HAPPY TRAILERS: The Grandmaster by Wong Kar Wai

Not sure how I feel about this.  I’m very glad Kar Wai is back to doing more rainwork, but in general I would prefer that he stick with people gazing at each other in sadness in the rain rather than kicking each other in the rain.  I’ll admit the glass breaking in the storm looks good, but I worry that this is another of the little experiments that has taken his career on this unfortunate detour in recent years. I’m all for letting a man experiment, but just walk away from the heartbreaking stories of urban ennui you do better than anyone Kar Wai!  

For instance, the idea of people kicking each other in the rain sounds good, but when you get down to it, rain isn’t going to make a fight any rougher or scarier, just kind of sloshier and messier. A lot of people slipping, if you’re going to get serious about it and slipping is not the stuff of nailbiting action.  

Also - that straw Panama maintains its shape awfully well in the torrential downpour. Must we throw all disbelief out the window to take this journey with Kar Wai. In the Mood for Love didn’t ask us to accept such things!

Nevertheless, I’ll be first in line.

Hollywood studio seeks Kickstarter funding for movie, everyone’s cool with it. Noted billionaire Zach Braff does it, and it’s an outrage.

Precisely.  We warned about this.  Issues are almost exactly the same as with Mars, but because that was a beloved cult favorite, any success was applauded.  (Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell could have written million dollar checks each, same as people are saying Braff could. Yes, it would be money gone and they would get no piece of the Warners project…but wasn’t this their dream?)  

Ultimately, funding a for-profit venture as a charity is weird and is a niche that has opened up thanks to a generation of useful idiots in the YAY! ERA who live to mindlessly cheer on their team - so long as their team comes in some sort of token indie garb, be they politicians or late night tv stars.  The same mentality that was outraged for poor Conan not getting his talk show even as he pocketed a $40 million pay off; or who thinks sitcom stars are “on their side”…Or who supports a politician because they make slightly more than the usual nods to social media or pop stars or what have you.  

Generation YAY! get ahold of yourself!  You have Braff on your hands!

Goodnight, Farewell and Amen Dr. Sidney Freedman.  Thank you for keeping us sane through the longest Korean War America has ever known.

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Happy goddamn 100 Paramount.

"Disney’s Second Screen Live program, introduced this week at CinemaCon, encourages moviegoers to play interactive games on their iPads while watching a film in a theater. A home video version for select Disney Blu-Ray titles launched in 2011. “Of course you hear a lot from exhibition, ‘we don’t allow cell phones’”, Disney Exhibitor Relations VP Nancy Klueter said this morning at a CinemaCon panel on theater showmanship. “This screening would be inviting those people to bring their technology so you wouldn’t be offending them”. Disney and their exhibition partners hope the ploy will bring younger audiences back to theaters."

—

On the one hand, by even contemplating this step, Disney has now become a war criminal and becomes the duty of every lover of film or even humanity to do all they can to stop them and bring this company to its knees until they renounce this evil.

On the other hand, you can’t really blame them. When one looks at the trailers this week for the Zack Snyder Superman, the Verbinski Lone Ranger, hoopla  for the Iron Man 3 upcoming release…how can we expect that audiences raised with the notion that tired, inert dreck like this is the pinnacle of Hollywood storytelling should be able to keep their devices off during them.

These films make the action spectacles of the 80’s and 90’s like Lethal Weapon 2 and Twister seem full of humanity and life. So it is very difficult on the one hand to deaden the audience’s senses with a genre that has become about nothing more than cranking up the volume and layering it over with a full-of-itself, portentous pomposity, and on the other hand tell them: no you’re not allowed to play with your toys here. You have to focus and pay attention.

Which is to say, with this generation raised on these films and glued to their devices since birth coming of age we are all doomed. Congratulations to Disney for realizing it. And for the rest of us, the best we can hope is that we can go down sword in our hand fighting them with our last breath, and die an honorable entertainment martyr’s death.

(Source)

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jenkirkman:

Hello everyone!
My book “I Can Barely Take Care of Myself” is out today!! (April 16th!)

I think you will get some laughs. There’s stories about failed teenage love, failed early 20-something love, fights with my parents, bad stand-up comedy gigs, getting engaged, getting married, getting divorced, bad haircuts, anxiety disorders, the threat of nuclear war, not wanting to have a baby, not wanting to talk to strangers and explain why I don’t want to have a baby, pretending to be pregnant at a nail salon, my nana and next door neighbor who died alone, the horror of alcohol-free afternoon birthday parties for adults, getting bullied at school, feeling like an outsider in life….

This book is about what gets said to women who are almost 40 who don’t desire children but it’s a lot more than that.

I encourage you to support your local bookstore (even if it is Barnes and Noble) and buy the hardcover there this week.  If not, you can purchase on Amazon or Barnes and Noble websites.

In fact, I made it easy - all info is here:

http://jenkirkman.com/book

I am halfway through this book by my old friend Jen Kirkman. Rave review to follow because unless she totally screws up in the second half it is one of the funniest things I have ever read in my entire reacing history. But dont wait for my final verdict. Kirkman hits the stands hard today so cut out of work early and rush down to your local book emporium and get your hands on one of these. Truly hilarious. And moving too for now extra cost!

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Where Gen Y dreams are born

"

THR: You co-hosted the Oscars in 2010 with Steve Martin. What did you think of the reaction to Seth MacFarlane’s performance?

Baldwin: The Oscars is a completely thankless job. It’s really tough.

THR: So you wouldn’t do it again?

Baldwin: No. Never, never, never. And I enjoyed doing it. What the Oscars absolutely, unequivocally should be is a show with a little bit of entertainment and a very reverential overview of movies of that year. And that show would last about two hours, and it would be a very tight show with a lot of serious, cineastic appreciation. But the Oscars is also a television program that raises 90 percent of the Academy’s budget for the year in a single night. When the Oscars is three hours — when they bullshit you and say that the Oscars is running long, and that’s a problem — that’s not a problem. They’re making more money. So ABC and the Academy, they have no interest in doing a tight, better-produced show. They are forced, because of economic constraints, to have a flabby, tired show.

THR: And everyone who does it gets raked over the coals.

Baldwin: They need to gamble on the show, and they’re not gambling. I am a member of the Academy, but everyone who has done it lately has been crucified. So they’re not going to get anybody who is reasonably talented or special to take that chance anymore. They don’t pay you any money; the Oscars pay you like chicken feed. It’s all about the honor of helping to extol film achievement. But they’re going to have a tough time. I’m dying to see who they get to do it next year. They’re going to have to go dig someone up from a cemetery. They’re going to have to go dig up Bob Hope.

"

— Alec Baldwin on hosting the Oscars to THR.

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Living the Dream at the Open Casting Call for Universal Studios Tour Guides

Yesterday was the day that changed everything for me. After four decades of silent desperation, I took a shot at my dream of becoming a Universal tour guide and attended an open casting call.  From the harrowing chronicle of my journey:

As a boy and budding film nerd growing up in Los Angeles, the Universal Studios tour was my personal Stork Club. Children of the ’70s, the tour and I grew up together. I am old enough to remember when the attractions on the tram ride consisted of some foam rocks falling into a gully and a guy in a Wolf Man mask running at the bus and growling. As the years marched on, I was thrilled by the addition of the Jaws attack and the Airport ‘77reenactment show, and again as trams drove through the avalanche cage where the Six Million Dollar Man had fought his historic showdown with Bigfoot, and once more with the addition of the breathtaking Battle of Galactica.

As I grew older, I moved on but never forgot, especially as an ever-more-dazzling line of stars — Jimmy Fallon, Jack Wagner, Conan O’Brien, as well as some of the greatest executives entertainment has ever known — emerged from the tour-guide ranks to take Hollywood by storm. Never far away was the memory of the Animal House epilogue, the information that Babs Jansen had become a Universal tour guide. “Ask for Babs,” it said, and I promised myself that someday I would

Read the entire tragic tale at Grantland.