I think Netflix is going along with the rules as begrudgingly and to the letter as possible. Which, good for them, fine. But they are using their business model, their popularity, and their ability to spend a lot on productions to try and change a system to their benefit. If they could get away with not releasing…

Cinema has been pretty good about evolving with technological changes, even when some of its biggest names resisted - sound, color, widescreen, cgi, etc. This is different, it’s not about technology (watching films at home is half a century old or more), but rather changing something more integral to the very nature…

Couldn’t say for sure (part of the problem in all this is how frustratingly secretive Netflix tries to be about everything), but it seems like Netflix finds even the most minor requirement of theatrical distribution to be a nuisance. And they’d do away with that requirement if they could. Their efforts to brute force…

It’s actually been an issue since pre-Netflix days, but mostly outside of a US context - in other countries, “TV movies” often are cinematic in the ways you describe because (at least in Europe) there are funding bodies for films made for TV, and commercial breaks (and other factors more TV-related in the US) are less…

And, also, the MCU’s not really all that confusing.

Willis was amazing! I think Allen has said that Willis taught him how to make actual movies - instead of just acting zany in front of a camera. But whatever one thinks about Allen these days, it’s a credit to his artistry that he took those lessons forward, and continued to seek out creative, thoughtful…

Didn’t Up with People do, like, 5 or 6 super bowl halftimes back in the day?

Here’s a pretty good interview with Randall Poster, one of the unsung heroes of Wes Anderson’s films:

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but it was definitely a hit in my house - if you like what Mika’s selling that whole first album is pretty great.

Liz has been saying for a while now that the Adams material’s not coming out, but she’s been pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing. Supposedly she’s got a whole new batch of songs that she’s more fired up about that she’s been recording. But this news certainly leads to some sad, frustrating speculation. Maybe…

Is that true about Gangs? I thought they’d always had DDL in mind for it, even chased him down at an obscure shoemaker’s shop in Italy to beg him to come out of retirement, or something like that.

It’s almost like De Niro himself might once have played a younger version of a well-known actor.

I have a feeling Singer “has shit” on a lot of powerful people.

I’m not talking about “equitable outcome” because I tend to reject the whole “outcome/opportunity” rhetorical framework, which is a rightwing construction meant to deflect from having the actual policy discussions that we’re trying to have in this thread. As myself and others (particularly Norm! Chomsky above) have…

I’m not so sure it’s fair to say the 90% was a “myth” - the marginal rate of 90% on income existed on paper, and was paid (AFAIK) by many. However, I think you’re right to say that because of differences in the way income, wealth, investments, etc. were classified, 90% is probably too high a term for the catch-all way…

You’re isolating the tax rates from other cultural circumstances (with a slight nod to other factors that may have contributed to the growth after the ‘64 cut). During the ‘50s, under Eisenhower, when the upper rate was around 90%, the country went through an economic boom that saw massive gov’t expenditure on job…

I didn’t love S2, but I liked it more than most. I even found the incomprehensibility of the plot somewhat appealing, eventually. It seemed that S2 meant to be just as scuzzy as S1, but without all the romantic mythos - and while I did love that mythos on first watch, it also made a lot of it too neat (I’d say all the…

The Peter Green stuff is pretty great if you’re into that mid-60s British blues thing - early Yardbirds, Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, etc. Green and Jeremy Spencer are both two of the best guitarists to come out of that scene, with distinct but really complimentary styles (Spencer later joined a crazy cult to which he…

I love watching new stuff, but there’s definitely  a lot of value in rewatching. In fact I think a fairly solid argument could be made that the current lionisation of pop culture was, at least partially, born out of the “forced” rewatching that late boomers and gen Xers were subject to pre-100 channels, cheap dvds,…