“Any literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to support an instictive preference.”—George Orwell
Rushfield Babylon
Month
Still, the message that the year sent about quality and originality is real enough that studios are tweaking their operating strategies. Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio behind “The Social Network,” is trying to bet more heavily on new directors with quirkier sensibilities. To reboot its “Spider-Man” franchise, for instance, Sony hired Marc Webb, whose only previous film was the indie comedy “(500) Days of Summer.” The studio has also entrusted a big-screen remake of “21 Jump Street” to Phil Lord and Chris Miller, a pair whose only previous film was the animated “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”
“We think the future is about filmmakers with original voices,” said Amy Pascal, Sony’s co-chairwoman. “Original is good, and good is commercial.”
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Does anyone know the exact date when the present tense became the official tense of writers straining for edginess?
Is it edgy because it’s a retro thing? A throwback to writers in the 60’s and 70’s who actually understood the english language well enough to take the occasional license with their verb forms?
Or is it edgy because it’s RIGHT! NOW! As in this, this s— is going down this SECOND. By the time you are reading this magazine article, you’ll have missed it, man. The world will have passed you by.
Or is it edgy because it makes use of extraordinary futuristic powers. For instance in the following sentence:
Not only does the author make use of a time machine that so he can at once be sitting in a booth with Winona Ryder for an hour and be writing about sitting in a booth with Winona Ryder for an hour, but he can also transport the reader to that same hour so that the space/time continuum between event, artistic rendering, and receipt of information is flattened to negative space. You think Conde Naste doesn’t have the technology to do such things? How can you be so naive?
Or does it just look cool?
Esquire’s Stacey Grenrock Woods Questions Aziz Ansari on self-proclaimed foodie credentials: The most important interview you will ever read.
ESQ: One tastes like flour, one tastes like corn. [Motioning to the plate of pancakes on the table] These are made of flour. [Laughing] Here, taste them so you have a point of reference.
AA: You’re being really rude! That was a very condescending thing. Very unnecessary.
ESQ: Really? I thought this was a spirited exchange.
AA: I’ve never explained mulitas to anyone and then they got mad at me. Everyone else just says, “Oh, that sounds delicious. I’ll try one!”
ESQ: Maybe they weren’t really listening to you. I’m a journalist.
”—Read it all. Now. Here.Yesterday, we had , explaining that he makes Transformers films out of concern for the toymakers who would be unemployed without him.
Today, joining the parade, the formerly hugely well-regarded director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck explains that making a big budget studio star vehicle was out testing his boundaries, as an artist.
In the end Mr. von Donnersmarck surprised many, including himself. His new movie, “The Tourist,” which opens Friday, is the polar opposite of “The Lives of Others”: a big-budget studio extravaganza, shot mostly in Venice, that is a traditional caper, starring two of Hollywood’s biggest names, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.
“You know how people always say that you have to step outside your comfort zone?” Mr. von Donnersmarck, 37, said in an interview Tuesday. “Well, I live outside my comfort zone always.”
The lesson to young filmmaking students; never be afraid to accept a giant paycheck. No matter how much it hurts you to suddenly become fantastically wealthy, always remember it is your service to the arts.
Michael Bay on how he came to reconcile himself to the inevitability that much as it pained him, he had to make Transformers 3:
I was gonna do my small movie I keep talking about, and the studio just said—the true story is, they took me to Vegas, they wanted to celebrate it breaking $400 million domestic, they gave me a martini, they gave me another one, I don’t really drink two martinis, they go “We’re here to talk to you Mike, we’re fucked if you don’t do Transformers 3 right now” (laughs). The studio guy laid it out, I’m friends with him, he says, “We need a tentpole.” And it’s hard to pull a tentpole for a studio when you’ve got a window of two years or whatever, cause they’re at a point where if they don’t pull it by September, I think we were in August, if they don’t start pullin’ by September or October, it’s hard to get it together for that following year. These guys are under tremendous pressure, so I’m like “Ugh (pause) It’s gonna cost you but yeah” (laughs). Because it’s literally like workin’ 5 solid years, or 6 years. And our economy was so bad, and it’s still so bad. The nice thing about it is that automatically you give 5,000 people that are making toys for that movie job, you give 2,500 people for this movie that are doin’ this, you just give jobs so that’s what’s good about it.
And when Lucifer returned to the underworld, he said, you guys, Bay and I just had the best meeting…
That’s the thing people don’t remember about Nazi Germany too, how many people were put to work making those uniforms. You can harp on the holocaust, but in the end, wasn’t that what it was all about?