The Afternoon Report: Monday 6 August 2018
Kate Wagner On "The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films" 99 Percent Invisible
"Ricky Strauss, a successful marketer, has been given oversight of original films and TV shows for Disney’s coming streaming service. Does he have what it takes?" Brooks Barnes NYT
"Censorious activists are using the digital signage of social media to intimidate companies, particularly entertainment conglomerates, into blacklisting the 21st century version of all that is un-American: the 'un-woke,' either now or in their false consciousness past. We may not be in a new blacklist era, but not since the postwar anti-communist crusade have so many artists been rendered unemployable for something they said."
"James Gunn, Old Tweets and the Return of the Hollywood Blacklist" by Thomas Doherty
"A major reason MoviePass has been burning through an estimated $45 million a month is that it has to pay movie theaters the full ticket price for most of the millions of tickets its subscribers order. "A small amount of our subscribers, that 15% that would go to four or more, go to a lot of movies. A lot! It's almost half of our cost of goods, like 40% of our cost of goods are used by that 15%." Business Insider
MoviePass: Three-Movie Limit Per Month CNN
Michael Chabon Producer-Writer On Latest "Star Trek" Series TrekMovie.com
"God’s Lonely Men: Taxi Driver in the Age of the Incels: 'Although Martin Scorsese’s movie is more than 40 years old, it is eerily alive to this moment, horrific for reasons beyond what its creators could have imagined'" By Lindsay Zoladz
"Lessons in Dressing and Decorum from Betty Blue"
Haifaa Mansour Returns to Saudi Arabia for Next Film The National
"The halving of America’s newspapers has already happened. It only gets worse from here." Margaret Sullivan in Washington Post
"Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines... We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions."
Apple, Facebook Pull InfoWars And Affiliates Variety
"Hannah Gadsby, like many women, is done hiding her anger, and in “Nanette” she bends the bounds of stand-up to accommodate it." Moira Donegan at The New Yorker
Details On Dinesh D'Souza Distrib: "PureFlix.com, its on-demand streaming service, attracts more than 125,000 subscribers who pay $10.99 a month. It features around 10,000 pieces of exclusive and licensed videos, from Billy Graham sermons to an original drama series co-starring Antonio Sabato Jr., the model-turned-actor." NBC News
“Minding the Gap” is a diamond: shocking, sharp, slicing, gorgeous, glinting, cutting deep, deeper. In Bing Liu’s masterful, momentous debut documentary, a friend muses, “When you’re a kid, you just do, you just act, then somewhere along the line, everyone loses that.” Under the main titles, the camera rushes forward, a montage of shots from behind three young men skating the unpopulated center city of Rockford, about ninety miles northwest of Chicago. The music is dreamy. There’s a hint of melancholy. Jump cut, jump cut, the sequence suggests the physicality of escape in their lives, and a time-slipping-forward crush that we are unprepared to witness. The three sway as they control the pavement: supple, languorously elegant, arriving from daily grace to a plain and ordinary neighborhood." Ray Pride Reviews at Newcity
"Fan Bingbing Tax Scandal Uneasy for Luxury Brands in China" Jing Daily
"China Launches 'Patriotic Struggle' Campaign Targeting Intellectuals"
"Any authority that cracks down on artists, journalists, intellectuals, and lawyers has completely lost its legitimacy to rule. It is evidence of vulnerability and fragility in facing the challenges of today and the future." Ai Weiwei to NPR
“There are profoundly deeper and wider ruins in this deteriorating society where the human condition has never been respected." @aiww Responds To Chinese Authorities Destroying His Beijing Studio https://t.co/cwKXQFp7qw @hrw_chinese @hrw— Sophie Richardson (@SophieHRW) August 5, 2018
"Welcome to Xinjiang in China’s northwest. Twice the size of Germany, it holds crucial energy assets in its deserts: the country’s largest natural gas reserves, almost half of its coal, a fifth of its oil. It is a vital artery for President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and markets in central Asia and the Middle East. Yet it has also, over the past two years, become the scene of one of China’s most intense, largely hidden crackdowns. Hundreds of thousands of people have been placed in extralegal detention... In southern Xinjiang, where policing is the most intense, up to 80 per cent of adults in urban neighbourhoods have been rounded up according to remaining residents. “So many people, mostly the men, were imprisoned for so-called ‘913’ crimes: having forbidden digital content on their phones.'" The FT
BREAKING
Locarno: German-Kurdish Director Huseyin Tabak Set for Talking Donkey Pic ‘Grisella’ (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/TG3gRbXfD2— Variety (@Variety) August 6, 2018
