Bilge Ebiri: "In the wake, are movie theaters, having long since lost their essential place in our culture, going to become relics of the past? Probably not. People are desperate to get out of the house, get their kids out of the house and get back to normal. “When this lifts, none of us are ever going to want to be anywhere close to our couch or our TV ever again,” predicts Richard Rushfield, who runs the popular film-industry newsletter The Ankler. “Our couch is going to have associations for us of this awful time.” One recent survey found that almost three out of four Americans said they missed going to movie theaters — which is significantly higher than the percentage of Americans who regularly went in the before times. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis spoke for many of us when she wrote, “When at last we can go out again and be with one another, I hope that we flood cinemas, watching every single movie, from the most rarefied art film to the silliest Hollywood offering.”

Vulture | May 26, 2020

"In the world of performing arts, the coronavirus pandemic has already sunk summer. Now it is felling fall. Even as reopened barbershops, beaches and bookstores herald the resumption of economic life across America, concert promoters, theater presenters, orchestras and dance companies are ripping up their 2020 calendars and hoping 2021 will mark a new beginning. “I think 2020 is gone,” said Anna D. Shapiro, the artistic director of Chicago’s storied Steppenwolf Theater Company. “I’ll be stunned if we’re back in the theater.”
The Autumn That Is Not To Be: Live Producers Shut Down 2020

The New York Times | May 26, 2020

Dury's Camera Store in Nashville Closes After 138 Years

May 26, 2020

"I meet Buscemi (he says it boo-sem-ee, not boo-shem-ee) for the first time at an airy Italian restaurant a short walk from his place. Neither of us knows it yet, but this cloudless March Wednesday is one of the last normal days on record, before New York City all but shuts down because of the coronavirus and we are collectively advised to confine ourselves to our apartments. As it turns out, my last sit-down restaurant meal until who knows when is this lunch, with Steve Fucking Buscemi. He has the spinach frittata."

GQ | May 26, 2020

Irvine Welsh: "Money and privilege have wrecked our politics and society. They’ve also suffocated our culture, art and entertainment in a cloak of blandness."

Twitter | May 26, 2020

The Daily Mail Quotes Woody Allen: "You don’t make a movie to win an award. Mozart never composed a symphony thinking about a trophy. If I get a chance and the virus abates, maybe before I die there is always the chance I will make a great film. But I haven’t done that yet. ‘I couldn’t care for a second. I write what I think is funny, a situation I want to explore. I don’t censor. I have no interest in catering to the malicious thoughts of others… There is nothing dark; this is a comedy romance."

May 26, 2020

Walmart, Taco Bell, Anheuser-Bushch, Pepsi Among Advertisers Demanding New Terms In Deals With Little-Watched Billion-Dollar Startup Quibi

Wall Street Journal | May 26, 2020

"Four Ways to Fund — and Save — Local Journalism"

May 26, 2020

Safdies Sign TV First-Look With HBO, A24

Variety | May 26, 2020

"I went directly to YouTube rather than approaching the filmmakers because I wasn’t interested in negotiation. I don’t support the documentary, I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative.”
YouTube Pulls Producer Michael Moore's Widely Contested Anti-Climate Campaigner Film For Copyright Violations

The Guardian | May 26, 2020

Ken Burns: "This crisis is on the level of the Second World War, but particularly the Depression and the Civil War. As Lincoln predicted, the danger didn't come from without, but from within, and now that's literally medically, epidemiologically true, but also politically and socially true as well. We have the opportunity to press a reset button about our values."

May 26, 2020

Gerald Howard: "To the extent that a Don DeLillo Nobel is discussed, the consensus seems to be that yeah, he probably should get it, but he won’t because, well . . . he’s too cerebral, he stays under the radar, add your own excuse or rationalization here. I used to be disappointed and depressed by this tepid response to him and his work. Lately I’ve been working my way up to infuriated. It is, in its lazy way, not just an insult to DeLillo—it also constitutes a dismissal of everything American literature has achieved and had to tell us about ourselves and the world in the postwar years.

May 25, 2020

"Some billionaire home buyers are getting massive discounts due to pandemic fears in the housing market. Kylie Jenner bought a house for $36.5 million in cash after the price was originally $55 million."

Variety | May 25, 2020

Soraya Roberts: "Isolation is horny as fuck. Not for everyone, obviously, but if you’re single and you live alone. . . I mean, I have never thought this much about sex in my life. Not even in high school. Although this does kind of feel like high school: snacking, jerking off, sort-of working, snacking, jerking off. Or maybe we’re regressing to a point in history when we were exclusively driven by our basest instincts: horny, hungry, trying not to die. In between we binge-stream. And through this fogged up lockdown-induced lens, the horniness of what we are watching is compounded by our own..."

May 25, 2020

June-July Taipei Film Fest Says OK Without International Attendees

Variety | May 25, 2020

Bloomberg Advises, Be Wary Of "Human Capital Stock": "It’s a modern quandary for the ultra-wealthy: a yacht awaits at harbor, but how to safely reach it without risking exposure to the germ-ridden masses?"

May 25, 2020

"Bogdanovich shoots black and white on The Last Picture Show to [evoke] the period, realism and loneliness of the story. But on the other hand, [its] shimmery monochromatic gray-on-black photography and classic framing suggests, like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s films, the trappings of a film genre of another time. But in this case, it’s not an obvious genre like horror films or private detective movies. The look of the The Last Picture Show suggests a prestige Hollywood picture of the fifties (From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, Home from the Hill). The exact kind of film you can imagine Sonny and Duane watching at the town’s lone movie theaere. And due to both Bogdanovich and McMurtry’s old-soul quality, the movie actually feels like a fifties film."
Tarantino On Bogdanovich

May 25, 2020

Journalist-Songwriter-Screenwriter Jean-Loup Dabadie Was 81

Five Songs By Dabadie

May 25, 2020

"There’s a fascinating game of movie fandom that goes like this: 'What’s the greatest movie of [that year] or [that decade] that never got the love, or the reputation, it deserved?” If you’re talking about the 1980s, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it’s Something Wild. You’ve probably heard of it, and have probably never seen it. [sic] It came out near the end of 1986, and though it received a handful of good reviews, along with some fairly hostile ones, the movie was basically ignored. No one was buzzing about it; no one was seeking it out."
The Sunday Column Takes A Whirl In Jonathan Demme's Something Wild

Variety | May 24, 2020

Venezia dice che settembre accadrà, fa cenno a tutte le navi in mare

May 24, 2020