China Tightens Film Censorship
Times Editors Believe They Elevate The Life’s Work Of Frederick Wiseman By Dubbing Him The Great American Novelist
China Alibaba Tech Conglom’s Facial Recognition Software Targets Uighur Features
Behind Bernard Bergemar And MindGeek, The Montreal-Based, Luxembourg-Registered Owners Of PornHub, YouPorn, AgeID, TrafficJunky and RedTube: “Mario Salieri was shooting a pornographic movie in a lavish Prague villa two decades ago when he first caught sight of the computer geeks who were about to upend his industry. “The owner of the villa asked me if we could offer a sandwich to a young computer programmer who had been renting a room,” says Mr Salieri. “The boy was pale and visibly hungry.” A few years later, Mr Salieri discovered that “the boy” had bought his first Rolls-Royce Phantom. Like other coders, he had made a fortune selling advertising on the early free-to-watch porn sites, which today attract hundreds of millions of visits every day.”
“Elle Fanning barefoot at LAX simply knows things I do not know, has a wisdom I will never have, wields a power I cannot fathom.”
Jason Kint: “OK, whew. I’ve now read all 130 pages of state AGs suit v Google. In three words, Google is royally screwed. Expect… Press headlines: Facebook and Google colluded! For a company who regularly dismisses the importance of its display advertising biz, it sure was willing to break a lot of antitrust laws… like the state AGs vs Facebook, I’m also thrilled here, this is the exact case I wanted against Google. As promised, Texas had the experts. Like with Facebook, the lawsuit significantly includes the intersection of data and antitrust and the erosion of privacy and capturing of profits as Google achieved market power and could weaponize data. The state AGs very clearly understand Google’s business model. “Google’s entire business model is to collect comprehensive data about every user in the service of brokering targeted ad sales. In other words, Google is more concerned about bad publicity than about users’ privacy.”
“Danny Trejo, 52 years sober, urges those fighting addiction to seek treatment during pandemic”
“If Iger, 69, is offered the ambassadorship to China or Great Britain and accepts, it would mark the end of his stunning 25-year run at Disney.”
“I’m totally team Tom Cruise on this one. If whoever leaked that audio wanted to make him look bad, it backfired and made him look awesome”
Audio, Via The Sun
Hannah Beachler: “Let me be PERFECTLY clear here. Regardless of the message, don’t ever presume you can scream at a crew on set from a position of power. The entire crew should have walked off! It’s not okay in ANY industry. TC is not the hero in this circumstance. Christian Bale however…”
“Tens of thousands of in France’s arts and entertainment sectors took to the streets to protest the continued closure of cinemas, theaters, concert halls and museums. The biggest demonstration was in Paris’s Place de la Bastille, where 10,000 gathered, but there were events across the country including in Marseilles, Lyon, Nantes and Strasbourg. French exhibitors’ body La Fédération Nationale des Cinémas Francais called on its members to light their neon 5pm-6pm.”
Adrienne LaFrance: “People tend to complain about Facebook as if something recently curdled. There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view. Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture. I’ve been thinking for years about what it would take to make the social web magical in all the right ways—less extreme, less toxic, more true—and I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem. I’ve long wanted Mark Zuckerberg to admit that Facebook is a media company, to take responsibility for the informational environment he created in the same way that the editor of a magazine would. (I pressed him on this once and he laughed.) In recent years, as Facebook’s mistakes have compounded and its reputation has tanked, it has become clear that negligence is only part of the problem. No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine. Read: Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough. The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.“
Viral Tom Cruise, According to the Sun: “They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us! Because they believe in us and what we’re doing! I’m on the phone with every fucking studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs you motherfuckers. I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don’t do it you’re fired, if I see you do it again you’re fucking gone. And if anyone in this crew does it – that’s it, and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever fucking do it again. That’s it! No apologies… That’s what I sleep with every night. The future of this fucking industry! So I’m sorry I am beyond your apologies. I have told you and now I want it and if you don’t do it you’re out. We are not shutting this fucking movie down! Is it understood? If I see it again you’re fucking gone — and you are — so you’re going to cost him his job, if I see it on the set you’re gone and you’re gone. That’s it. Am I clear?”
“Hybrid” Sundance Announces 72 Features, “Virtual” Gatherings
Universal Donna Langley: “Consumer consumption of content has never been higher, so that’s great. Streaming, which was disrupting our business to begin with, will continue to disrupt and particularly this sort of legacy business. That said, I do believe theatrical is and will continue to be, on the other side of this, a very important part of the ecosystem. I don’t believe theatergoing and streaming are binary; both are part of how we like to consume content. On the other side of this we are potentially going to see fewer screens, fewer movie theaters just by virtue of the small chains not being able to hold on, and some of the larger chains, in an effort to right-size their business, seeing some of their locations going away. That was already happening pre-pandemic. I don’t think fewer screens is going to mean less box office, necessarily — big blockbusters rarely occupy 100% of available screens and theatres, so I think we’ll be okay there. It really is a question of how quickly can theatrical rebound, how long is it going to take to get the audience comfortable to go see a movie again, and what do they want to see in the movie theater.”
John Le Carré: “He was no neutral observer of the cold war, stating that, whatever the shortcomings of western political systems, they were not to be compared with one-party dictatorships. After the end of communism, however, he said: “Spies did not win the cold war. They made absolutely no difference in the long run.”
Nancy Meyers on Retirement
“Pornhub Purged Almost 80% Of Its Content, More Than 10 Million Videos out of a Total 13.5 Million”
Ann Reinking Was 71
From 2019: “Ann Reinking on Her Life as Bob Fosse’s Muse, Lover, and Friend”
Here’s the 2020 Blacklist pdf
