Nude in theaters, Anna Hutchinson will give you a log when she screams her top off in Cabin in the Woods. New on Blu-ray, Emily Browning makes an astounding nude debut in Sleeping Beauty, and nude on HBO we’ve got a feast of flesh fit for a king on Game of Thrones.
” By 2013 , film will slip to niche status, shown in only a third of theaters. By 2015, used in a paltry 17 percent of global cinemas, venerable old 35 mm film will be mostly gone.” The epic life and death struggle between film and digital rolls on, and in LA Weekly’s cover story must-read Gendy Alimurung details the sobering — and imminent — sea change in film production and exhibition with insights from figures at every stop on the cinematic food chain: Filmmakers, arthouse/rep theaters, film curators, projectionists, preservationists, and even the cold, lonely (and increasingly studio-blocked) vaults that house the dwindling ranks of cinema’s remaining 35mm prints. “Digital is the future!” you might say. “It’s cheaper and looks just as good as film!” Great taste, less filling, etc. Many a sentimental plea has been made on behalf of 35mm: The way things are going, repertory houses will find their programming options limited to the smattering of popular titles studio vaults make available. There’s that distinguishable living quality to film, with its pops and hisses and beloved imperfections, that digital prints just can’t replicate. Or, as Edgar Wright suggests, shooting on costlier film changes the relationship a director has to the process itself: “Because when you hear the camera whirring, you know that money is going through it. There’s a respectfulness that comes when you’re burning up film.” Most of that’s already been argued, but Alimurung takes pains to appeal to the pragmatic side of digital cheerleaders by pointing out what many proponents of digital film and its many admitted benefits (lower cost, ease of production, cheaper distribution methods) seldom have an answer for: the long-term hazards of going exclusively digital. “The main problem is format obsolescence. File formats can go obsolete in a matter of months. On this subject, [UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak’s] every sentence requires an exclamation mark. “In the last 10 years of digitality, we’ve gone through 20 formats!” he says. “Every 18 months we’re getting a new format!” So every two years, data must be transferred, or “migrated,” to a new device. If that doesn’t happen, the data may never being accessible again. Technology can advance too far ahead.” But the demands and costs of constant technological upgrades aren’t the only issue with the industry moving exclusively to digital. “In the digital realm, the archivist’s mantra, “Store and ignore,” fails. If you don’t “refresh,” or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can’t just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, ‘You’re shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing.'” What’s saddest is that there isn’t an easy solution to be offered other than appealing to the studios (and, it’s worth noting, the vast majority of allied theater chains represented by the National Association of Theater Owners) to leave room for niche 35mm film culture to live on while their charge into the digital future continues. Major changes are in store for everyone — not just the studios, or the theater owners, or the increasingly obsolete ranks of actual trained projectionists, or the ticket-buyers. So yes, a storm’s coming. What can be done about it? Discuss. [ LA Weekly ] Photo: Julia Marchese of the New Beverly Cinema, Jennie Warren for LA Weekly
James Cameron ’s Titanic is a stunningly realistic portrayal of a sinking ship , but apparently it just got more real for at least a handful of people. According to some tweets that are making the rounds, some younger Americans had no idea until now that the “unsinkable” cruise liner existed and did in fact hit an iceberg and sink in the Atlantic 100 years ago. What? They didn’t watch Downton Abbey and put two and two together either? (Note: Just like the deceased would-be heirs of Downton, Jack and Rose are fictional. Though something tells us many of the Titanic’s passengers probably had acting abilities comparable to Billy Zane’s.) Instead of ridiculing these youths for being ignorant of a fairly remarkable historic event and complaining about Idiocracy becoming more factual each day, let’s turn this into a teaching moment. Here are nine other films that depict a very real thing that happened in human history: Pearl Harbor In case the reference didn’t register at the time, there was a real Day of Infamy behind those insipid comments on Twitter a year ago about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami being payback for Pearl Harbor. Those jerks weren’t talking about the Ben Affleck movie, but a real military strike that happened. The movie that tells the sobering story of the naval base attack in 1941, in which 2,402 Americans were killed, was directed by Michael Bay (which seems like a joke but is true). Apollo 13 The three-man crew on the Apollo 13 mission really did spend four bleak days in their spacecraft after an oxygen tank exploded on the service module. What had been planned as the third manned moon landing instead became a harrowing effort to make it back to Earth safely. The drama captivated the nation on television in 1970, a time before the Internet. The Perfect Storm Before George Clooney and his perfectly disheveled beard hairs set sail in 2000, the dangerous storm that swept away the Andrea Gail fishing vessel really occurred, serving as the basis for the ill-fated film of the same name. Some of the facts in the movie have been disputed, but the 1991 nor’easter/hurricane did in fact collide in what many referred to as “the perfect storm.” The Killing Fields The mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in the mid- to late 1970s might be difficult for even Cambodian youths to fathom, but the story of journalists Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg was very real. The two were covering the fall of the capital to the regime, and at the time, many journalists managed to flee. Pran was stranded but ended up escaping the death camps. He coined the phrase “killing fields,” the mass grave sites of which there are a mind-boggling 20,000. Alive A chartered flight really did crash in the Andes in 1972, and survivors stayed alive by eating the flesh of dead passengers. Sixteen of them were rescued two months later when Uruguayans Nando Parrado (played in the film by Ethan Hawke) and Roberto Canessa climbed through the mountains for 10 days to seek help. All the President’s Men Wondering where the “-gate” suffix originated? Decades before Weinergate, a little scandal called Watergate happened, and journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were there to reveal the truth behind the wrongdoing and President Nixon’s involvement in it. The film is an adaptation of the reporters’ book, which was based on their investigative reporting in an era before “truthiness.” Silkwood Another pop culture reference is about to make sense to many: A “Silkwood shower” isn’t just something germophobes want to take after they get off the subway. It’s a term derived from a scene in which plutonium plant worker Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) is, horrifically, contaminated with radiation. Silkwood really did die mysteriously as she planned to reveal wrongdoing at the plant in the mid-’70s. GoodFellas Based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, GoodFellas recounts the dirty deeds of Henry Hill and Co. Hill, who became an FBI informant, was a member of the Lucchese crime family and was involved in the also-real Lufthansa heist, among other crimes. Hill’s still out there somewhere, being forced to eat “egg noodles and ketchup” instead of spaghetti with marinara. United 93 After terrorists hijacked United Flight 93 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, passengers and crew learned of the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those aboard refused to let the plane hit its intended target, likely a government building in Washington, D.C., and planned to storm the cockpit. Some liberties were taken regarding whether they successfully entered the cockpit, but unless you believe conspiracy theorists, the plane did crash in a field in Pennsylvania.
“’The thing that makes it so relevant is that we live in this age of robots, particularly when it comes to war,’ [Tim] Hill, also a longtime writer on the television series SpongeBob SquarePants , told 24 Frames. ‘We have drones that do our fighting for us, do all these jobs men and women don’t want to do. And that’s what makes this so interesting — things like this moment in the story when Johnny realizes he’s going to be disassembled and contemplates death, and whether it’s right to terminate someone else.’ He paused. ‘These are heavy themes for a family movie,’ he said, anticipating a reasonable reader’s reaction. ‘But I think they can have their place.'” Of course. [ LAT ]
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Just because it’s 2012 to us doesn’t mean that a LOT of folks aren’t living in the 1950s A White Father Rejects His Daughter’s Black Boyfriend You might have seen the hidden-camera show “What Would You Do?” before, where actors are sent to restaurants, stores, and other public places to engage in activities that would cause people to expose their TRUE feelings about race, sexual preference, and gender roles in America. In this particular episode, a swirly White woman is bringing her Black boyfriend to meet her father for the first time at a diner. As you can guess the father is less than please with the pigment in said boyfriend’s skin and some tense and awkward moments ensue. Images via YouTube Hit the flip to watch the interesting, yet infuriating video…
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