A Making-Of And An Almost Unmaking-Of And Finally, Modest Success: What Happened With Sundance 2020's The Last Shift With Its Pandemic Theatrical Run?

New City Film | March 5, 2021

California Will Reopen Amusement Parks Like Disneyland, Stadiums And Concert Venues On April 1

Twitter | March 5, 2021

"Midnight Cowboy shattered many barriers. Men like these—hungry, hollow outcasts—had never been depicted with such honesty and directness in a mainstream American movie. Neither had this vision of New York—cold, bleak, corrupted. The acting is superb—not just Voight and Hoffman, but a small troupe of brilliant supporting actors—the screenplay terse and powerful, the camerawork fluid, the music poignant and engaging. Even the costumes are memorable. Still, no one expected the movie to make a dime. On the way to their first screening before the executives at United Artists, the chronically anxious Schlesinger turned to Hellman, his producing partner, and asked, 'Really, Jerry, do you think anyone in their right mind will pay good money to see this rubbish?'"
Excerpting Glenn Frankel's "Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic"

Vanity Fair | March 5, 2021

Rushfield: “The exhibition industry, even post-apocalypse, remains what it has been for a long time now: an industry dominated by bottom-feeding venture capitalists looking to squeeze as much money out of it as they can in as short a time as possible before they dump their companies or liquidate them. But what they certainly don't do is invest in anything that won't pay for itself in six weeks. In most businesses, that pattern is what's known as The Death Spiral or The Doom Loop. And that's why the whole windows/theatrical vs. streaming debate is completely screwed up and hopeless. As much as in my heart I would like to be team theatrical until I die, you look at on the one side, you've got a company like Netflix whose lightning rise has been driven at every moment by a fanatical, no-detail-is-too-granular obsession with customer experience and improving that pixel by pixel. On the other side, you've got a company like AMC still making bullying noises about the windows and not budging in putting their gouged customers through an experience that rivals a major airport hub. Its visionary CEO (self-described), after a year of his company being dead in the water and having to discharge most of its employees and having agitated and fumed for a government bailout, awards himself a $3 million bonus.”

March 4, 2021

“The scrappy final act is made even scrappier when you see how much older Holland and Ridley look in the clearly reshot scenes (Liman worked with the Don’t Breathe director Fede Álvarez) and the epilogue, shot almost two years after the rest of the film, is an almost comically clumsy way to close out one of the pandemic’s clumsiest offerings. ‘Chaos Lumbering’ would be more fitting.”

The Guardian | March 4, 2021

Holding Up Will Smith And Jada Pinkett Smith As Pandemic-Era Entrepreneurs

Hollywood Reporter | March 4, 2021

F9 Postponed 2 6/21

Screen Daily | March 4, 2021

“Stronger-than-expected grosses for Tom & Jerry are extremely encouraging given the family profile of the film, according to CEO Greg Marcus. Market research conducted during the coronavirus pandemic showed “the people who were the least comfortable were women,” Marcus said. “The worry was ‘uh-oh, they bring the families.’ And so to see them come back, that’s really encouraging.”

Deadline | March 4, 2021

Alexander Chee: "Minari is already one of the most talked about films of the year, and as happens to many masterpieces — and I do think it is one — it has found itself in a controversy of a kind. The Golden Globes refused to consider it as an American film because much of the dialogue is in Korean — putting it in the Best Foreign Language Film category, where it did win this last weekend. It was just hard to celebrate given it included the humiliation of insisting we are American all over again. Perhaps never so humiliating as now."

Gen Medium | March 3, 2021

Multiple Disney Store Closures "Beginning" Corporate Downsizing

The New York Times | March 3, 2021

Godard Talks Future Projects With Kerala Fest (90-minute video)

March 3, 2021

Drafthouse Shutters 90-Year-Old Ritz in Downtown Austin

March 3, 2021

Jacqueline Stewart: “How can you love these films if you know that there’s going to be a maid or mammy that shows up? Well , I grew up around people who could still love the movie. You appreciate some parts. You critique other part. It can enrich your experience of the film. We know millions of people love these films. We’re not saying this is how you should feel about Psycho or this is how you should feel about Gone with the Wind. We’re just trying to model ways of having longer and deeper conversations and not just cutting it off to ‘I love this movie. I hate this movie,’ there’s so much space in between.”

March 3, 2021

On “WandaVision”: “Living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe must be terrifying. It is a world full of superhuman, god-like beings who answer to no one; a Lovecraftian existence where threats from beyond the cosmos are constantly in danger of crashing through and swallowing up everything and everyone. The MCU is a reality where half of humanity can be snapped out of existence – only to return years later to find a world that’s moved on without them. To live in the MCU is to live in a constant state of existential dread. Every now and then, the MCU films will casually address this terrifying truth – and usually shrug it all off with a pithy quip.”

March 3, 2021

Alamo Drafthouse Bankruptcy Prepares Sale To Tim League And Two Investment Groups

Hollywood Reporter | March 3, 2021

Alamo Answers Abbott: Despite Executive Demand, Theaters Will Still Look After Customer Safety

Variety | March 2, 2021

Arthouse Streamer MUBI Hires Kino Lorber, Alamo Drafthouse, Studiocanal Hands

Deadline | March 2, 2021

“For those wondering what Oscar ratings might be like in this pandemic-struck year, based on the off-a-cliff results for Sunday's Golden Globe awards, the forecast could be: look out below. Globes ratings plummeted more than 60% from the 18.3 million viewers who watched last year, per Nielsen data, to an average audience of 6.9 million. While the Globes have a long and uneven TV history -- at times airing in syndication, on cable and for a time after an earlier scandal, not at all -- that's the lowest tune-in since NBC acquired the broadcast rights in the 1990s.”

March 2, 2021

Guy Maddin: “It’s a nice throughline too, to talk about skepticism as a kind of ‘psychic edging,’ as a way of delaying pleasure. ‘Metaphysical edging.’ I can’t get past the thought of metaphysical edging… I guess I’ve been doing it. To hear myself talk about it, I sure sound self-centered — I sound like some wanking solipsist. Maybe I am. I always try to be honest about myself in the work so that maybe if viewers were honest about themselves, they’d stand a chance of finding themselves in the movie somehow. I don’t know if that’s ever really happened, but that was the hope way back at the beginning,”

Slate | March 1, 2021

Nick Pinkerton: “I have myself been at times a consumer of lists, and like many a compulsive film viewer, I was to some degree raised by them, and got some sense of my bearings through the framework for exploring ‘world cinema’ that they provided. There are principled stances to be taken for and against the list. Representative of the pro- camp is Jonathan Rosenbaum who, in the introduction to his collection ‘Essential Cinema’ proposes the list as a means to speak truth to power, writing that ‘the disinclination of American film academics to offer any alternative canons has continued to give the industry an unchallenged playing field, assisted by such recent promotional campaigns as the American Film Institute’s various polls that list the one hundred greatest American films, stars, comedies, and so on.’ For the anti- party I’ll offer an excerpt from a 2019 piece, “Against Lists,” published in ‘Another Gaze’ by Elena Gorfinkel, a UK academic, who writes: “The impulse to list is allied with collection, a desire to record, to archive, to remember, to preserve experience and the aesthetic feeling of films one might not otherwise recall. These are meaningful, important and historically enshrined activities, on their own terms. But in this hyper-mediated moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list—list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery receipt of your watching—has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure.’”

March 1, 2021