Noah Kalina, Psycho Tank
Roger Ebert: I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping...
1. Obviously, the absence of a must-see mass-market movie. […]
2. Ticket prices are too high. […]
3. The theater experience. […]
4. Refreshment prices. […]
5. Competition from other forms of delivery. […]
6. Lack of choice. Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films [this has arguably been the case since 1989 with Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape]. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts. Yet most moviegoers outside large urban centers can’t find those titles in their local gigantiplex. Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few overhyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear.
The myth that small-town moviegoers don’t like “art movies” is undercut by Netflix’s viewing results; the third most popular movie on Dec. 28 on Netflix was “Certified Copy,” by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. You’ve heard of [him]? In fourth place—French director Alain Corneau’s “Love Crime.” In fifth, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“—but the subtitled Swedish version.
The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.
I would go watch new releases more if they would start allowing outside food. I don’t mind waiting a few months when the second run theaters here in portland(which is most of them) have them showing for $3 and I can sit with a locally brewed beer in one hand and yummy fresh pizza made fresh just next door to the theater in the other hand.
Oh yeah and quit it with the 3D thing. It is still lame.
(Source: news.ycombinator.com)
Note Of Note of the Day: From the Associated Press’ Washington-based Assistant Chief of Bureau for photos, J. David Ake:
A protester handed President Barack Obama a note while shaking hands along a rope line in New Hampshire today. Photographer Charlie Dharapak smartly zoomed in so you can read the note for yourself.
Transcript follows for those who can’t:
Mr. President: Over 4000 peaceful protesters / have been arrested / While banksters continue / to destroy the American economy (with impunity) / You must stop the assault / on our 1st ammendment rights [sic]. / Your silence sends a message / that police brutality is ac(ceptable) / Banks got bailed out. / We got sold out.
(via biglyre)
OMG! Adorbz of the Day: Luke and Faris share a moment of stunned disbelief as they learn Darth Vader’s dark secret.
[nerdbastards.]
(Source: ozap)
(via kevin)
Ef ya! I hate planking.
(via thesinglehound)
If this scene doesn’t make you want to see Drive, you probably hate movies.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Fennesz
—July
Fennesz, July
(Seven Stars, 2011)11:49 eternal.
“Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It’s got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It’s all of that. It’s not having to grow up. It’s four-dimensional chess, it’s strategy, and it’s being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.”
(via bbook)
“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception..”
- Alan Moore
(via dalasverdugo)
If I Were President… | NYTimes Opinion
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
The question implies that if you swap out one, put in another, then all will be well with America — as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.
When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different. Science provides a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths on which good governance should be based and which exist outside of particular belief systems.
Our government doesn’t work — not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, wouldn’t be to lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to bring an objective reality to the electorate so it could choose the right leaders in the first place.
Andrew Weil:
I’d tell the nation that I was powerless to control the war machine, Wall Street, big oil and the other interests that run the country, and I would urge Americans to form a new political party not beholden to them.
(Source: blua, via littlehudson)
First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?
And so when someone says, “We don’t have enough money for this space probe,” I’m asking, no, it’s not that you don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of money that you’re spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.
You remember the 60s and 70s. You didn’t have to go more than a week before there’s an article in Life magazine, “The Home of Tomorrow,” “The City of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow”. All of that ended in the 1970s. After we stopped going to the Moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.
And so I worry that the decision that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow’s gone. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, and the rest of the world is going to pass us by.
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (via david)
