

“Vice is laying off staff today. Per an internal email, the company is laying off fifty-five employees in the US and 100 internationally”

A Statement From The Vice Union

“Warner Bros. and Nolan declined to comment for this story. But those with knowledge of the plans describe how the studio is moving forward. The company has conducted cast and filmmaker interviews for long-lead journalists, monthly magazine writers, by Zoom, and is preparing to drop a second trailer online. The studio, Nolan and theater owners are in close contact about measures that can be taken to bring people safely into multiplexes. Everyone has been trying to pull toward the same goal, say those familiar with the conversations who were not authorized to speak about them publicly: support Tenet as the movie that reopens America. For Warner Bros, the upside is huge: It could capitalize on months of pent-up demand and give the studio theaters all to itself.”

BMD: “Attempting a traditional summer tentpole release of Tenet looks like a phenomenally stupid business decision. Even if the major chains reopen, they will not be able to serve large audiences. Social distancing guidelines mandate selling only a portion of their seats, and some areas have caps on how many people can congregate in one place. At best, you’d have to aim for a slow but steady release; there’s no physical way to get the explosive opening weekend that’s been standard for decades. Even then, you’d still need to convince people to go. Releasing Tenet in July—with “can’t-miss” marketing—is a potential death sentence for anyone who decides to attend that must-see release, picks up the virus from an asymptomatic carrier, and subsequently develops terminal respiratory or other symptoms. All audiences will receive a muted experience: audience response will be replaced by the dead air of empty seats, contagious laughter and gasps by contagious disease.”

Philip Lord: “not sure I get how people who profess to love movies want to spend any energy slagging the people who make them. Every filmmaker I know works their ass off to make something great. When a movie falls short, it’s important to remember it happens to the best of us.”

Glenn Kenny: “Rex Reed has often acknowledged that the labor expended on filmmaking is such that it’s a miracle that even awful ones are completed. And that doesn’t stop him from tearing apart the many movies he hates. You apparently want a participation trophy system of reviewing.”

Chelsea Paretti: “whatever!!! bad movies suck!!!!!!!!!”

Farran Nehme: “Vincent Canby was known to look for something, anything to praise in a film if possible; but that didn’t stop him from writing excoriating pans when the need arose. It takes enormous effort to write even a bad novel, but book critics don’t generally face these reproaches.”

Nick Pinkerton: “The odious myth of ‘filmmakers’ as a caste of exceptionally driven individuals uniformly striving for excellence. As in any profession their ranks include naturals and strivers, ass-kissers and medium-talent workaholics, and loads of coasting mediocrities. The late, lamented Mark E. Smith often spoke of treating being in a band the same way he treated his job as a shipping clerk on the Salford docks. Art is enormously important to me, but it’s also shift work. If you receive especial praise for doing it, you’re exceptionally lucky. Which then suggests a separate-but-related issue, which is that several world-historically great filmmakers—Rossellini, Buñuel—were notoriously incredibly fucking lazy. Try softer!”

Robbie Collin: “Online ticket sales systems will automatically isolate individuals and family groups, entry times will be staggered, and “enhanced cleaning and employee protection protocols” introduced. In short, you’ll be able to enjoy the cinema experience in full without directly interacting with, or even coming within two metres of, a single other human being. In other words, just how I always liked it.”

“One of the main differences between writing subtitles and translating a novel is that a novel translation replaces the original, but when you’re watching a film with subtitles, you can hear the actor’s voice and see his expression—a lot of the emotion of the original dialogue is transmitted even if the audience can’t understand the words. So the subtitles should match the emotions the film evokes, or the audience feels a gap. This is particularly complex with comedies. The way a sentence is structured affects the humor. At festival screenings of Korean films attended by non-Korean audiences, I’ve noticed the audience doesn’t laugh when they read a punch line but at the moment that the actor delivers it. They can sense a release of tension in the actor’s voice and then everybody laughs. So ideally I try to put the punch line in the same part of the sentence where it falls in Korean. The problem is that sometimes the word order is very different in Korean.”

“I’ve subtitled Olivier’s movies since Irma Vep and on some level I feel that if I have developed a style in subtitling, it is the result of my work with him over the years. His movies—so difficult to subtitle, so quickly spoken, so deftly edited by the late great Luc Barnier, a dear common friend—helped me develop a real penchant for condensed, elliptic subtitles that work as dialogue. They allow the reader to pay more attention to the image and at the same time, they say it all—syntactically they work but you feel they are lean. I don’t use this style all the time but it has definitely influenced my work with Claire Denis, although hers is a different poetry—if I wanted to “cheat” on her movies, to lengthen the subtitles, I could, because there is little editing and rarely two people doing verbal ping pong, but I want to keep her subtitles as cryptic as the lines spoken, so I use this same elliptical style I’ve honed over the years with Olivier.”

“Produced eight years after The Day the Clown Cried, it shows what I believe the tone of that mythical lost film might be: treacly, sentimental, and awkwardly grasping for a perpetually out-of-reach balance of pathos and humanism. This seems like the kind of movie that was financed by mobsters, and somehow that quality comes across in the filmmaking.”
Alex Ross Perry On Jerry Lewis’ Hardly Working

Mouse Closin’ “Frozen”

“Once Amazon itself reached great stature, it did not encourage a level playing field; rather, it used its own increased leverage and bargaining power to drive whole market sectors to surrender their profitability to Amazon’s growth. As a former content writer for the company’s front page wrote, “As the public saw it, we had morphed from David to Goliath.”

“John Stankey said newly appointed WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar is the right fit because of his background at Hulu & Amazon: ‘He’s been through these battles,’ but the competition today in streaming has never been more intense”

Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee NoHo Video Store Moved into Storage

“If Momofuku Is Closing Restaurants, What Does It Mean for Everyone Else?”

“Google has drastically rolled back its diversity work due to fears of being perceived as anti-conservative. Sources say employees have been pushed out, programs cut, and workers have been discouraged from even using the word diversity.”

Robert De Niro On Living In “Science Fiction” 8-Minute Video