[moved to piefed] movies

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22137422

On British telly in half an hour.

The US subtitles are indeed a thing:

Sparrows Can’t Sing attempts to represent the diversity of characters and cultures that were prevalent in the East End during the early 1960s, including those typically found in the local pub, as well as local tarts, Jewish tradesmen and spivs. Consequently the dialogue became a mix of rhyming slang, London Yiddish and thieves cant. It is no surprise that it became the first English language film to be released in the US with subtitles.

Also on the Internet Archive.

On January 1, 2025, we celebrate published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entering the public domain! The passage of these works into the public domain celebrates our shared cultural heritage. The ability to breathe new life into long forgotten works, remix the most popular and enduring works of the time, and to better circulate the oddities we find in thrift stores, attics, and on random pockets of the internet are now freely available for us all.

While not at the same blockbuster level as 2024 with Steamboat Willie’s passage into the public domain, works from 1929 still inhabit strong cultural significance today. The works of 1929 continue to capture the Lost Generation’s voice, the rise of sound film, and the emerging modern moment of the 1920s.

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Last year Mickey Mouse made a splash with Steamboat Willie cruising into the public domain. This year TWELVE more Mickey shorts join to flesh out the notable events of Mickey’s young career. He speaks his first words in The Karnival Kid, he wears gloves for the first time in The Opry House, and Ub Iwerks leaves the studio at year’s end with Wild Waves. Disney animation also kickstarted their Silly Symphonies series with the haunting tales The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.

In 1929, if your film wanted to have any attention it needed sound. Musical films were everywhere with The Broadway Melody winning the second ever Best Picture award at the Oscars, The Hollywood Revue introducing the world to “Singin’ in the Rain”, and the Marx Brothers making their big screen debut with The Cocoanuts.

Below is a list of more significant films from the year:

• All Americans (dir. Joseph Santley)
• Blackmail (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• Lambchops (dir. Murray Roth)
• The Wild Party (dir. Dorothy Arzner)
• Spite Marriage (dir. Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick)
• Say It with Songs (dir. Lloyd Bacon)
• Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor)
• Welcome Danger (dir. Clyde Bruckman and Malcolm St. Clair)
• The Black Watch (dir. John Ford)
• The first five Silly Symphonies (dir. Walt Disney or Ub Iwerks)

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 17, 2025, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

On June 2, 2023, Blake Lively began a text exchange with her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni that blamed her assistant for not getting her an updated batch of script pages. “She didn’t realize they were new,” Lively wrote. “New pages can always be sent to me as well please.” The actress signed the missive with an “X” — the universal symbol for a kiss. Lively followed up with another text shortly thereafter. “I’m just pumping in my trailer if you wanna work out our lines.” Baldoni responded: “Copy. Eating with crew and will head that way.” Eighteen months later, that interaction was depicted in a New York Times bombshell report in a far more sinister light. The Times wrote: “[Baldoni] repeatedly entered her makeup trailer uninvited while she was undressed, including when she was breastfeeding.”

That discrepancy is one of many highlighted in a scathing $250 million lawsuit filed Tuesday afternoon by Baldoni against the Times in Los Angeles Superior Court. Baldoni is among a group of 10 plaintiffs that also includes publicists Melissa Nathan and Jennifer Abel who are suing the newspaper for libel and false light invasion of privacy over the Dec. 21 article titled “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.” The parties, which also include “It Ends With Us” producers Jamey Heath and Steve Sarowitz, claim that the Times relied on “‘cherry-picked’ and altered communications stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead.”

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The 87-page complaint, which also accuses the Times of promissory fraud and breach of implied-in-fact contract, offers a rebuttal of the narrative set forth in the 4,000-word article that has rocked Hollywood and led to WME dropping Baldoni as a client hours after publication. Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the piece painted Lively as an actress who allegedly endured months of sexual harassment from Baldoni and Heath and supposedly faced retaliation in the form of a smear campaign because she voiced her concerns. But according to the lawsuit, it was Lively who embarked on a “strategic and manipulative” smear campaign of her own and used false “sexual harassment allegations to assert unilateral control over every aspect of the production.” And according to the suit, Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, allegedly berated Baldoni in an aggressive manner during a heated meeting at their Tribeca penthouse in New York, “accusing him of ‘fat shaming’” his wife. The suit claims that the A-list actor also pressured Baldoni’s agency, WME, to drop the director during the “Deadpool and Wolverine” premiere in July, well before Baldoni enlisted crisis PR.

Non-paywalled link.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22076183

A24 and Alex Garland hit a home run with Civil War earlier this year. The film had pretty good reviews but did exceptionally well at the box office. There was doing well and then there were the numbers that this movie managed to pull in. If it was one of the bigger studios, they would have looked at that $124 million worldwide and probably fired someone, but for A24, that is a win. So, it's not surprising to hear that Garland and A24 are teaming up for another war-based project. This one is just called Warfare and was written and directed by Garland and Ray Mendoza, an Iraq war veteran. Whenever a movie based on modern-day warfare comes out, you always see veterans reacting to the film and talking about what aspects of the film are accurate and what aspects aren't. This time, the team for this film appears to be trying to stop that before the film even comes out by having a veteran behind the camera. It's one thing to have someone on set as a consultant; it's another to have them behind the camera and helping direct a scene. The first trailer and poster were released earlier this month, and the film will be released sometime next year, maybe in April, if they want to try and make that Civil War lighting strike twice.

Trailer

Talk of homicide is on the rise in films, researchers have found, in a trend they say could pose a health concern for adults and children.

A study found that over the past 50 years there had been a small but significant increase in movie characters talking about murdering or killing.

“The surprising thing is the increase occurs not just for crime genres, which you would expect because they’re violent, but also for non-crime genres,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, who co-authored the study.

The team suggested the rise may indicate an increase in violent behaviour in movies, and called for a promotion of “mindful consumption and media literacy” to protect vulnerable groups, especially children.

Bushman said: “Adults can make their own choices, but I’m especially concerned about children being exposed to violence in the media.”

The question of whether on-screen violence has an impact on viewers has been a topic of much debate. Some studies back the idea young people can become more aggressive after watching violent media, such as TV and video games, with children exposed to such media being more antisocial and emotionally distressed.

However, an analysis published in 2020 suggested any positive relationship between violent behaviour and violent video games is minuscule, while scientists have also suggested that whether violent movies contribute to real-life aggression depends on if the viewer is already predisposed to violence.

Non-paywalled link.

I guess you could say...that was fast.

Non-paywalled link.

Get ready to sing your heart out— at home! 🎤🎶 Watch Wicked at home on December 31 uni.pictures/WickedAtHome

— @WickedMovie

In a conventional publicity campaign for a Hollywood film, every aspect is precision-engineered for maximum impact. The teasers begin early. The rumours from early screenings glow with positivity. The cast stay inseparable from both one another and their two core messages: that the film is tremendous and, boy, did we have a nice time making it.

Last summer, as he prepared to open the romantic drama It Ends with Us, Justin Baldoni took a radically different approach. Rather than go for unity, he and his co-stars appeared to have split. Rather than insist they had a nice time, they demurred. And rather than glow with positivity, he hired the same crisis PR expert as Johnny Depp to allegedly dismantle the reputation of his leading actress.

Baldoni is now the subject of an extraordinary legal complaint filed by Blake Lively, that leading lady, against Baldoni, his film studio, his publicist, and the aforementioned crisis PR team, led by Melissa Nathan, a veteran whose preferred approach could best be described as “attack is the best form of defence”.

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In a way, the most remarkable aspect of the whole sorry saga is that Justin Baldoni thought he could take on the might of Hollywood’s most wholesome and powerful cartel and win. In Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’s Hollywood, it always ends with them.

Archive

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is everything that’s beautiful and horrifying about classic vampire stories.

From Dark Horizons:

After New Line Cinema’s anime feature “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” debuted to a disastrously low $4.5 million in its opening weekend in cinemas on December 13th, and then fell a steep 72% to just $1.25 million this past weekend, the title is being made available on digital at home on December 27th.