Money Ball

Assorted Movie Blogs

the Film Experience

The Movie Digest
Movies with Abe

Zola's Movie Pic's

21st Century Social Networking Tools- the basics

David Pogue gives a basics guide to social networking tools;

As a public service, therefore, I’m offering a handy clip-’n’-save guide to the social networking services you’re most likely to hear about at this summer’s barbecues.

Facebook- This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month. Similar to Facebook- Myspace, Bebo, Orkut

LINKEDIN - It’s Facebook for the professional set

TWITTER -This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you. Similaar: Google Buzz,FriendFeed,


Others: FOURSQUARE, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, YELP, OpenTable,UrbanSpoon,

Meet Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill with Riz Khan

The King of Bollywood in New York

There is no American equivalent to this spectacle, in which actors, joined by dozens of dancers, recreate musical numbers from popular movies. Here, all talents — acting, singing, dancing — are equal. Well, not always singing; in most Bollywood films, vocals are provided by playback singers while the stars on screen lip-sync...

Though the musicians remained onstage for Amitabh Bachchan’s first solo set, they were less consequential. His appearance was more an exercise in collective memory than a great performance. A star of stratospheric proportions, he was celebrated with hagiographical videos and voice-overs. (“Even the way he stands makes an impact.” “They aped his hairstyle.”) The younger Mr. Bachchan performed one of his father’s best-known routines, from “Don,” while images from that film flashed on a screen behind him.

With a silver goatee and short dark hair, the elder Mr. Bachchan cut an august figure. But he, too, was not immune to the pulls of legacy. Toward the end of the show, in a segment that was part spoken-word performance, part “Inside the Actors Studio,” he discussed his own parents with emotion. First, he recited a few lines of “Agneepath,” a poem by his father, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, which was, he said, “written to inspire the Indians.” (Friday was the 61st anniversary of Indian independence.)

Then he spoke about his mother, who died last year, and slipped into his character from the film “Deewaar,” who prays for his mother’s health. As Mr. Bachchan delivered the lines, his voice grew deep, mean and improbably raspy. And then, just as quickly as he had begun, he snapped back to normal and was greeted with the night’s most sincere standing ovation. On a night full of carefully choreographed moments, this blatant blast of acting also proved to be the truest.

-Movie Stars Take to the Stage, Giving ’Em the Old Bollywood Razzle-Dazzle

Tropic Thunder

Photo of the Day

via Boing Boing- Pieter Hugo's Nollywood Series

Related;
Nigerian films are so successful that the government wants to get involved;

Today, filmmaking employs about a million people in Nigeria, split equally between production and distribution, making it the country's biggest employer after agriculture, according to the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB). The industry has sales of $200m-300m a year....

The films cost anywhere between $15,000 and $100,000 to make, and the money comes directly from the market. Producers, or “marketers”, as they are known, use some of the profits from one film to pay for the next. Banks do not lend to Nollywood, as there are no statistics from which they could estimate likely returns

Obama Fact of the Day

His favorite Harry Potter character may be Dumbledore (he won’t comment when it’s mentioned that the headmaster of Hogwarts may be gay.) He favors the Rolling Stones over the Beatles and Batman over Iron Man.

-Obama Talks About His Girls

A love story of a different sort

Chris & Don. A love story


NYT Review;

The three-and-a-half-decade relationship of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate....

Early in their relationship the two developed a special coded language to discuss themselves through notes and cartoon drawings in which Mr. Bachardy was a cat and Isherwood an old horse, and the movie develops these dialogues into short animated sequences. During a rocky period in the early 1960s when Mr. Bachardy began pursuing sexual encounters outside the relationship, they referred to his behavior as “mousing.” Mr. Isherwood’s anxiety, in which he imagined living without a partner, was reflected in his novel “A Single Man.”

In this pre-Stonewall era Isherwood’s increasingly acute political consciousness led him to make “the treatment of the homosexual a test by which every political party and government must be judged.”

The last section of the film, devoted to Mr. Isherwood’s slow decline from prostate cancer, is its most wrenching. Mr. Bachardy, determined to make Isherwood’s death “something we were doing together,” chronicled his deterioration, executing as many as 9 or 10 drawings a day, including one of his corpse.

Isherwood would have told him, “That’s what an artist would do,” Mr. Bachardy reflects, then adds, “And that’s what an artist did do.”

----

I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent. But are you going to sink or swim? There’s a most awful daintiness in the idea that everything you write should be just so—perfection—and all the rest carefully destroyed so that it won’t hurt your image. Often this is a dangerous kind of vanity. Goodness knows, I’ve written lots of stuff that I hate, but there it is, flapping around in the vaults of various motion-picture studios; and sometimes I’ve done good work for the cinema. If you want the money, and you want to live that way, you’ve just got to take it. I suppose, under ideal circumstances, I would say, have some other profession and keep your writing for yourself.

Human Nature meets Mother Nature

Encounters at the End of the World- a great documentary

A review from NYT;

One of the beauties of “Encounters at the End of the World” is that all the furry and floating animals are no more wondrous than the bipeds tramping through and around McMurdo: the linguist turned philosopher, the banker turned bus driver and the female adventurer who, for drama and odd entertainment, likes to have herself zipped up in a carryall bag. (She’s her own baggage.) Mr. Herzog opens his mind, heart and eyes to all these wayfarers who — despite the persistent strain of melancholy that touches each and every person who appears on camera — seem eerily at peace at the bottom of the world. One reason may be that, like Mr. Herzog, more than a few evince a deep-felt pessimism about both the present and the future.

If this were a nature documentary like any other, the casual talk about global warming and other calamities might cast shadows across this bright expanse. But there’s something about Mr. Herzog — including the accidental if now well-practiced comedy that colors even his most dramatic pronouncements — that inevitably keeps his pictures from growing too dark. One reason is beauty, which in his hands has a way of keeping the worst at bay; it is, after all, hard to fully despair in the face of so much of the natural world’s splendors. Another reason, I think, has to do with Mr. Herzog’s seemingly unshakable faith in human beings, who for all their misdeeds at times reach a state of exaltedness. They soar — just like that jellyfish.

Bush and Batman quotes

Indian Superstars

Kabir Bedi



Diana Hayden

O' Really

A smart worker, not a hard worker

Award-Winning Writer Gloria Calderón Kellett Discusses Sitcom Writing, Screenplays and the Changing Landscape of Television

Mindjet: Between the award-winning screenplays, theater, comedy and books— how do you manage to be so productive with so much of your life dedicated to your work?

Gloria Calderón Kellett: I am super anal-retentive and organized. I think I’m a smart worker, not a hard worker– I was the person who’d always write the papers the night before, and get an “A.” If I have a deadline I’ll meet it, so oftentimes I give myself a self-imposed deadline. For example, I’ll book a theater before I’ve written the play. Or, I’ll invite six actors to come to my house on a Sunday to read something I haven’t written yet so that I’ll be forced to write something for them to read. I like writing— I have a lot of ideas— but I don’t love re-writing. But, I’m getting comfortable with re-writing because I know it’s an essential part of writing. Also, my husband is super prolific; he works harder and smarter than I do, so anything I do comparatively is not that much work. And we have a lot of artistic friends, who are doing all kinds of things— we’re surrounded by it— so what I do doesn’t seem like work. Most days at work are really fun.

MJ: What do you think of how revenue is being re-distributed with the changing landscape of television (consumers, ads, Internet, production)? How did the writers’ strike* affect you?

GCK: I think it’s very exciting actually. Personally, as a lover of television for many years I feel that TV’s very stale. A lot of the shows that are new every season are just versions of shows I’ve already seen on the air. There’s not a lot of creativity anymore. When we were growing up, 35 million people would watch the Cosby Show or Family Ties, and those were okay numbers for them. Now, if we get 11 million viewers for How I Met Your Mother we’re excited because there are just so many options [with new media like Internet and streaming content]. The networks are nervous, they’re forced to make milquetoast decisions as to what the programming is, and don’t take a lot of risks. Which is what makes cable and Internet so interesting, because they don’t have to rely on pleasing such a wide array of people. I looked into a Web series, and I sold two during the strike but can’t do them now since I’m back on my contract. There’s no money in them, but you get creative freedom to do whatever you want, throw something out there. And digital’s fairly easy to produce— with the Internet, production value isn’t super important; they just want funny or interesting material.

The strike itself was difficult because I wasn’t working and I missed everybody. I love my job and I wanted to be there, but this fight is for future generations that will need payment for the Internet. It was a very theoretical fight. I was walking on the picket line with writers from I Love Lucy who don’t make one penny on residuals and their pension plans are nil. How often is that show played on the air? How often has it played over the years? These people should be safe in their retirement, and are not. I felt it was my duty to strike for future generations that will be going through the same thing. There won’t be any impact on my living wage for quite some time, but it could be that in the next 10 years everything will be streamed. The landscape of entertainment is going to change significantly. It’ll all be on demand eventually. [Your favorite show] will still be on every Monday at 8 pm, but that’s the earliest you can watch it. And they’d promote new shows, like, “hey if you like How I Met Your Mother, then you might like Buds, and you can get five free episodes of Buds and if you like it, then you can pay 50 cents an episode, and add that to your subscription.” I think heading in that direction is exciting; it’ll open up worlds for more writers, and for more interesting television. So it’s not something I feel threatened by at all; I think it was a worthy fight and I’m glad we made some headway on it.

Movies and GDP

The 1976 classic, directed by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro as the bitterly alienated protagonist, gave the world De Niro’s catchphrase “You talking to me?,” and also introduced a young Jodie Foster. But what does it have to do with the world economy?

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. He said that his action was an attempt to impress Foster. (The movie features a scene in which a mohawked De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)

According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for President Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Due to this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Professor Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

“Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy.”

-The Travis Bickle Effect

Cool Obama ads

Eurovision Corruption

Forty years on, we are being asked to believe that General Franco ordered his top television executives to offer bribes to all and sundry to make sure that Spain’s entry won that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, and thus deprive Congratulations and Cliff Richard of the title that should have been his.

-Franco's win at Eurovision...

Movie recommendation- a stroke of insight

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is excellent. If, like me, you find it hard to believe that the average quadriplegic is fairly happy, this movie will convince you. In fact, it does more: By putting you in the shoes of a man able only to move one eyelid, you'll realize that you too could be ecstatic simply to regain your abilities to speak and eat

- Bryan Caplan





Related;
Locked-In syndrome
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Who’s That Girl?

Alongside whatever she has offered her audience through the years — sex, glamour, dancing, defiance, blasphemy, spirituality — Madonna has never pretended to be anything but diligent. She’s disciplined, hard-working and determined to sell. For Madonna as a pop archetype, the truest pleasure isn’t momentary physical ecstasy or divine rapture but success. She labeled that impulse too in an early tour: “Blonde Ambition.”

Presenting herself not only as an object of desire but as a material girl with her eye on the profits was one of the many smart moves she made from the beginning. By flaunting her control and her triumphs, Madonna gave fans a stake in her long-term prospects, something that loyalists should be able to appreciate as her sex appeal inevitably fades — although Madonna is still svelte, toned and dressing in lingerie as often as she pleases. On another of the new album’s little manifestoes, “Give It 2 Me,” she insists, “Don’t need to catch my breath/I can go on and on and on.”...

Madonna might be singing to all her wannabes through the decades in “She’s Not Me,” a branding statement — “She doesn’t have my name” — couched as a warning to a lover. It’s about a girl who tries to steal a man by copying everything from the singer’s perfume to her reading list. As if to remind the guy that he and the singer have a shared past, the track reaches way back to revive disco — scrubbing guitar, canned hand claps, brief touches of (synthetic) strings — while Madonna sings, “She’ll never have what I have/It won’t be the same.”

Which is true. No one since Madonna (including the Neptunes’ client Britney Spears, whom Madonna once smooched as an equal) has come close to achieving the same alchemy of flirtation, pop proficiency, concert spectacle and self-guided tenacity. But she still has to watch her back.

21

Kaplan, Muse of Film `21,' Uses Blackjack Theory at Work

Bill Kaplan, chief executive officer of FreshAddress Inc., and a co-founder of the blackjack team upon which the recent movie ``21'' was based, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about the film, parallels between his life and the movie, and the application of blackjack game theory in business.