"In one effort, the company invalidated the passwords of the 75,000 subscribers who used the service most often, while falsely claiming 'we have detected suspicious activity or potential fraud' on their accounts. Many of the people who tried to reset their passwords were unable to because of technical problems; the app would not accept their email address, they would not receive a password-reset email, or the email would link to a nonworking website. When an executive warned that the practice would catch the attention of federal regulators and state attorneys general, Mr. Lowe responded in writing 'OK I get it,; suggesting the company try it with '2 percent of our highest volume users.'"
Imagine That: The MoviePass Deception Was Worse Than Anyone Knew

The New York Times | June 8, 2021

Gleiberman Makes Sweet Love To Cruella in The Sunday Column: “It may be the best movie of the year so far. That sounds like a provocation or maybe hype, but I’ll throw down the gauntlet: Name a better one. Cruella is a high-kitsch rock-opera psychodrama staged with seductive style and a vicious kind of glee. It tells the story of Estella, an ambitious young British nobody played by the incomparable Emma Stone, who gets her freak on by metamorphosing into Cruella, a radically mod ’70s London fashion designer with schizoid hair and a defiant loose screw. The thrill of the odyssey is how twisty and emotionally vibrant it is.”

Variety | June 6, 2021

"I don’t feel comfortable kissing someone... I don’t know where they’ve been": Joy Press talked to intimacy coordinators about the joys & complications of shooting sex scenes during the pandemic

Vanity Fair | June 3, 2021

Cannes, July 6-17: Nanni Moretti, Tre Piani; François Ozon, Tout S’Est Bien Passé; Asghar Farhadi, Un Héros; Jacques Audiard, Paris 13th District; Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria; Ildikó Enyedi, The Story of My Wife; Sean Baker, Red Rocket; Justin Kurzel, Nitram; Bruno Dumont, France

Hollywood Reporter | June 3, 2021

Pixar's Luca Will Play A Single Screen In The U.S., For One Week Only at Disney-Owned El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard

June 2, 2021

Felix Salmon: “AMC traded 761 million shares today, for a total volume of $47.6 billion. Are both of those all-time records for any stock ever?”

Twitter | June 2, 2021

“It’s one thing to reopen theaters as that slowly rolls out, but it another thing to continue showing films on celluloid. I don’t want to sound like a snob, but for me, there is a massive difference,” said Giovanni Ribisi of the programming at New Beverly; [many] of the 35mm and 16mm prints coming from Tarantino’s private collection. “It is also important to make the effort to get back to life — and what better way to celebrate it than coming to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s so easy to start thumbing through your life. But to put your phone down, and to pay attention, and to not have the option to fucking pause the movie, it’s refreshing.”

Hollywood Reporter | June 2, 2021

Drafthouse Leaves Bankruptcy With Plans for Five New Locations, Including Lower Manhattan: “Alamo Drafthouse has completed its sale to Altamont Capital Partners, funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group LLC and Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League.”

Variety | June 1, 2021

Guy Lodge: "The pleasing surprise of Moulin Rouge twenty years on is that it has hardly dated at all, having been so determinedly out of time in the first place. Baz Luhrmann’s textbook postmodernism, repurposing late twentieth-century pop for the essential purposes of early twentieth-century opera, practically future-proofed itself: its full-hearted embrace of its own bad taste and shameless anachronism was either its defining charm or its critical failure at first sight. Either you’re sweepingly moved by the sight and sound of Nicole Kidman trilling out 'One Day I’ll Fly Away' into the night, astride a gilded papier-mâché elephant, or it makes you curl into a tight ball of mortification, but the reaction is likely to stick. Either way, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that Kidman – whose post-Cruise reinvention as her generation’s premier risk-taking star Luhrmann’s film launched with a very high kick – is giving it less than her all."

The Guardian | June 1, 2021

The Warner Bros. Discovery Presentation Card Is Here

Hollywood Reporter | June 1, 2021

AMC Finds Arclight and Pacific Properties Attractive: “AMC Theatres Raises $230.5M for Acquisitions, Investments via Stock Sale”

Hollywood Reporter | June 1, 2021

“SNL, when it’s good, can still touch the zeitgeist, and while the show’s send-up of Vin Diesel was very funny, the thing that stayed with me and sent me back to watch that sketch again (I’ve seen it four times) is that it caught how thoroughly any vestige of romance has leaked out of American movie-theater culture. By making Diesel the idiot galoot a spokesman for the moo-vies, the sketch basically said: We’re going back to theaters now, but who would be thick enough to actually defend the experience? The sketch posited the moo-vies as a ritual habit for chucklehead losers.”

Owen Gleiberman Hopes To Foment A “Culture War” About Moviegoing With The Latest Dreadful Sunday Column

Variety | May 31, 2021

John Logan, Who Wrote Skyfall, Spectre: “The reason we’re still watching Bond movies after more than 50 years is that the family has done an extraordinary job of protecting the character through the thickets of moviemaking and changing public tastes. Corporate partners come and go, but James Bond endures. He endures precisely because he is being protected by people who love him. The current deal with Amazon gives Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who own 50 percent of the Bond empire, ironclad assurances of continued artistic control. But will this always be the case? What happens if a bruising corporation like Amazon begins to demand a voice in the process? What happens to the comradeship and quality control if there’s an Amazonian overlord with analytics parsing every decision? Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson are the champions of James Bond. They keep the corporate and commercial pressures outside the door. Nor are they motivated by them. That’s why we don’t have a mammoth Bond Cinematic Universe, with endless anemic variations of 007 sprouting up on TV or streaming or in spinoff movies. The Bond movies are truly the most bespoke and handmade films I’ve ever worked on. That’s why they are original, thorny, eccentric and special.”

The New York Times | May 31, 2021

“A Quiet Place Part II, in 3,726 venues, is expected to generate $58 million through on Monday. Those ticket sales are significant because they are not far off from what the movie was projected to make prior to the pandemic. (The sequel was originally set to release in March of 2020) The original opened to $50 million in 2018, a huge result for a movie not based on existing IP. The studio’s decision to hold the follow-up until theaters reopened to a significant degree proved to be prudent. The first film cost just $17 million to produce, while the second carries a $61 million price tag."

Variety | May 31, 2021

A Union For Producers? "Effie T. Brown and other producers say a variety of factors have made it tougher for them to earn a living. The consolidation of studios and the rise of streaming have changed the economics of the industry, eliminating or eroding their share of so-called backend profits, the money divided up after expenses are recouped (a form of Hollywood accounting that is often the subject of litigation). And, unlike almost every other cast and crew member, producers have no union that guarantees a minimum level of compensation and employer contributions to healthcare and pension plans, a situation magnified during the pandemic, which halted productions."

LA Times | May 31, 2021

L. Ron Hubbard Is Credited With Writing A 1960 Screenplay With Nazi Propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Who Lived For A While In His London Digs

Three Screenwriters Weigh The Script: "Josh Olson is the Academy Award-nominated writer of the 2005 film A History of Violence and a longtime friend. He agreed to help us out, and he brought along two of his friends, Daniel Waters, writer of the movie Heathers, and John Brancato, who, with Michael Ferris, wrote the screenplays for The Game, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and Terminator Salvation."

Daily Beast | May 30, 2021

"It is regrettable that the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile has decided not to provide essential financial support for the efforts to complete the legendary Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s unfinished film."
Saving Socialist Realism, A Third, Lost Chilean-Era Film by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento

May 30, 2021

John Waters On Polyester At 40: "“I never talk about politics in my movies because you don’t want to date them. You want your movies to play in thirty years. Timelessness means you’re never too mean, ‘cause mean’s funny for 20 minutes, not 90. At the same time, you just embrace all the subject matter, even the stuff you’re making fun of. I was making fun of myself in the very beginning of my career by saying I made trash movies. Right in the beginning, I made fun of myself first.”

May 30, 2021

Jeff Bezos: “We’re looking forward to reimagining and developing the deep catalog of MGM. The acquisition’s thesis here is really very simple: MGM has a vast, deep catalog of much-loved intellectual property. With the talented people at MGM and Amazon Studios, we can reimagine and develop that IP for the twenty-first century. People who love stories are going to be the big beneficiaries… The only way to get above-average returns is to take risks and many won’t pay off. Our whole history as a company is about taking risks, many of which have failed and many of which will fail.”

Variety | May 28, 2021

AMC, Regal, Cinemark Unmask With Vax

Variety | May 28, 2021