Re: Aladdin, apparently this lyric from "Prince Ali" was changed from

to

and I am going to fucking burn the world to the ground on Howard Ashman's behalf.

EDIT: oh god I just listened to that moment in the song and hearing Smith "sing" it is so much worse than I could have imagined.

http://youtu.be/BEHX72PKmkk?t=175

New album by Esperanza Spalding (jazz-fusion bassist/vocalist) just dropped, and it's probably my favorite record of 2019 so far.

Sorry for the delay in replying—still in the process of moving, which hasn't made for a lot of free evenings.

To use one example, the big AMC near me as recently as 2013 would carry a shit ton of indie dramas on its fourteen screens—now it's down to the latest blockbusters, whatever horror movie is playing, and whatever studio comedies are out there. It'll run smaller dramas for like a week and then they're gone. Nothing ever has a chance to get its legs.

And to be clear, I think the MCU has exacerbated the problem to the breaking point because of its ability to have multiple movies play at once, but it was already happening. The limited-release model just can't compete when every single movie is expected to hit as many screens as possible at once and make at minimum its budget back opening weekend. There's no room for things to find their feet anymore because anything that can't do at minimum a couple dozen million opening week is cut off at the knees. Smaller movies can't afford the advertising blitz necessary to get a bunch of butts in seats and justify their existence opening weekend, but they don't have a chance to get word of mouth anymore because they're immediately subsumed by tentpole flicks.

The one exception is horror movies, because those almost always generate a massive ROI—audiences will go to basically any of them, so you can make Hereditary on a budget of $10 million and get $80 million back no problem. But for most other films, you can forget it. There are isolated successes here and there, but the overall trend is slow death.

And as far as Endgame getting knocked out by Pikachu . . . yay? That's just tentpoles eating at each other, not anything actually positive. Warner Brothers' video game IP knocking out Disney's comics IP isn't some kind of victory for smaller movies (and it hasn't even turned out that way tbh, Endgame still has more screens at my local theatres than Pikachu does.)

- - - - -

In other Disney-related news, the fuck is this shit.

Ignore the absolutely terrible arrangement and the fact that Will Smith isn't even trying. It just looks so goddamn CHEAP and claustrophobic. Congratulations, Disney, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make Agrabah look like a costume party in a broom closet.

The issue isn't even how much content they're pumping out, it's that it's completely broken the theatrical distribution model. I checked AMC showtimes near me yesterday and there are literally like five non-MCU movies showing on screens right now, getting three or four screenings a day. That includes brand-new releases. It was already hard to see movies below a certain budget outside of metropolitan areas, especially if they weren't distributed by one of the big studios—now it's almost straight-up impossible to see a smaller movie at a theater for more than a one- or two-week window if you don't live near a big city.

Exacerbating that is the model where if you don't make a windfall your opening weekend, your movie is considered a flop and will be buried as quickly as possible. Throw on top of that Disney's increasingly tyrannical rules with theater chains about how long they're required to play the latest blockbuster and on how many screens, and it's basically the death of the medium for small towns.

If it weren't the MCU it'd be another franchise, but the unique ability of the MCU to churn out multiple movies a year is just accelerating the cycle.

The Centr of Controversy, Kivan Bay

Spoilering the specific aspect of Avengers: Endgame that's addressed in this article:

That this isn't frequently mentioned in the same breath as Vertigo stuns me, and to be honest I think it's the better film. Hitchcock and Connery's involvement almost makes it feel like a self-lacerating confession--Connery's Mark is a monster, a gaslighting, paternal rapist whose role as the movie's "hero" plays as a cruel joke (and is eerily reminiscent of Hitchcock's behind-the-scenes treatment of Tippi Hedren, whose career he ruined when she refused his advances). Hedren herself gives the best lead performance of any of the Hitchcock movies I've seen--she's a proto-Laura Palmer, a raw nerve of trauma barely covered by the criminal habits she's taken up in order to survive. Marnie succeeds where Vertigo fails--that movie's greatest weakness is its relative lack of attention to Madeline/Judy outside the lens of Scotty's obsession, while this one puts us through Marnie's torment through her own eyes, to a degree that would be histrionic in lesser hands but instead is harrowing.

Rear Window is still my favorite Hitchcock, and that's not likely to change--besides being a masterclass in tension, it's incredibly fun to watch. This movie is decidedly not, but it takes the runner-up spot. Due for a critical reevaluation, to say the least.

Eight years after DiF made me aware of its existence, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation screened at Trylon in the Twin Cities. No way in hell I was gonna miss this.

The crowd fucking LOST IT during the truck chase. R.I.P. Snickers.

I love TFA, I want to trust JJ and think this is all misdirection, but

We'll find out in eight months either way.

Not a book, but: never forget the time Hunter S. Thompson absolutely reamed Anthony Burgess over his trying to back out of a deadline.

Two things I wish: 1.) that Thompson were still around to write about the modern Republican party; 2.) that "cheapjack scum" enters our cultural vocabulary.

Rewatch round two.

Buster Keaton had a threesome with Orson Welles and Michael Mann and birthed this absolute masterpiece. Mythic, operatic, chilling, gorgeous. We are not worthy.

Re: "Show-nothing marketing campaigns for tell-nothing movies"—

"Who cares whether Tom's ability to give a good performance is compromised, thus weakening the movie's ability to stand on its own when it no longer has the Disney marketing juggernaut behind it? At least this way the nerds will clap and cheer harder opening night when they're surprised by the CG blob he's punching."

Sekiro, the new From Software game, is basically what would happen if you combined Bloodborne with Uncharted and set it in feudal Japan. I have almost snapped my controller in half in frustration with a couple of bosses (recorded myself finally vanquishing one below) but am otherwise having an utter blast.