ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

http://youtu.be/CTNJ51ghzdY

vidim da je warner/dc panel doneo i neki teaser za suicide squad

Reditelj filma FINAL GIRL Tyler Shields nosi ime koje kao da je izmišljeno za porno glumca. Možda bi u tom žanru mogao kudikamo bolje da se snađe jer njegov pokušaj stilizovanog osvetničkog trilera koji koketira sa estetikom bajke i kompromituje ionako klimave karijere Abigail Breslin i Wesa Bentleya ne zaslužuje prelaznu ocenu ni na jednom nivou. FINAL GIRL je simplifikovana, glupa, stilizovana budalaština o devojci koja je ostala siroče kao dete i od malih nogu je pripremana da ubije počionioce gnusnog zločina protiv ženskih članova porodice njenog mentora. Koliko god se Shields trudio da film obogati raznim detaljima, među kojima su i narkotici i halucinacije, ovo je jedan od onih primera u kome svako osveženje samo služi da podseti gledaoca koliko ga novi momenti ne samo ne zanimaju već ga i podsećaju koliko je sve to u osnovi bezveze.

plakat za slovenačko DOBA NEVINOSTI

http://dobanevinosti.blogspot.com/2015/07/doba-nevinosti-slovenija.html

Dawn of Justice trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0WWzgGyAH6Y

Ајдачићева листа

https://vid.me/e/NHC9?card=1


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Ovako snimljeno telefonom izgleda kao Skupljači Perja 2: Doba perja. 

Nego:


http://youtu.be/L-SJG4KXtk8

kompozitor slovenačkog DOBA NEVINOSTI

http://dobanevinosti.blogspot.com/2015/07/julija-in-alfa-romeo-muzika.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rwSMgfDuwis

A evo ga i Dedpul, snimljen telefonom na Komikkonu. Pošto Foks ne traži da se ovo skloni sa JuTjuba, slutim da su oni sasvim okej sa idejom da im ovo promoviše film:

http://youtu.be/K-zNGcmZ-zs

Najavili su da će uskoro staviti trejler na net.


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Iwata Satoru, the hugely popular president of Japanese games giant Nintendo, has died of cancer, age 55.

The company issued a notice reporting that Iwata died on Saturday as a result of a bile duct growth.

He joined Nintendo in the 1980s as a programmer. In 2000 he became a board director and became president in 2002.

In his time at the top he oversaw some of the company's best products: the Wii and the DS, as well as less successful introductions, the GameCube and the Wii U.

Twice in recent years, Iwata took pay cuts as the company reported losses, and recently he attempted to steer the company away from its dependence on consoles. That policy seemed to be bearing fruit, and the company expects a major jump in profitability thanks to new smartphone gaming.


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pXP-uvc7DZs

Stari o novim britanskim serijama koje se bave politikom...

http://www.beforeafter.rs/kultura/glasacka-kutija/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PLLQK9la6Go


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Pogledao sam COMMON izvanredan BBCjev televizjski film o problemu "udruženog zločinačkog poduhvata" kao krivičnog dela pred britanskim sudovima, iz pera barda britanske televizijske socijalne drame Jimmy "The Governor" McGoverna. McGovernov scenario je angažovan, baziran na činjenicama i plasira ih savršeno a da usput ne kompromituje sve potrebne dramske kvalitete, čak naprotiv, COMMON uspeva da bude prilično uzbudljiv i da zaintrigira gledaoca u pogledu ishoda, iako ovakav film retko kada to uspeva.

McGovernov scenario je prošao kroz izuzetno veđtu režiju Davida Blaira koji je uspeo da ga realizuje briljantno, izvlačeći maksimum iz glumaca uporedo sa izuzetnom estetizacijom sumornih mančesterskih lokacija i državnih institucija. Nico Mirallegro u glavnoj ulozi nevino optuženog mladića predvodi izvanrednu glumačku podelu i stoji kao emotivno jezgro cele priče, a o snazi okupljene glumačke sile dovoljno gvoori činjenica da Michael Gambon igra epizodnu ulogu sudije.

Blairov pristup visokoestetizovanom realizmu je konzistentan, i uspeva da ni u jednom trenutku ne izgradi šik-sliku dubokih socijalih podela u Engleskoj, Međutim, njegovo rešavanje mizanscena u scenama, kadriranje, i vladanje ritomom priče je izuzetno i ovo je reditelj na kog svakako treba obratiti pažnju.

aplikacije na kasetama:

Commodore Is Back, Baby, With a ... Smartphone?
commodore-2Click to Open Overlay Gallery
WIRED

Commodore, the name that helped usher in the PC revolution, is back. With a phone.

For those of you too young to remember, Commodore was a hot company in the mid-1980s. It was a leader in personal computers, shipping thousands of Commodore 64 desktops daily. Guinness has named it the single biggest-selling computer ever—the company sold as many as 17 million of them—and the brand name is still widely remembered. Still, the company went bankrupt in 1994, and the brand saw several fuzzy changes of trademark ownership over the years.

Now it's appearing on a smartphone created by a pair of Italian entrepreneurs. It's called the PET—sharing its name with Commodore's other iconic PC—and its custom Android build includes two emulators so owners can enjoy old C64 and Amiga games.

Rumors have swirled around the phone for months, driven in part by design renders published online. With its release imminent, I met with the guys behind it and tried out a prototype. Perhaps the biggest question: how a company that folded two decades ago can release a new product.

That's a long, strange tale.
Ancient History

Jack Tramiel founded Commodore International in 1954 in Toronto. After launching the PET in 1977 and following up with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, he left. The company slowly withered and folded in 1994. A buyer snapped up its assets, including 47 patents related to the company's Amiga line, but the Commodore trademark changed hands several times. In 1996, the German PC conglomerate that owned the rights to it filed for bankruptcy, and the Commodore name bounced around some more, going through two more bankruptcies. Two years ago, a federal court ruled that the trademark belonged to Commodore Holdings B.V., a Dutch company that has been silent ever since.
commodore-1Click to Open Overlay Gallery
WIRED

That's where things stood until March, when Massimo Canigiani and Carlo Scattolini registered Commodore Business Machines Limited in the UK. The Italian entrepreneurs claim to have acquired rights for the brand and trademark in the mobile industry in 38 countries, including the US.

This isn't the first time Commodore has risen from the dead. Five years ago, an American company called Commodore USA released the C64x, an all-in-one PC sporting an Intel Atom processor, Nvidia Ios2 graphics, 4GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage, and a Blu-Ray reader. Nostalgia and retro gaming weren't enough, however, and Commodore USA shut down in 2013.
Meet the New PET

The new Commodore PET is an Android phone of rather common design. It is well-built, with an aluminum frame and interchangeable polycarbonate covers. The shell displays a big C= logo, and a smaller one could replace the home button below the 5.5-inch IPS 1920×1080 pixel resolution display made of Gorilla Glass 3.

The phone will feature a 1.7 GHz Mediatek 64-bit octa-core processor with ARM Mali T760 GPU and a huge 3000 mAh battery. The main camera uses a 13-megapixel Sony sensor with a bright f/2.0 aperture. It can make images up to 4096×2304 pixels, and videos up to 1080p HD. The front camera is an 8-megapixel rig with an 80-degree wide angle lens. Both can be operated with the dedicated shutter button on the right side of the case. The PET has dual-SIM 4G connectivity.
commodore-3Click to Open Overlay Gallery
WIRED

Other custom functions I spotted include a nice implementation of Daydream (the Android feature that lets you chose what information appears on the display during charging), and system gestures that let you interact with the phone by shaking it, flipping it, or waving at it. And of course there will be a guest mode.
A Classic Arcade in Your Hand

Although nostalgia is not the core of the product, there is of course room for retro gaming. The Commodore PET runs a custom version of Android 5.0 Lollipop and two preinstalled emulators. They weren't finished on the prototype I used, but I'm told they'll be customized versions of the VICE C64 emulator and the Uae4All2-SDL Amiga emulator. The team also is working with unnamed software houses to bring some of the 1980's best games on the PET before shipping.

When it launches later this week across Europe, the Commodore PET should come in two different versions, a light one (costing around $300) with 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM, and a regular one (costing around $365) with 32GB of internal memory and 3GB of RAM. Both will have a 32-gig microSD card included—though the dedicated slot will support cards up to 64GB, too. Users can choose a white, black, or classic biscuit-beige case, though I'm told green, blue, and other colors might be added.

Initially, the PET will be available in Italy, France, Germany, and Poland, with plans to add more countries in Europe and America in the near future. It's an inarguably niche device, but at the very least proves that technological nostalgia is an incredible—and very cool—thing.

Reprizirao sam THE NEW CENTURIONS Richarda Fleischera, ekranizaciju romana Josepha Wambaugha, prvo njegovo značajno pojavljivanje u bioskopima. Ovaj film je po mnogo čemu značajan, između ostalog i zato što je doneo jedan novi, realističniji, crnohumorniji senzibilitet u prikazu svakodnevice policajaca. Ovu formulu kasnije su doveli do savršenstva neki drugi filmovi poput FORT APACHE, THE BRONX pa sve do END OF WATCH, ali THE NEW CENTURIONS stoji kao jedna od preteča.

Scenario Stirlinga Siliphanta i nepotpisanog Roberta Townea nudi razbraušenu adaptaciju Wambaughovog romana koja u jednom trenutku počinje da deluje proizvoljno, ali Stacy Keach i George C. Scott u glavnim ulogama uz Fleischerovu dosta efikasnu režiju čine da se film nekako sklopi u celinu. Ipak, postoji niz digresija snažne znakovitosti koje ostaju nerazrešene i to predstavlja ozbiljan problem.

Neke od životnih stvari koje film prikazuje u međuvremenu su postale kliše, recimo veza policajca i medicinske sestre (FORT APACHE THE BRONX, STREET KINGS npr.) zatim ubistvo nedužnog prolaznika samo zato što je pogrešne rase (FORT APACHE THE BRONX) ili spasavanje beba od roditelja-alkoholičara/ narkomana/ psihotičara (END OF WATCH). Film se dotiče i proskribovane homoseksualnosti (FORT APACHE THE BRONX) i niza drugih pitanja.

Iako su sve ove teme kasnije bile bolje i efektnije razrađivane, THE NEW CENTURIONS ima poseban značaj u istoriji žanra, naročito jer nije imao previše naslova na koje se mogao osloniti. Otud iako mu je domet * * 1/2 zaslužuje ocenu za istorijski značaj. Koga zanima evolucija žanra, svakako treba da ga pogleda, ostali će imati više sreće sa nekim od naslova koje sam nabrojao.

* * * / * * * *

In arguably the strangest news of the day, German news outlets are reporting that the head of famed filmmaker and "Nosferatu" director F.W. Murnau has been stolen from his grave.

Murnau died in 1931 in a car crash with his body buried in his family plot in a cemetery in Stahnsdorf, Germany. Today, it seems grave robbers opened his metal coffin to access his body, but left the nearby graves of his two brothers undisturbed. Wax residue at the scene has been suggested to be a possible occult connection.

"Nosferatu," released in 1922, was silent vampire movie and unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula". It remains one of the most famous early cinematic works ever made and was the subject of its own film in 2000's "Shadow of the Vampire" which starred John Malkovich as Murnau.

ovi germani totalno šiznuli

I dalje verujem da je veliki gubitak za srpski film to što Milutin Petrović nije ozbiljnije pokušao da se angažuje unutar nečega što bih kolokvijalno nazvao mejnstrim filmom. Svaki njegov film je pokazao da je reč o reditelju koji ima dara za filmsko izražavanje, poznaje formu i ume da se njom poigrava. Otud je šteta što toliki dar nije realizovan u nekom ostvarenju koje bi moglo privući gledaoce, ispričati priču itd.

PETLJA je celovečernji art-film nastao metodom pabirčenja , od eksperimentalnog filma PETLJA koji je pre neku godinu dobio sredstva od FCSa i filma o Ljubomiru Šimuniću EXPRECIOUS DREAMS koji je Milutin Petrović snimio po scenariju koji je napisao sa Dušanom Cicvarom. Ipak, među svojim saborcima iz pogreta Garažni film, Petrović je uspeo da ode najdalje u pogledu atraktivnosti filma koji snima, i šavovi po kojima se spavaju dva filma, gotovo da se ne osećaju.

Kudikamo, najbolji delovi PETLJE i jesu oni u kojima se integriše EXPRECIOUS DREAMS odnosno oni u kojima PETLJA zaliči na taj film. Što se film odmiče dalje od teme voajerizma, Šimunićevih fetiša, preplitanja realnosti, novog filma i kinotečkih klasika, stvarnosti i fikcije, to postaje slabiji i šteta je što tih "slabih deonica" ipak ima dosta i što je kvalitet filma neravnomeran naprosto zato što su kadriranje, estetizacija, pa i gluma u pojedinim delovima znatno angažovaniji nego u drugim.

Isto važi i za idejno polje, film je mnogo bolje kada mistifikuje Šimunića, njegov rad, voajerizam, erotiku nego kada pokušava da se okrene društvenoj kritici koja u ovako eksplicitnoj formi deluje potpuno deplasirano. Štaviše, sam film čini sve da uvuče gledaoce u svet inspirisan Šimunićem i njegovim inspiracijama u rasponu od Hitchcocka do Russa Meyera, i sve što pokušava da aludira na bajata viđenja nših društvenih problema, od nedovoljnog poštovanja za umetnike do umešanosti tajnih službi u naš javni život, izgleda suvišno i bolno banalno.

Čak se i sam film u jednom trenutku pobuni protiv toga. Dok u svom najboljem delu, Petrović prati Šimunićevu voajersku estetiku u kojoj žene nikada nisu sasvim obnažene, sunovrat u disertaciju o DBu i ostalim glupostima uključuje upravo potpuno golu glavnu glumicu. Kada glumica postane potpuno gola, kao i da ceo film izlazi iz svega onoga što ga je dotle činilo zanimljivim.

U pogledu autorske intervencije na materijalu, PETLJA je sasvim sigurno film zarobljen u osamdesetim i najviše podseća na underground naslove iz tog perioda, a u najboljim delovima uspeva da postigne i njihovu fakturu slike, mada prečesto deluje elektronski oštro što smeta opštem utisku, naročito jer nas film u više navrata podseća da je snimanje na filmu Šimunićeva specijalnost. Dakle, u pojedinim delovima, PETLJI nedostaje taj celuloidni look.

Nažalost, ovaj apartni pogled na film danas teško da može imati jaču internacionalnu eksploataciju jer naprosto tako nešto nije u trendu a mi smo prevelika periferija da bi diktirali trendove pa bih rekao da bi se PETLJA morala zadovoljiti nastupima na srpskim festivalima, ali isto tako možda i na Grossmanu koji gaji nostalgiju prema pajkićevskim osamdesetim kojim ovaj rad definitivno pripada.

Iza svega ipak ostaje potreba za pričom. Vrlo je zanimljiva zavisnost PETLJE od priče čime se definitivno odmiče od onoga što bi eksperimentalni film trbalo da nosi. No, pošto ovo nije taj eksperimentalni film koji je najavljivan već nešto drugo, čini mi se da u njemu eksperiment ne treba ni tražiti.

Potreba za pričom pokazuje da se u Petroviću iza svega krije reditelj koji uprkos svom underground angažmanu, ipak teži naraciji, i zato se ne može do kraja odrediti da li je ovo pravi art ili ipak samo hendikepirani loopy mejnstrim.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

Pogledao sam ANT-MAN Peytona Reeda. Ova Marvelova ekranizacija stiže sa negativnom reputacijom zbog otpuštanja Edgara Wrighta jer nije hteo da se uklopi u konvenciju MCU. Ipak, dolazi i sa pozitivnom predrasudom zbog činjenice da je film režirao Peyton Reed, potpisnik nekoliko odličnih filmova među kojima je remek-delo DOWN WITH LOVE.

Peyton Reed se ovim filmom vraća korenima, počecima, on je krenuo radeći goofy rimejke goofy Disneyevih filmova za televiziju i ANT-MAN je upravo to, deo Marvelove franšize koja vraća Dinsey u okvire filmova za ne naročito zahtevnu decu.

Međutim, iako nije Edgar Wright i prihvata rediteljsku konvenciju MCU koja vonja po televiziji, naročito u scenama dijaloga, Reed ipak uspeva da uspešno nasledi deo zaostavštine koju su ostavili Edgar Wright i Joe Cornish kao scenaristi. Za početak, Wright i Cornish su postavili ANT-MAN kao film koji ima likove, priču i zaokruženost, iako se putem određenih kopči naravno ugrađuje u MCU. Zatim, film su pogurali u pravcu Amblina, sa porodicom u centru pažnje koja je ugrožena razvodom i može se obnoviti očevim podvigom. Kod Spielberga doduše, obično to radi dete.

Reed je reditelj visoke vizuelne kulture što se u ovom filmu paradoksalno ne oseća u onoj meri u kojoj bi trebalo. S druge strane, on nije reditelj akcionih filmova i zato ANT-MAN ne upada u amok Marvelovih filmova u kojima second unit preuzme uzde i snima nešto svoje, potpuno drugačije od onoga što radi unit sa glumcima. ANT-MAN je u tom smislu koherentan film, za koji se vidi da ga je radila jedna uigrana ekipa saradnika. Akcione scene su zanimljive ali su duhovite i pomalo goofy, taman onoliko da se oseti Reedov pečat.

ANT-MAN je takođe throwback osamdesetih kao i GUARDIANS samo što je ipak malo orignalniji.

Kad je reč o scenariju, ovo je origin story i u tom pogledu ima sličan problem kao IRON MAN, dakle glavni konflikt krene prekasno, film propisno ni "ne počne" sve do polovine, premda zapravo treba da defiišemo koji element priče zapravo čini ono što treba da počne. Ako je to konflikt sa negativcem, film "počinje" kasno ali ako je pretvaranje Scotta Langa osnovna tema, onda počinje na vreme. Rečju, ovo je film koji je više origin story nego što ima fokus na duel dva junaka - premda, funkcioniše zaokruženo.

Paul Rudd kanališe B-verziju Bena Afflecka i ponekad se zapitam koliko bi film bio bolji da je mao harizmatičnihjeg glumca u glavnoj ulozi. Rudd kao i Reed, nije akcioni tip i to je OK, ali za nijansu je previše bled u odnosu na zahteve priče. isto važi i za Evangeline Lilly. Dok je ona priličan promašaj u podeli, inače nasleđen od Edgara Wrighta, Rudd je na granici, korektan ali je mogao biti i bolji. Michael Douglas se zbabio ali je naravno u odnosu na sve ostale glumce u filmu tata u svakom pogledu.

ANT-MAN ima razne vidove stagnacije u sebi, ali kada mu se odbije deo na uravnilovku koju nameće MCU, plus kada se konstatuje da je u drugim deonicama zaista vrlo simpatičan, i da je za razliku od GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (koji je bogatiji, duhovitiji i bolji ukupno uzev) uspeo da pevaziđe problem tankog negativca, onda mogu reći da je reč o naslovu koji ostavlja bolji utisak od onoga što su mu zaista fundamentalne vrednosti.

* * * / * * * *

WTF. U Foksu malo odlijepili. Juče je prikazano kako će izgledati Apocalypse u X-Men: Age of Apocalypse i zaista je teško reći išta sem "Prvi April je prošao, rođaci, a za sledeći ste mnogo poranili". Pogotovo mi je ovo nejasno posle ipak relativno srećnog dizajna kostima i maske u Days of Future Past...

Da ne pominjem da izgleda kao Ivan Ooze iz Moćnih Rendžera...



Podsećanja radi:

Ami Canaan Mann, kćer velikog Michaela, posle filma u kome je anticipirala TRUE DETECTIVE, pre nego što će u drugoj sezoni TRUE DETECTIVE postati još direktnije dužan njenoj porodici, napravila je zanimljiv zaokret u karijeri sa filmom JACKIE AND RYAN. Njen treći film je vrlo konvencionalna starovremska melodrama smeštena u američku provinciju i govori o train-hopping filk kantautoru koji luta amerikom da bi mu se odjednom desila jedna od ključnih mitema holivudskog vesterna, ljubav sa samohranom majkom, olakšana time što majku igra Katherine Heigl, i što je nekada bila country pevačia sa diskografskim ugovorom koja se posle propasti cele industrije povukla.

JACKIE AND RYAN je drugačiji od uobičajenih melodrama smeštenih u američku unutrašnjost koje mahom dolaze sa indie scene, naprosto zato što sve što ne može da proizvede globalni plasman biva gurnuto u indie. JACKIE AND RYAN je u svom postupku vrlo mejnstrim i baš zato danas deluje kao nešto bliže televiziji nego bioskopu.

Susret sa ovom vrstom filma koji ne samo da je vrsta u izumiranju, već je odavno istrebljen, a bio je okosnica kinematografije sedamdesetih pa i osamdesetih je prijatan i nostalgičan, ali JACKIE AND RYAN naprosto nije taj film koji bi mogao da oživi ovu vrstu melodrame.

U ovom filmu ništa nije naročito slabo, ali je malo šta i impresivno izuzev odlično postavljenog početka, naročito u rediteljskom pogledu. Otud, ovaj film se mahom kreće predelima korektnog, a to nažalost u ovoj inflaciji ponude naprosto nije dovoljno.

Na kraju, ostaje pitanje da li je i mogućnost recepcije ovakvog filma poremećena estetikom ekscesa, gde su i komercijalnost, i hermetičnost, i i artizam i emocije obično dovedeni do ekscesa. Tim pre JACKIE AND RYAN deluje kao film koji najbolju sudninu može imati na malom ekranu.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

Pogledao Antmana. Objektivno, ne naročito sjajan film, ali solidan "mali" superherojski film. Prijatno je da za promenu u filmu nemamo apokaliptični scenario u toku (već samo u najavi) i da je sveden na opipljivije međuljudske odnose koji nose sukobe i strasti. Naravno, ima mu se mnogo toga za zameriti - od šematizovanog scenarija preko bezličnog negativca do mnogo neuspelih humorističkih spizoda, ali kao film koji treba da prenese duh Antmena na veliko platno, dobro se okoristio izvornim materijalom, prokleo je plauzibilnost da bi slavio duh naučne avanture i dao nam onaj devil may care šmek superherojštine iz vremena kada je susret dvojice superheroja iz različitih stripova u kojima su obojica pozitivci neizostavno morao da znači tuču. Plus, Majkl Daglas potpuno investiran u ulogu (za razliku od uzdržanijeg Redforda u Winter Soldieru), Evanđelina Lili solidna, Majkl Penja dobar mada je uloga malo uvredljivo očigledan etnički komik rilif, tako da je Pol Rad zapravo najmanje ubedljiv član ansambla koji do kraja filma ne zna da li da ode full retard i kanališe Krisa Prata iz Gardijansa ili da se drži ozbiljnije antiherojske drame. Zadovoljan sam i rado ću ga reprizirati kad stigne na HBO naredne godine.

Chris Pratt je klasa iznad Rudda u Marvelovom univerzumu. Ovo je granični slučaj.

http://www.princip.info/2015/07/18/ekonomija-severne-koreje-raste-brze-od-evrozone/#

Trejler za slovenačko DOBA NEVINOSTI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWAlqiaHr7s&feature=youtu.be

Izbori u Demokratskoj Narodnoj Republici Koreji veoma posećeni:


North Korea Elections Achieve 99.97% Turnout

QuoteNorth Korea's state-controlled elections saw a 99.97% voter turnout on Sunday, with only those absent from the country not participating, state media reported.
Almost the entire country reportedly made it to the polls, including the elderly and ill, who cast their votes through "mobile ballot boxes" for uncontested candidates carefully selected by the ruling party.
North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, who exercises complete control over the country's 24.9 million citizens, was also seen casting his ballot in the capital, Pyongyang.
The elections were Mr Kim's first at a local level since he inherited the position in 2011, with voters reportedly  "singing and dancing" as they cast their vote at polling stations "clad in a festive atmosphere".
Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said: "All participants took part in the elections with extraordinary enthusiasm to cement the revolutionary power through the elections of deputies to the local people's assemblies".
Local elections are held every four years and voters choose mayors, local assemblies and governors, who meet twice a year to approve budgets and endorse leaders that have been approved by the ruling party.
In the 2011 elections, which also saw a 99.97% voter participation rate, 28,116 representatives were elected as deputies without a single vote of opposition.
Ballot papers only present one candidate to choose from, which has been overseen by Mr Kim's Workers' Party, and any dissenting votes are considered acts of treason.
The elections have been denounced as an effort by North Korea to appear democratic, but are also an opportunity for the government to see if any established names are absent and to oust any dissident behaviour.
South Korean intelligence says that dozens of North Korean officials have been purged since Mr Kim took power in 2011, including his once powerful uncle, Jang Song-Thaek, who was condemned as "factionalist scum" following his execution in 2013.
The results of the election are expected to be officially announced early next week.

Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention

QuoteAdvertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.
Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
Expensively trained human attention is the fuel of twenty-first century capitalism. We are allowing a single industry to slash and burn vast amounts of this productive resource in search of a quick buck.
1. A classic market failure The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good - access to your attention - doesn't reflect its full social cost.
Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, bill-board operators, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - namely, how easy it is for you to escape their predations. This is often much lower than the value to you, or to others, of directing your attention to something else.
Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced. We are all continuously swamped by attempts to distract us from what we actually want to do - like watch a movie or listen to a song - with messages we don't want or need. Being constantly addressed in this way changes how we think and behave: it makes us harried and irritable, and we try to cope by closing ourselves off from the world and each other.
It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good. Taken moment by moment it is a finite resource, like a sandwich, whose consumption by any party means that other parties can't consume it, including the person themselves (rivalrous). At the same time, our current institutions make it difficult for any party to prevent others from consuming it (non-excludable). Our attention is a valuable commodity and a vast number of businesses are determined to dig it out of us and sell it before someone else does.
2. Why now? Advertising is an old racket, but these days it feels as if we are almost drowning in its insidious manipulative bullshit - inside novels, in airplanes, on concert tickets, on poor-people's foreheads, on eggs in grocery stores, on public trash cans, on the inside and outside of public buses, in police cells and on police cars, on the back of toilet doors, inside newspaper "articles" and on and on and on. Why is this so? A number of reasons suggest themselves.
First, as we have become more wealthy our consumption decisions have become more valuable. People can now be induced to pay much more for a carefully branded and positioned beer product than the competitive market price of the mere commodity of "beer." We desire and can afford a more interesting consumption experience. As a result, supernormal profits are available to those who can persuade consumers to buy their version of beer. Of course, economics wins in the long run: the promise of those supernormal profits both attracts competitors and finances increased spending on advertising to compete to attract customers' attention until economic profits fall back towards zero. But in the meantime, a vast quantity of advertising has been produced.
Second, a shift in social norms has made it more acceptable to sell other people's attention. Increased prices have spurred the development of a sophisticated market for our attention, together with an entire industrial sector of attention miners. Anyone in a position to access our attention, like the managers of pubs or hockey arenas, will be approached by multiple companies offering to pay a fee to install their advertising screens, banners, or cookies.
Advertising has become harder to ignore. Advertisers can hunt us more assiduously and individually as we browse the internet, their banner ads and pop-ups following us around no matter where we go.
Simultaneous to the appearance of this new opportunity for rentier profits has come a weakening of our moral constraints against exploiting this kind of power over people. Whether you call it neo-liberalism or something else, we are certainly living under the domination of a cult of market individualism. The result is not only that it has become morally acceptable to sell off other people's attention without their consent in the name of free market economics. But, in addition, anyone who refuses to do so is considered an economic idiot - someone who leaves money on the table. If she is an agent for the owners, like the manager of a city's public bus fleet, then she is guilty of neglecting her moral duty as a trustee to secure and advance their financial interests.
Thirdly, technology has made advertising even more intrusive. Not only is it now possible to print advertisements on grocery store eggs and to put digital displays above pub urinals. The digital age has added an extra level of exploitation. Every moment we spend on the internet or with our smart phones is being captured, repackaged and sold to advertisers multiple times. Advertisers (and other third parties like credit rating agencies) will pay a great deal for our profiles because the better they know us the greater the effectiveness of their advertising. That's another way of saying that their advertising becomes harder to ignore. They can hunt us more assiduously and individually as we browse the internet, their banner ads and pop-ups following us around no matter where we go.
3. Counter-counter arguments: How economists defend advertising and why it isn't enough The existence of the advertising industry poses something of a challenge to the ideology of free market economics since it seems to go against the principles of consumer sovereignty and consumer welfare (efficiency). Two justifications are prominent in the defence of advertising. First, that it is directly valuable for consumers because it communicates valuable information. Second, that it funds universal access to "club goods" (like television shows and internet services) whose production is socially valued but would otherwise not be financially viable. There is some merit to both of these, but I think they are far from sufficient.
3.1. The direct value of advertising Several mechanisms are usually appealed to at this point by economists. First, that advertising gives consumers valuable information about the sellers and prices of products they want to buy. The favoured example here is the classified ads section in newspapers. This saves consumers the attention it would have cost to do their own research and encourages producers to compete more strongly on price, thereby allowing consumers to make more efficient purchasing choices.
Perhaps it was the case in 1961 that consumers struggled to find such information for themselves. But it is hard to see how this can still be the case in the internet age, where price comparison websites centralise such information in a far more convenient format than billboards and classified ads. (Incidentally, this is something which many companies resist, for example, by deliberately offering complex and non-comparable service packages.)
This argument also seems to neglect the fact that information has costs as well as benefits, especially when you consider the difference between publishing information for consumers to find and advertising as we know it. Advertisements do not concern what the consumer is interested in finding out, but what the producer wants to sell. That is why producers pay to access consumers rather than the other way round.
Advertising can be used to reduce competition: high spending by rich established players drowns out information from smaller newer competitors and thus creates an entry barrier, converting markets to oligopolies. And advertisements are deliberately constructed to manipulate consumers rather than to inform them, by exploiting our cognitive biases with misleading headline prices, statistical fallacies and so on (behavioural economics research has been very influential here). Heavy processing by consumers, and often further research, is required to make this "free" information usable for decision-making.
Second is the counter-intuitive claim that brands communicate their trustworthiness by their conspicuous expenditure on advertising not by what it actually says. When considering which version of the generic washing machine to buy, the rational consumer has to weigh up lots of claims about quality against the objective fact of price. If a brand can demonstrate that its quality claims are credible that makes the consumer's decision much less of a gamble. Like banks housed in grand marbled buildings, companies which pour vast amounts of money into advertising campaigns must be supremely confident about the quality of their products and its long-term sales. Otherwise they couldn't afford to burn so much money on ridiculous Super Bowl ads.
In effect, advertising tries to do our practical reasoning for us, shaping and ordering our inchoate desires into actionable preferences for specific products. But will buying those things really make us happy?
This argument rather reminds me of John Maynard Keynes's suggestion that in a recession caused by a collapse of aggregate demand one could solve the problem by burying bottles filled with bank notes and then leaving it to private enterprise to dig them up again. Once again, it is not that this argument makes no sense at all, but that it takes no account of opportunity cost - the fact that we have better options. As Keynes put it, "It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
Companies wanting to demonstrate their confidence in their products don't have to waste so much of our time to do so. There are all sorts of more constructive ways of spending money conspicuously. For example, any large company these days has enormous discretion over its effective tax rate. A company prepared to pay billions more in tax than it can get away with must be very confident of itself and could communicate that fact to customers by publishing it prominently on its products. Or, to reassure customers of its very long-term viability, it could switch to a defined benefits pension system for its employees. Or it could give large amounts of money directly to hospitals and schools and publish its philanthropy as a proportion of revenue - perhaps it could make this specific to a certain product by promising to donate the first $50 million in sales.
Third, is the social status that advertising can confer on a product and its consumption. What's the point of buying a Rolex or Mercedes unless the people around you know that it is expensive and are able to appreciate how rich and successful you must be? The business logic here is sound, but not the moral logic. After all, what this comes down to is that these companies deliberately waste the attention of the 99% of the population who can't afford their products just so those who do buy them can bask in the knowledge that everyone knows the price of what they are wearing and driving. Such advertising constitutes a regressive tax imposed on the rest of us by luxury brands in order to increase the value of their products to rich people.
There is one further argument that occurs to me although I haven't seen it made by economists: that advertising creates value by spinning a story around a brand that customers want to buy into. They turn a mundane commodity item, like shoes or a computer, into a choice of lifestyle and a means to further your conception of the good. A kid puts on a cape and imagines herself a crime-fighting superhero. This is a crude version of the socially sustained illusions that adults can build our whole lives around and which are nowadays sculpted, in part, by advertisers. Their products become an end worth pursuing in themselves, rather than merely a means.
I think the fashioning of these illusions - turning clothes into fashion; turning food into health; turning diamonds into love - is the most significant way that advertising creates economic value, as real as the transformation of steel into a car or cotton into cloth. But I am dubious of the worth of its achievement. In effect, advertising tries to do our practical reasoning for us, shaping and ordering our inchoate desires into actionable preferences for specific products. But will buying those things really make us happy?
3.2. Financing public goods Advertising is the financial model for many pure public goods like terrestrial television and radio, as well as club goods like newspapers, Google's search/email and Facebook. These are goods that tend to have very low variable costs - meaning the cost of serving an extra individual is almost nothing. The socially optimal level of production is universal access at the marginal cost of zero. Yet there are still significant fixed costs that must be recouped if producing it is to be financially sustainable. In cases of pure public goods, it is implausible to charge individuals for access.
In cases of clubbable goods, one could take a subscription approach, but its transaction costs might raise the price well above the profit maximising price. In addition, the profit-maximising price of a subscription will exclude most people from access (the path chosen by the academic publishing and pharmaceutical industries), meaning a deadweight loss in social welfare.
Advertising provides an alternative revenue source that makes it possible to profitably provide such services universally at the marginal cost of production - that is, zero. Advertising thus solves a problem the invisible hand couldn't reach and thereby makes us collectively much better off.
Of course, advertising is only one solution to the problem of financing club goods. There are alternatives. If these things are so valuable to society there is a case for supporting them from with taxes - grants, license fees (many national broadcasters) or payments for ratings. This is a well-established system for funding public and club goods. Taxes have their own inefficiencies of course, as well as some unfairness in requiring people to pay for services they don't use (the childless paying for schools, urbanites subsidising rural bus routes, smokers contributing to pension funds and so on). But the negative costs of advertising are arguably worse, and harder to bring under public scrutiny.
Why could we not have a democratic Facebook? Would this not be superior from a social welfare perspective to the current farming model of extracting maximum value from its members-cum-livestock?
However, the main challenge to this argument is that maximising profitability is a business economics rather than an economics concern. The level of advertising in a product - such as a magazine you thought you had already paid for - is not calibrated to the requirements of financial viability. It is just another source of revenue to be maximised. Google makes $60 billion a year from advertising; Facebook something like $10 billion. These figures bear no relation to the cost of providing the services that their consumers value. They are best understood as rents, payments that accrue to agents simply because of their privileged access to a scarce resource: our attention. Many for profit companies are forced to rely on advertising only in the sense that it is their best strategy to maximise profits and that is what they exist to do.
Alternative models, like that of Wikipedia, are sometimes possible and are more socially - that is, economically - efficient. Wikipedia's value to consumers is in the hundreds of billions of dollars while its annual operating costs are only $25 million. If Wikipedia were fully to exploit its advertising potential it would realise revenues of several billion dollars per year. But it clearly doesn't actually need to do that - its annual pledge drive is quite sufficient.
Obviously Wikipedia's operating costs are so low, like Mozilla's, because of its volunteer labour force. But that fact just makes one wonder why we couldn't have a "democratic" Facebook too, and whether that would not be superior from a social welfare perspective to the current "farming model" of extracting maximum value from its members-cum-livestock.
4. The right to preserve our attention Advertising is a valuable commercial opportunity for businesses with access to consumers' attention, or their personal information. For the companies that buy and sell our attention it is - as all voluntary transactions must be - a win-win. But advertising lacks the free market efficiency that is claimed for it. Advertising is made artificially cheap, like the output of a coal burning power station, because the price at which it is sold doesn't reflect its negative effects on third parties - us.
Defenders of advertising, including economists, point out that it has positive side-effects for consumers, including price competition and the funding of universal services like Facebook, Google and broadcast and online journalism. But their calculations generally neglect the costs to consumers' welfare of an excessive amount of advertising, and the possibility of alternative funding systems like taxes (the BBC) and philanthropy (Wikipedia). The problem is not just that particular adverts are annoying and distracting and exploit our inability to escape, but the cumulative effect of having to wade through an endless stream of sugar coated crap.
It is not impossible to bring advertising back under control, but we will need more than one lever.
First, we should reinvigorate social norms and legal rules against the excessive exploitation of our attention. We should carve out large spaces - "attention preserves" - which would be off-limits to advertisers (starting with restrooms). There are already some privatised attention preserves, like Facebook or newspapers, which prevent a free for all tragedy of the commons by farming their users, limiting the depredations of advertisers to just below unsustainable levels by quasi-government fiat. A real government fiat could solve the tragedy of the commons without treating us as farm animals.
We should also put particular restrictions on the most distracting forms of advertising, with sounds or moving images. In some contexts, these are a public nuisance on the order of cars without mufflers. And we should restore the principle that we should give at least tacit consent to advertising, meaning that we could realistically exercise our notional right to exit. That means certain physical spaces should be out of bounds, such as airplanes or police cells or schools. In digital space it means that ad-blocking technologies should be generally available and legal.
What is needed is an effective property-rights regime that gives individuals the right to control where we direct our attention, and thereby bring the market price of this modern commodity in line with its true market value. Advertisers should pay us, not third parties.
Second, in some spaces we should embrace the ethic of market fundamentalism and then demand that advertising conform to it. The reason advertising is artificially cheap is that no one has to ask our permission to advertise at us. We are involved in the transaction only as the commodity that is being bought and sold, and therefore the value of our attention to us - the opportunity cost of being distracted and interrupted by all those self-serving spam messages - does not determine its price.
Instead, the market price for our attention is just the cost of digging it out of us. That's the difference between the price of conscript labour and free labour. From this perspective, the problem is that our property rights regime does not reflect the ideal of consumer sovereignty at the heart not only of mainstream (neoclassical) economics theory but also the political ideology of market fundamentalism that actually determines economic policy.
What is needed is an effective property-rights regime that gives individuals the right to control where we direct our attention, and thereby bring the market price of this modern commodity in line with its true market value. Advertisers should pay us, not third parties. If you could assert your property rights to your attention, you could sell it at a price that reflects its value to you. If advertisers had to negotiate directly with you, or at least your software agent, then they would have to start paying a price that would not leave you feeling violated. And at that price they would want to buy much less of your attention than they do at present.
Capitalism being the wonder that it is, there are already some companies trying to make a business model out of this, like Fluence. The increasing popularity of ad-blocking software is also leading some internet companies, such as the Guardian, to offer alternatives.
Third, we should reconsider more socially efficient ways of funding services that can be scaled up at almost zero cost. This is particularly important now, because zero marginal cost is what the internet is all about. Access to these digital services shouldn't depend entirely on the dominant commercial models of advertising versus subscriptions. Journalism, for example, is too important to be reduced to "clickbait" and abject dependence on Facebook and Apple. Other industries, like academic publishing, use a subscription model that excludes a vast proportion of possible readers at the profit maximising price.
From an economics perspective, this is idiocy. We are leaving social value on the table. We should be looking for alternatives, whether different funding models (like micro-payments, or a spotify for books and academic journals, or citizen voucher systems); different funding sources (like pledge drives and taxes); and different economic structures imposed by governments (such as restrictions on third party sales of your information, or democratising the governance of large social media companies like Facebook).
5. Summing up Terrestrial television probably presents the best known example of the economic - and moral - case for advertising. It is the model many people immediately think of when this issue is raised. Other funding sources - taxes or pledge drives - come with their own limitations and don't have an obvious superiority. Consumers have easy exit rights, so their choice of how much to watch more or less tracks their personal level of dislike for advertising. Although consumers are not the customers of television companies, they therefore have substantial influence over the transaction, and the quid pro quo for them is transparent.
But most advertising nowadays doesn't look like that. Advertising is just another revenue stream to be maximised by those with access to our attention. Whether it requires our tacit consent or a quid pro quo is entirely contingent. Since we are not formally - that is, legally - part of the transaction, our influence over its terms declines in proportion to our inability to escape it.
For example, lots of companies sell you things, and then go on to sell your attention (and all the information they can glean about you) to other companies as well. Like movie theatres, live sports events, cable television, airlines and so on. The digital subscription I bought from The Economist feeds me the same advert for the same MBA programme every couple of pages - a level of crassness that demonstrates just how low these companies value the attention even of their paying customers. It is hard to believe that advertising is about providing information to aid rational economic agents make decisions. Advertising to children in America has increased more than 150 fold since the early 1980s, especially inside schools where the audience is captive.
Things that we find valuable and are quintessentially our own are being stripped away from us without our consent or adequate compensation.
Our right to preserve our own attention and to make our own decisions about how we spend it and with whom our personal information is shared must become part of the political agenda. We need a legal and policy response to the market failures of the advertising industry, and we need it soon.
As long as either our attention or our personal information is traded by third parties in markets that do not incorporate their value to us, they will tend to be underpriced and used in ways that are both against our wishes and detrimental to our well-being. That meets the definition of exploitation. Things that we find valuable and are quintessentially our own are being stripped away from us without our consent or adequate compensation.
The state of the advertising industry is a gift to critics of capitalism as a whole, like Naomi Klein or Michael Sandel. And they have a point. Our expensively university trained attention is the central productive resource of the twenty-first century. It's what all those shiny digital services and promises about the internet of things are ultimately made out of. If we don't own this resource then it belongs to no one and everyone - in other words, to whoever can grab it and marketise it first. This is the set up for a tragedy of the commons.
Thomas Wells is a philosopher based in Rotterdam. He blogs at The Philosopher's Beard. This is a significantly revised and extended version of an essay that appeared on 3 Quarks Daily.

Pogledao sam GLADIATORERNA Petera Watkinsa, pseudo-dokumenatarac o futurističkom svetu, jako sličnom tadašnjem, u kome su velike sile odlučile da umesto ratova naprave reality show u kome će se nadmetati njihove vojne formacije u "malim kontrolisanim ratovima". Iako nisu za poređenje, uostalom GLADIATORERNA je film iz 1969. neporedivo sam više uživao u filmu ROBOT JOX koji je Stuart Gordon snimio na istu temu. Možda je to zato što sam infantilni ljubitelj žanrovskog filma, a možda i zato što je GLADIATORERNA nažalost preopterećen opštim mestima i ni na koji način ne uspeva da nadgradi ni svoj pripovedački postupak, ni svoju narativnu, ali ni ideološku premisu. Dvadeset godina kasnije Gordon je snimio B-film u kome je tu istu premisu odveo mnogo dalje, za početak, plasiravši je u formi SF šunda, i obraćajući se publici kojoj bi zapravo možda neka politička pouka i bila potrebna, na određeni način secirajući i populizam i populističke filmske forme.

Watkins ne ide nikuda sa svojom premisom, i svaki iskorak samo devalvira ono što je zanimljivo u samom početku. Cronenbergov redovni saradnik Peter Suschitsky je slikao ovaj film i fotografija je jedan od najpristojnijih elemenata ove produkcije. Naravno, dozvoljavam da je GLADIATORERNA verovatno bio prava senzacija kada je izašao 1969. godine kada je pobedio i na tršćanskom festivalu fantastike.

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Navodno ovo je zvanični tviter nalog severnokorejskih vlasti na engleskom jeziku:


https://twitter.com/uriminzok_engl

Odmah da se ogradim, nemam veze sa njim

By Jeremy Smith

When Peyton Reed landed the ANT-MAN directing gig, no one was more surprised than me. The moment Edgar Wright left the project, which he'd been writing (with Joe Cornish) and preparing to direct since 2006, I wondered how anyone could walk on and, I assumed, trash the wonderful superhero movie Wright had spent nearly eight years developing. I believed Marvel had done Wright remarkably dirty, and shared this opinion with many of my friends – one of whom was Peyton Reed. For a day or so, Peyton and I speculated as to which "poor sap" (Peyton's words) might take on this unenviable task, and whether they could possibly salvage the project. Then I caught wind that Adam McKay was in talks to replace Wright, and I had a slight change of heart. Given his history with ANT-MAN star Paul Rudd, I thought McKay was an excellent Plan B. So I promptly sent a text to Peyton to get his thoughts on the subject, and didn't hear back from him for a week – right around the time I read a Deadline story announcing Peyton Reed as the new director of ANT-MAN.

I was a fan of Peyton Reed the filmmaker long before we became friends (and, amazingly, we're still friends even though he let Deadline have the goddamn ANT-MAN exclusive). I interviewed him back in 2003 for DOWN WITH LOVE, and again in 2010 when I took part in a tenth anniversary screening of his competitive cheerleading opus, BRING IT ON. Whether he's making a teen comedy or a bruisingly funny examination of a dying relationship (2006's hugely underrated THE BREAK-UP), Reed approaches the material with all due movie love; he's as avid a cinephile as anyone in the audience, and he wants to upend their expectations at every turn. When he worked ALL THAT JAZZ jokes into BRING IT ON, I knew I'd be a fan for life; that we somehow struck up a friendship along the way makes his success all the sweeter. I just wish there was some way that this particular success didn't entail another friend having to move on from a film he'd worked on for close to a decade, but that is water well under the bridge, and needn't be discussed any further here.

Let there be no mistake: Peyton didn't just walk on and make someone else's film. As you'll read in this two-part interview, the film had to be heavily reshaped (with the help of McKay and Rudd at the script level) and finished in time for a set-in-stone July 17, 2015 release date. So while getting to make a Marvel Comics movie was a dream come true for a lifelong geek like Peyton, he had to remain incredibly focused to ensure the project didn't turn into a nightmare – which it didn't. I may be biased... okay, I'm extraordinarily biased... but in my estimation, ANT-MAN is a complete joy, and has the best third-act of any movie in the Marvel Studios canon. If this is what Peyton can do with a salvage job, imagine what he could accomplish if this was his film from scratch.
Peyton Reed Paul Rudd Ant-Man

Jeremy Smith: Did you really just lock picture this week?

    Peyton Reed: We literally finished three days ago. We'd locked picture, but it was the final reels of color correct, and the last two of 1,600 visual effects came in.

Jeremy: That's a lot of visual effects. This is a first for you in this regard.

    Reed: It feels like they pushed that deadline even later and later. In this case, it was liberating because we were able to tweak and tweak, particularly with the sound mix and visual effects. The drum I was beating the whole time about visual effects was just trying to get them photorealistic. You see a new version and send it back, and they're like, "Ugh, you're sure?"

Jeremy: You're pushing, and Marvel's pushing as well. How hard can you push when you have a set release date?

    Reed: You push really hard, but the person I found out who is pushing along with me was Victoria Alonso, who is one of the secret- or not-so-secret weapons of Marvel. She's the Queen of Post-Production. We'll be in these visual effects reviews with our laser pointers, and, as a long-time movie fan, I'm really particular. But she will see things the human eye can't see. She's amazing. We had between 1,500 and 1,600 visual effects shots, while AGE OF ULTRON probably had 2,400. It's a lot of shots in our movie, but it's not nearly to the amount of AOU. It's more contained, but it's the crux of this movie. If you don't buy the shrinking or the ants, then the movie's just not going to work.

Jeremy: Getting across the size-shifts, and how that impacts or enhances a punch... that seems like a nightmare.

    Reed: A lot of it is trial and error. The movie was originally designed to be a [2.40:1] aspect ratio. When I came in and started working with Jake Morrison, the visual effects supervisor, the stuff we were designing and the shots we were doing, I felt like the movie should be [1.85:1]. The act of shrinking is really a vertical act. When he shrinks, the world he leaves behind is above and around. And a lot of the compositions we were doing worked so much better in 1.85. I know that 2.4 is the epic aspect ratio, but I talked to Kevin and I said, "I think it works better in 1.85." THE AVENGERS is 1.85, and that's a pretty epic movie, so we made the decision to move to 1.85. I think it was a really smart decision for this movie.

Jeremy: I know 2.4 is every film geek's favorite ratio, but I think we sometimes overemphasize its importance. JURASSIC PARK was 1.85.

    Reed: Absolutely. E.T. is 1.85. The whole history of movies up until the '50s was pretty much Academy. THE WIZARD OF OZ is Academy, and that's pretty epic.

Jeremy: It's how you fill the frame, right?

    Reed: Right. And I've always made those decisions, even on BRING IT ON... when you do your first movie, you're like, "I'm doing it 2.4! This is my shot! I'm going to do it epic and widescreen!" With BRING IT ON, because of those cheerleading formations, 1.85 made more sense, whereas DOWN WITH LOVE, that had to be an approximation of CinemaScope. I just felt like this worked better for ANT-MAN, and it was really liberating for the visual effects, because there was something about it feeling claustrophobic in 2.40. But the reality of, like, making it feel real, and when you get down there how the light plays, and the dust motes that fly around. This vibe was really important. Dealing with it in visual effects, and then again in the DI when you're color correcting... if you bring it too bright, it can really break the CGI. I was way into this aspect of the process.

Jeremy: How early did you make the aspect ratio call after you came on?

    Reed: Probably only a couple of weeks after I came on. McKay and Rudd were doing rewrites, so I was back and forth between Atlanta and the [Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles], where Paul and Adam were writing. It was all happening really quickly, but when we were assembling the sequences, and trying to figure out what was going to remain from before, 1.85 just made more sense.

Jeremy: In terms of that process, because it was so heavily publicized...

    Reed: Oh yes. (Laughs) You and I... one of the first things that happened, just as a bystander, I think I DM'd or emailed you because you'd posted that video of the mascots racing. I think I said, "Who's the poor sap who's going to take on this movie?"

Jeremy: As fans of Edgar's, we were both like, "Man, this sucks!"

    Reed: Then I think it was a week and a half later that I was announced, and you texted me like, "Um, what's going on?"

Jeremy: You went silent. I had heard McKay was in talks, and you texted me something innocuous and then just disappeared. So you pulled the greatest poker face of all time.

    Reed: I had no idea! When it first came out, it was not on my radar at all. I was reading what was going on online like everyone else, and then I got a call from Kevin. As you know, I developed FANTASTIC FOUR back in 2003, and met on GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY three years ago. I was on Kevin's radar, but I honestly did not expect to get that call. In the back of my mind, if I got that call, I was thinking, "This would be a tricky proposition." But I got the call, and I read all of the existing drafts, and went in to discuss the situation not only creatively, but the schedule. I had very specific responses to the drafts that existed, and I had a conference call with him. I had nothing to lose, and no investment in the thing, so I said, "Here's what I think absolutely works, here's what I think absolutely does not work, and here as an Ant-Man fan..." and you know how you have your own personal relationships with these characters. I had specific ideas, particularly with Hank Pym and Hope, of what I wanted to see and didn't want to see, and then some conceptual things. These happened to dovetail with a lot of the stuff McKay was thinking about. McKay, in addition to being an amazing comedic writer, is also a big comics nerd. Have you ever talked to him about comics?

Jeremy: Only briefly in an interview. I know he's a huge Jack Kirby nerd.

    Reed: He's also a really smart structuralist in terms of script. So when people read that McKay and Rudd were writing, they thought it was going to be some silly comedy. But McKay and I were both on the same page in terms of two things: in the third act, we both wanted take the shrinking even further into the Microverse. We couldn't use the term "Microverse" because it had something to do with the Micronauts or something. So we called it the Quantum Realm. We talked a lot about it, and we both wanted to embrace that psychedelic era of late-'60s/early-'70s Marvel.

Jeremy: Like Steranko?

    Reed: Steranko and even Ditko. We really wanted that to be a part of the movie. It seemed amazing visually, and we also liked the idea of setting up where Scott had to really make a self-sacrifice to save his daughter. That led us to both of us wanting to see some version of Wasp in the movie. Janet had been referenced in the Edgar and Joe drafts, but she was never a part of the movie. We needed to figure out how she could be a part of the movie in an organic way, in a way that didn't sell out her character, but in a way that strengthened things. And the conception of Hank Pym... particularly knowing that Michael Douglas was playing that character, I really wanted to strengthen the part of Pym in this movie that's motivated in large part by guilt, by a tragedy in his life. So McKay wrote several versions of this Janet flashback, and how it could inform things. It did a couple of things: it galvanized the relationship between Hope and Hank in the movie, and it also set up this cautionary thing about what happens if you screw with the regulator on the suit. If you screw with the regulator, you could go subatomic. We know that something bad happened earlier, and Scott has to make that same decision. That was something that McKay and Rudd and I brought to the script that wasn't there. I love that idea. Edgar and Joe had set up a great opportunity with a mentor and a pupil who both have issues with their daughters that need to be resolved. We just wanted to deepen and strengthen that.

    Another thing I wanted to play with was Edgar and Joe's original idea of a heist movie – which was amazing and great! McKay had the idea that, in those heist movies, there's always one last thing they have to get; the hero's got to go do it, and he might not be ready for it, but you send him in for this trial by fire. So McKay had the idea of "What if he encounters this Marvel character?" I loved the idea, and specifically with that character. It appealed to the kid in me who wonders, "I want to see how this hero and that hero match up." And it felt like it really served it the story. It felt organic. It felt like something that would stand alone for somebody who hadn't seen any other Marvel movie or read the comics.

    Another thing we added was when Scott reaches this point of desperation where he's like, "Tell me about this tip. I think I'm in." The idea of Michael Pena and these tips, that was something that was never in these original drafts. Luis was always a character in Edgar and Joe's draft, but McKay's first rewrite had Luis serving waffles to the guys. He became a weird father figure to this group of thieves. Then the idea that Luis is the one with the tip, but he gets excited and goes off point: we had our production writers, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, write these scenes with Paul. I boarded them and shot them, and we liked it so much that we added one at the end. It worked with the information we wanted to convey, but also as a comedic trope.

    We also talked about stealing the suit from the safe, and McKay brought over this friend of his who's a security expert. Paul and Adam and I sat and listened to this guy, and he talked about specific types of metal that react to cold temperatures. So McKay came up with this idea about the safe being made out of the same metal as the Titanic. That was one thing he brought to it: this MacGyver aspect of Scott Lang. The whole section where he has to get through the laser thing. McKay and Rudd wrote that, and I boarded it out.

    And one more thing I said to Kevin is that I wanted an under-two-hour movie. I wanted a tight, fast movie – something that starts as a slow burn, but then catches fire.

Jeremy: That's what heist films do. You've got to do a lot of setup, but, if it's a good idea, the payoff is well worth it.

    Reed: It's a heist movie, but in addition it's a Marvel origin movie. We have to explain who Hank Pym is, who Scott Lang is, what that technology is, and how you control ants. Someone asked me to describe ANT-MAN, and I said, "It's got the structure of a heist movie with a strong science-fiction concept at its core, with these dueling father-daughter redemption stories, and it's all to the beat of a comedy."



We had to wrap up our conversation on the Disney lot here, but we resolved to meet a couple of weeks later over drinks. I'll have that part for you on Monday. In the meantime, get out and see ANT-MAN!

Pogledao sam BREAK POINT Jaya Karasa, sportsku komediju u kojoj Jeremy Sisto igra omatorelog dubl igrača a David Walton njegovog mlađeg brata kog u očaju poziva da mu pomogne da uđe na Open. Film je jednostavan, na razmeđi indie estetike i mejnstrima, sa očiglednim uplivom televizijske režije preko Jaya Karasa, i nažalost nema veliki domet ali je neprekidno simpatičan. Ipak, BREAK POINT nažalost ne uspeva da se izbori za značajije mesto među sportskim filmovima na temu tenisa, iako tu zapravo nema mnogo značajnih naslova i dobrih filmova. Walton ima vedrinu televizijske zvezde i dobra je kontra Sistu, međutim na kraju Karas ne uspeva da postigne neke od osnovnih pripovedačkih zadataka, recimo da ustanovi o kome je ovaj film i čiju transformaciju gledamo. Međutim, uprkos fundamentalnim nedostacima koji ovaj film definitvno smeštaju na mali ekran, nema sumnje da mu je nepretencioznost veliki kvalitet, plus prekaljeni i sugestivni profesonalci Amy Smart i JK Simmons u epizodnim ulogama.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

25

Monday mornings after the release of Marvel movies are for dissecting the secrets layered into the film, for sharing the gems hidden for the True Believers that could hint at the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the biggest easter egg in Ant-Man isn't a clue towards the future - it's a wonderful nod to the past.

At the end of the sequence where Scott Lang first tries out the Ant-Man suit he ends up on the roof of a car. He has been through a crushing valley of feet, menaced by a rat and sucked up into a vacuum cleaner and now, at the end of it all, rests on the dented roof of a car before returning to full size. Within the car sits a man who is startled by the events, but who - had he stuck his head outside! - might have recognized the costume. See, it was the first actor to play a live action Ant-Man: Garret Morris from Saturday Night Live.

For nerds there are a couple of essential old SNL pieces. There's the one with Shatner at the Comic-Con, telling everyone to get a life. They still sell t-shirts with that phrase on it. And there was the original cast Star Trek sketch, in which the biggest villain the Enterprise encounters is an NBC executive. But for me the number one nerdy old SNL sketch is from 1979. when Margot Kidder guested and they threw a Superhero Party.

I love this sketch! There's just enough deep nerdery on display (especially in 1979 terms) to show that the people behind the scenes knew these characters, but there's also a lot of fun being had with them. And for the purposes of this weekend's number one movie, the sketch has a hilarious moment where The Hulk and The Flash mercilessly tease Ant-Man about his power set.

Seeing Garrett Morris show up in Ant-Man was a joy simply because seeing Morris show up is wonderful, but more than that it was a beautiful nod to a strange highlight in the history of one of the most absolutely obscure characters in comics. And that beats any reference to an Infinity Stone or Spider-Man.

Now if only Morris' character had returned at the end on a newscast, delivering the news for the hard of hearing...

Lepo. 

Na drugoj strani, u DC-u, Dan Didio objašnjava novi koncept DC-jevog multiverzuma:



DC Finally Reveals What's Going On With Its Post-Convergence Comics



Ovo deluje kao nova, oprezna aplikacija Morrisonovog i Waidovog Hypertime koncepta.  "Sve može, al ne iživljavajte se u glavnim stripovima".


Mada, kad sam već tu da kažem da je to meni vrlo okej. Neki od meni najdražih DC serijala ne mogu se spakovati u glavni kontinuitet (Byrneov Superman & Batman: Generations, Injustice...) i to je u redu.

15.oktobra 1958. godine dogodio se incident u nultom reaktoru u Vinči. Nekoliko inženjera i studenata ozračeno je i pošto je lečenje bilo nemoguće u Jugoslaviji, odvedeni su u Pariz gde su spaseni primenom radikalne eksperimentalne metode presađivanja koštane srži. 1976. godine beogradska televizija je u koprodukciji sa francuskom televizijom snimila televizijski film OZRAČENI u režiji Gerarda Poitoua. Ovaj televizijski film gledao sam kao dete i bio prilično fasciniran, a sada kad sam ga reprizirao moram priznati da je reč o potpuno unikatnom gledalačkom iskustvu. Ako imamo u vidu da je Goran Marković bio pomoćnik režije na ovom filmu i jedan od glavnih glumaca, smatram da analize filma VARIOLA VERA zapravo ne može biti bez uzimanja OZRAČENIH u obzir.

Ovaj film je na neki način anticipirao VARIOLU VERU i to ne samo kao vrlo dramatična istinita priča iz istorije naše medicine već i po vrlo zanimljivom, hladnom, kliničkom tonu u kome se prilazi pojedinim situacijama. Naime, dok je VARIOLA VERA zbog same prirode zaraze u sebi nosila neke eksplicitne elemente repertoarskog horora, naprosto bolest se prenosi dodirom, tečnošću, kroz vazduh i sl. OZRAČENI svoju napetost i užas crpe iz vrlo hladnog, vrlo svedenog kadriranja koje je ipak filmsko, mnogo više arty nego što bi bilo svojstveno TV drami, kroz detaljne prikaze hirurških intervencija, i drugih medicinskih procedura koje kroz to svedeno kadriranje postaju vrhunski estetizovane, i konačno kroz bukvalni iskorak u dokudramu gde se junaci povremeno obraćaju kameri kao da je sve ovo zapravo nekakav proces koji se usput snima. Ovo narušavanje "četvrtog zida" kroz vrlo svedenu glumačku igru zapravo uopšte ne smeta kada se film gleda, kao što bi zvučalo kada se taj zahvat prepričava.

Ritam pripovedanja je vrlo temeljan, doprinosi toj kliničkoj hladnoći, a glumačka igra je bazirana na underplayu, vrlo diskretno plasiranim "malim temama" u razgovoru, bez ikakvih preagresivnih glumačkih bravura koje bi se mogle očekivati od podele koju čine prilično "masni" igrači poput Josifa Tatića, Petra Božovića, Dragana Zarića. Međutim, srpska podela je u odličnom sinhronitetu sa francuskom i nema apsolutno nikakvog disbalansa između ove dve skupine.

OZRAČENI sasvim sigurno spadaju u sam vrh naše televizijske tradicije, iako ovog puta ne treba zanemariti ni značajan francuski faktor u celoj produkciji. O ekskluzivnosti samog događaja koji se opisuje, naravno, da i ne govorimo, ali ne treba potceniti ni uredničku spremnost da se poduhvati ovako osetljive teme.

OZRAČENI se ne mogu smatrati partikularno politički hrabrim ili provokativnim delom, kao što je bila VARIOLA VERA, i takvih zahvata ovde nema, ali imajući u vidu samu temu, mogla je biti itekako "peglana" a nije.

Jeremy Smith: Too much of the discussion about the film has been reduced to journalists attempting to figure out what was held over from Edgar and Joe's version. The reviews are the most frustrating, because they're trying to make educated guesses when you've spent a good deal of time in interviews explaining the differences.

    Peyton Reed: Since we spoke, I've sort of stepped back and wondered, "What's the point of this? What's the point of trying to parse out who did what?" I sometimes don't remember on any given movie what was in the script, what a writer came up with or even what I came up with. It all just becomes a collaborative thing – and that's not a copout answer. This is truly the process. And this movie happened so quickly. I'll admit I do get miffed. I read an article earlier that said, "It had to have been Edgar Wright's choice to score the briefcase fight to The Cure." I was like, "What???" (Laughs) That was my choice! DISINTEGRATION was the second CD I ever owned!

Jeremy: The need to parse out who did what is already kind of silly, but it gets frustrating when you know these people don't have all, or sometimes any, of the relevant information.

    Reed: That's the thing. What's interesting to me is that it's a small overall percentage of the moviegoing population. I'm just excited to show the movie to people who don't give a shit who directed it. It just plays as ANT-MAN. That excites me more than anyone else. But the whole parsing out thing only frustrates me is when someone says "Of course, DISINTEGRATION by The Cure is Edgar's idea." Why? And just the logic of it. "Okay, he wrote the drafts, and then he left the movie, but then he came in later as a music supervisor to add songs?" I don't understand the supposed logic of that.

    One of the big takeaways for me is that a lot of the people writing about the movie don't understand how movies are made – which is curious to me when that's part of their job, I think. And then the other thing has just been the sheer laziness of journalism – present company excepted, and a handful of others that I truly love to read. It's rarely the proper film critics who are guilty of this, but... I guess you'd call them the "fanboy critics". I'll probably get in trouble for that statement, but I kind of don't care. Accept the movie that is before you. And then there's the other notion that... I have a sense Edgar Wright is probably over this situation, but it's funny that a lot of his fans are not. His adult fans.

Jeremy: Edgar has moved on to his next movie. BABY DRIVER sounds awesome, and it's going to be pure Edgar, which is what any fan of Edgar's should want.

    Reed: It was interesting doing press in London. People would come in every four minutes, and they would all go, "I have to ask you this upfront..." They all lead with it. I wanted to do the quick jumpcut version of it. "He developed this movie for eight years." (Snaps) "He developed this movie for ten years." (Snaps) "Twelve years." It just kept getting more ridiculous.

Jeremy: I want to get back to this idea of trying to assign credit to writers based on voice. It's perilous. For years, I labored under the mistaken notion that Leigh Brackett was the true writer of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I'd be like, "Just listen to the dialogue. That's right out of RIO BRAVO!" And then, once I started reading more about the production, I found out she only wrote the first draft, and that Kasdan and Kershner wrote most of what I love.

    Reed: Clearly, when I started this movie, I knew this would happen. It just comes with the territory. Then I got to a point where I was like, "Fuck it! I don't care!" I've always wanted to make a comic book movie, and I've been reading Ant-Man comic books since I was ten. I have my own feelings about the source material, and that material has been around for fifty years. When I first met with Marvel, that was my biggest misgiving: "How rigid are they going to be about what's already there." And they just said, "Here are the drafts. Have at it." I felt an incredible amount of freedom. It's hard for me to talk about it with all of the assumptions, the whole conventional wisdom of "The Disney-Owned Corporate Marvel vs. The Auteur." That was the storyline, but it's an easy story and absolutely not based in fact – in terms of my empirical evidence of having read every draft, and the empirical evidence of me and my relationship with Marvel. Feige was like, "Man, this is the twelfth Marvel movie. Mix it up! Change whatever!" I felt incredible freedom, more so than on movies I've made for other studios. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it's true.

Jeremy: That is the impression out there with Marvel movies right now. They want hired hands who'll do their bidding, not auteurs.

    Reed: Here's the thing: whatever happened with those two parties that preceded me, I think there's a certain part about it that they're not allowed to talk about publicly. But when I came on, [the project] was clearly in the disaster category*. It just was. They'd shut down for, I think, twelve weeks. No one was doing anything, and they had a release date.

Jeremy: How integral was Paul to the salvaging process?

    Reed: I mean, you know I have the utmost respect for Edgar as a filmmaker, but when I sat down with Paul, I knew him before this, but one of my biggest things was to gain his trust as his director. He had a lot at stake. He was out front. Whatever happened behind the scenes, he was contractually obligated to play Ant-Man. (Laughs) That was a really scary time for him. There's the actor's side to this, and Paul was abandoned. You know, there's part of that thing where directors feel like they have to play psychiatrist a little, and deal with every actor and how they're feeling about the movie. That was my biggest thing was Paul, going to him and saying, "Look, I know you have this version of the movie in your mind, and it's probably the reason you signed on in the first place. But that's not happening now. It's happening another way now. Let's talk about how it's going to happen." And, again, it was my good fortune that Adam McKay was writing with Paul. I was a little worried that Paul was just going to write because that idea of actor/writer can go awry really quickly. But it's a great credit to Paul as a writer and an actor that he's as generous as a writer as he is an actor. It was a really good situation. We did a lot of restructuring and a lot of rewriting.

Jeremy: Which allowed you and Adam to add in things from the comics that you liked.

    Reed: Some of which I was shocked wasn't there in the first place. It's so delicate talking about it because no one will ever read those drafts – at least, I don't think they will. It's funny, but I thought a lot about JODOROWSKY'S DUNE. I love that documentary. I love Jodorowsky, and I love him talking about the project. I love the artists that he was able in to make that movie. It's amazing. But the big question mark is, "Would that movie have worked? Would it have been good, or would it have just been a huge, self-indulgent disaster?" No one will ever know. But the documentary buys in and sells that notion that this is one of the most amazing movies you never got to see. And it's interesting that David Lynch ended up making DUNE. If David Lynch had started making DUNE, and then walked away, it would've been "David Lynch directing DUNE??? That would've been the greatest movie of all time!" It's all in the perception. "James Cameron's SPIDER-MAN? My head's going to explode! That's going to be the greatest movie of all time!" It never happened. We'll never know.

    This applies here as well. "Edgar Wright's ANT-MAN? That's awesome!" As you well know, I was psyched by that proposition. I really wanted to see that movie. But he never shot the movie, so we'll never know. You'd have to talk to Edgar – and, again, I'm not sure if he's legally allowed to talk about his experience. I didn't develop FANTASTIC FOUR for nearly as long as he was on ANT-MAN, but I know how painful it is to walk away from a project like that. I lobbied hard to get FANTASTIC FOUR. At that point in my career, I was a long shot. But I got it. I was so psyched to work on it, but it quickly became clear that Fox, in 2003, was not interested in making the movie I wanted to make. I only developed that movie for about a year, but I get it. I would never presume to know what Edgar's reasons were, but I know how hard it is.

    (The waiter drops by to take our order. When he leaves, Peyton picks up with a different thought.)

    It is interesting that these movies are a process. There's a certain discovery that happens when you're shooting and editing that either could not be foreseen when you're writing, or was a bump in script format that, when you put it on its feet, it's more than a bump.

Jeremy: Was there a specific discovery you can remember from the shoot or the editing of ANT-MAN?

    Reed: There were a lot of things. There was nothing major. I don't think we sacrificed any giant moment. The train stuff in the movie - the general conceit, not necessarily Thomas the Tank Engine, but the whole train set sequence – was always in Joe and Edgar's drafts. It's great! It's fantastic! It's exactly what you want to see in an ANT-MAN movie! It's the right sense of humor. It inverts the whole "more is more" trend of superhero movies.

Jeremy: And then you've got a miniature Buster Keaton gag in the middle of a major superhero movie.

    Reed: I love Buster Keaton, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that that was an influence for Edgar, too. There are a lot of similarities in Edgar's areas of interests and my own. Musically, visually, tonally, comedic... all of that. So maybe it's one of the things that made the final movie hopefully feel like more of a piece.

Jeremy: You do have similar sensibilities. It's no mistake I've become friends with both of you. We're all into the same shit. With Edgar it's De Palma and Prince... once we met, it was like, "How are we not friends?" Not that anyone gives a shit, but that's been the toughest part of this for me. I know that you two would totally be friends if you got to know each other.

    Reed: It's interesting, because Edgar and I exchanged emails early on, and... that was one of the things when I came in. "Is he really gone? Is this happening? Is this definitive?" When I finally had assurances from both sides, I was like, "Well, somebody's going to direct this movie. I want to direct this movie." We had a really nice exchange of emails that I feel were mutually respectful. I think we're both well-mannered men, and we both felt that the right thing to do was to have this conversation – for whatever reason. For our own reasons. I think it was at the end of our email exchange that Edgar said, "One day, when this is all way past us, we can get together and have a drink." I would love that. Because listen... we're both going to make lots of movies. This will just be a bump in the road.

Jeremy: You're both insanely talented filmmakers, and you'll hopefully keep making great films.

    Reed: Well, thank you. The media part of it... when I talked about lazy journalism, I suppose I'd be the same way if I were a journalist. It's certainly the savory story to tell. And Edgar has a very fervent fan base. He makes films in a very specific way. My career has been more... women's pictures. (Laughs) Cheerleader comedy, Rock Hudson-Doris Day homage, THE BREAK-UP... but we both have an intensely comedic background.

Jeremy: But that was not by design that that happened for you. Those were just the projects, right?

    Reed: Exactly.

Jeremy: And as a film buff, something like DOWN WITH LOVE is catnip.

    Reed: Absolutely. I was a kid who, probably like you, grew up loving movies, started to read movie criticism, then went back to read Cahiers du cinéma and got into the auteur theory. It's interesting how the auteur theory has changed since the '50s to now. When it was first introduced in France and then in America, it was talking about studio-era directors and the commonalities between them. There was authorship there as a director. Post-auteur theory, there are at least two generations of filmmakers who grew up with and leaned into the auteur theory. They branded themselves. I was not a director that did that – and not necessarily by design. There have been a couple of reviews that called me a "journeyman director". You know what? Fuck it. I love it! I do! I'm someone who would've loved to make movies in the studio system of the '30s and '40s. It doesn't mean I don't have my own style; it's just how my career has shaped up.

    But it would be interesting to sit down and have a conversation about the auteur theory with the cast of crew of your movie. They're collaborative things as far as I'm concerned. There has to be someone leading the ship with a real vision, and I feel like I'm that way, but the auteur theory has morphed into something that is part fantasy and part insult to everyone who works on movies. I really believe that. And I think more often than not, for directors who've bought into it, it's become a real straitjacket.

Jeremy: When you're talking about auteur filmmakers, I know one way they can protect their vision is to shoot little to no coverage. That way, there's only one way to cut the movie.

    Reed: Right. Bogdanovich style.

Jeremy: Whenever I talk to De Palma, he's like (in the world's worst De Palma imitation), "Coverage? Coverage is a bad word. We don't talk about 'coverage'." (Laughing) For some reason, I just gave De Palma a Texas accent.

    Reed: You just turned him into Hoyt Axton.

Jeremy: I get them confused. But regarding De Palma, I remember doing a Q&A with Paul Hirsch for BLOW OUT. We were watching the train station sequence, and he said to me, "There's no coverage." I asked him later how often that happens now, and he said never.

    Reed: It doesn't happen now, but even the directors who have a strong visual stamp, it isn't about oners and single shots; it is about the coverage and the cutting pattern.

Jeremy: Which a lot of us learned via hours of non-stop MTV.

    Reed: Kids and adults are so visually literate nowadays. Maybe they already do this, but in elementary schools, along with English, they should teach visual literacy. Actually, not "should". They have to at this point. It's not where our society is headed, it's where it is. Being able to decode the visual images of something, what it's selling you or how it's making you feel... that's crucial. With the cutting and rhythm of ANT-MAN, that's something we wanted to do: start with a slow burn and setup, and then, bam, it catches fire. We talked a lot about BACK TO THE FUTURE in that regard. They're obviously very different movies, but I wanted to slow it down a little bit because I wanted emotionality out of the movie: I wanted emotionality out of the Hank-Hope story; I wanted emotionality out of Janet; I wanted emotionality out of Scott-Cassie. It is by design a more intimate Marvel movie, and I wanted an audience to feel that.

Jeremy: Adding the scene with Janet where she dies. (Slight smile from Peyton.) Not that anyone's ever dead in these movies.

    Reed: She disappears.

Jeremy: (Laughs) I like how seeing that moment gives Hank's story a little more emotional depth. I don't think Marvel gets enough credit for how well they've played tragic moments. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER does this magnificently at the end.

    Reed: I think that movie gets maligned in ways that it shouldn't. I love that movie, and I think Joe Johnston was the perfect choice for that movie. That moment where Cap is going down with the ship? Amazing.

Jeremy: And that's Johnston, I think.

    Reed: OCTOBER SKY. I love that movie. Another overlooked movie. It's a very simple movie, beautifully shot... it's really, really good. But Joe Johnston doing a World War II movie with all of his design aesthetic that clearly informed STAR WARS, and just diving headlong into that original Marvel period... it works as a movie on its own, but does what it needed to do to set up the character for subsequent movies.

Jeremy: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER also has a hummable theme, which is rare for a Marvel movie.

    Reed: I'll say two things about that. In addition to wanting an under-two-hour movie, I came in and said to Kevin Feige, "I want ANT-MAN to have an identifiable theme." When I was a kid and saw Donner's SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, and walked out with that John Williams theme in my head... I went right out and bought the soundtrack. But can you do [a score like] that in 2015 without feeling like it's a throwback? It was something that Kevin, who's a soundtrack fanatic as well, had been chasing a little bit. There's no bigger SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE fan than Kevin; he started out working for [Richard and Lauren Shuler Donner]. I wanted to use Christophe Beck, who scored BRING IT ON and had not been able to work with since due to scheduling. Chris had been wanting to do a Marvel movie, too, and made that known. In the wake of him having scored FROZEN and EDGE OF TOMORROW – two completely different, but awesome scores – we were really in sync. We hired Chris, and he delivered a scene that is everything we're talking about. It's muscular in the way superhero scores need to be, but it's jazzy and has a playfulness to it. He knocked it out of the park.

Jeremy: Speaking of playfulness, Garrett Morris's cameo drew one of the best reactions I've seen in a movie this year. There were only, like, five of us that got it, but we flipped out when we saw him.

    Reed: That makes me so happy. Somebody asked me recently, "You had Garrett Morris from 2 BROKE GIRLS sitting in a cab. Why?" I realized that I'd have to explain to people that, technically speaking, Garrett Morris is the original onscreen Ant-Man. When we called Garrett to ask if he'd be in the film, he was like, "I love it! I was hoping you'd call!" I reminded him that when I was a student at UNC that... we invited Garrett Morris to talk. We had "A Night With Garrett Morris of SNL". I just love Garrett Morris. I wanted to do three things with ANT-MAN: get Garrett Morris in the movie, have a Stan Lee cameo that tops all of the other cameos – and I think we succeeded – and have an Adam Ant song on the soundtrack. I got all three of those things.

Jeremy: And you had to have Gregg Turkington for some reason.

    Reed: Let's talk about Turkington.

Jeremy: Has Neil Hamburger seen it yet?

    Reed: Neil has not seen the movie yet, but I kind of have an idea of what he'll say about it. With Gregg, we had to cast the role of the Baskin-Robbins manager, and I said to Feige, "There's this guy I think is perfect for the sad-sack manager. His name is Gregg Turkington." And Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, goes, "Oh, my god, I love ON CINEMA!" If you had a conversation with the head of any other studio, and you mentioned Gregg Turkington, they'd be like, "He looks weird. Maybe. Let's bring him in with some other people." With Feige, he not only knew who he was, but was like, "Yes! Let's cast him!" The Marvel people are actually comedy connoisseurs. They not only know mainstream comedians, but also indie or so-called alternative comedy. Feige is an obsessive DECKER and ON CINEMA AT THE CINEMA fan. How does a studio head make time to watch all of that stuff? This is an appealing thing for someone who is also a comedy connoisseur. It's a relief to not have to go through the cattle call audition, and explain to someone why this guy is going to be awesome.

Jeremy: Also, throughout the movie, I was wondering if there was a place for Tom Scharpling.

    Reed: I will tell you that not only was there a place for Scharpling, we in fact shot a scene with Scharpling. Scharpling was in a scene... there was a sequence in the film that was in the McKay-Rudd drafts that was referred to as the "wish fulfillment" sequence. There was a point where Scott gets the suit, goes through that whole experience and then does a lot of shitty things with the suit. We shot stuff where Michael Pena, T.I. and David Dastmalchian are shooting craps at an underground casino, and Scott is on the table flipping the dice. We also shot a scene where a woman is rushing with groceries and a baby under her arm, and she's trying to get to the parking meter before the evil meter maid gives her a ticket. He doesn't care, and gives it to her anyway, so Scott punches out his tires and blows up all the meters. It ended up not serving the story, but one of the beats in the montage was Scott filling out a lotto ticket, and then getting in the lotto machine with the balls to control what numbers came up. The disgruntled convenience store guy was Scharpling. And Rudd's a huge Scharpling fan, too. But Scharpling being Scharpling, he was like, "Listen, I know you're going to cut this scene. I'm not going to be in the movie. But if I happen to be in the movie or even in a supplementary scene, that's a bonus. It was just fun to do it." Scharpling is also a huge Marvel fan. As a housewarming gift for me in 1987 or '88, he gave me his entire collection of 7-Eleven Marvel Slurpee cups from the '70s or '80s – one of which was Ant-Man. Scharpling and I have had a long relationship, and Marvel has always been one of the centerpieces.

Jeremy: I'm sure Scharpling will find his way into the Marvel movie universe eventually. And Philly Boy Roy.

    Reed: We've got to get Wurster in there, no question.

    (Food arrives. We eat. There is small talk. Then Michael Douglas comes up.)

    Reed: In the original drafts, Pym was played as doddering and senile, which was a ruse. It was funny, but I felt it only got you so far. I wanted to embrace a more complicated version of Hank Pym because of his comic book past. I felt like the stage was really set for a Hank Pym motivated by guilt, who lived with this incredible tragedy in his past, and who was ill-equipped to deal with his daughter. He was obsessed with saving his wife absolutely at the expense of his daughter. He made a horrible decision early on in Hope's life, and this was affecting their modern-day relationship in a very profound way. That was interesting to me because you had Michael Douglas playing this character; he's made a career playing these kinds of complicated characters. That really excited him. He didn't realize Hank was such a complicated character in the comics, so we discussed the various incarnations of Hank. We didn't feel like we necessarily had to use a specific era or story, but it gave us the license to create a character with a lot of guilt, a lot of tragedy and a lot of deep-rooted suspicions about anything superheroic or Stark-related. He really dove into it. Also the idea of Douglas playing a mentor character, but he was a really fucked-up mentor. There's that scene where he finally tells Hope what happened to her mom, and he's so quiet and delicate. He's terrific, and I hadn't seen Michael do that in a very long time.

Jeremy: And Evangeline is right there with him. She's great, too. I've always really liked her when she's given a role with banter – especially, and this is going to sound weird, REAL STEEL, where she just has phenomenal chemistry with Hugh Jackman.

    Reed: Absolutely. She's really good in that movie.

Jeremy: And her interplay with Michael is wonderful in this.

    Reed: Well, there was interesting drama in that relationship. You see how profoundly affected she was by her father not knowing how to be a good dad.

Jeremy: So did Michael ever have moments where he was like, "Hey Peyton, this reminds me of the time I was talking to Milos on the set of CUCKOO'S NEST..."

    Reed: Listen... he didn't have to do that. I would solicit these stories. Any downtime we got, I would sit down and say, "Can we talk about THE CHINA SYNDROME? I probably just gave you twenty-seven cents because I just bought the Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray." We talked a lot about THE CHINA SYNDROME. He told me about telling Jack Lemmon, "Jack, you know you can't do the ba-ba-ba-ya-ba Jack Lemmon thing. You're a military guy." We all know Michael Douglas is an amazingly intelligent guy, but there is nothing diminished in him at all. We talked a lot about Zemeckis and Gale, and how they'd done I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, a movie I love that bombed. We talked about USED CARS, a movie that I love that bombed. They wrote 1941—

Jeremy: A movie I love!

    Reed: -that bombed. Zemeckis was in his twenties, and he couldn't get off the couch. In his mind, he was washed up. And Douglas talks about how, "Man, I saw that USED CARS? Fucking loved that movie! So when ROMANCING THE STONE came around, I wanted Bob Z." That movie absolutely reinvigorated Zemeckis's career. So we talked a lot about Zemeckis and ROMANCING THE STONE.

Jeremy: What about JEWEL OF THE NILE?

    Reed: We did not talk about JEWEL OF THE NILE. We did not have that conversation. (I get a great off-the-record Douglas story here. Sorry!) I love Michael Douglas. I always loved him as a fan, but working with him was a joy, man.

Jeremy: You talk about complicated characters, and the risks he's taken as a movie star. WAR OF THE ROSES? What kind of movie star today would allow themselves to play a drunken lout who pisses on his wife's fish dinner?

    Reed: He loves it! FATAL ATTRACTION, BASIC INSTINCT... he found this niche that worked. There were so many moments, but for that ANT-MAN/WASP scene, he had to sit in this array where we had five cameras, and be still essentially just act with his face. To see him do that process that he'd never done before, and go to an emotional place in that scene. It's such a brief moment in the movie, but to go to this emotional place of his twenty-five-year younger version losing the love of his life, he was like a twenty-year-old actor. He committed and got tears in his eyes. There is no laziness to this guy. This is an actor who's still hungry and wants to try stuff he's never done. He's not afraid to look stupid. That was inspiring to me.

    He's also just old-school Hollywood. When we were in London recently, he said, "Hey, we're going to do this small dinner with Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and some people at this private dinner club. I want you and Paul and Michael [Pena] to join us. This small group of people... I'm sitting next to Christiane Amanpour, Tom Stoppard is seated across from me, Sarah Ferguson stops by later...

Jeremy: Tom Stoppard? Seriously? Did you talk to him?

    Reed: Before the dinner, we were in the parlor having drinks. It was all very English. I was like, "What do I say to Tom Stoppard." So he comes up and says, "Hi, I'm Tom Stoppard." I introduce myself, and he says, "So you're the director of the movie?" I was like, "Yeah." And he said, "I'd like to talk to you, if it's okay, about the process of making a movie like this." I'm like, "Is it okay? Absolutely!" After a while, I got to the point where I could talk to him about not only his plays, but his experience in writing for movies, and what were his most fulfilling experiences. We talked about BRAZIL. But he's just so inquisitive and lovely. Later, he's sitting next to Rudd, and he says, "So, you not only starred in this movie, but you co-wrote it as well. You're a writer." And Paul being Paul was just, "Aw, I was working with Adam McKay, but I don't know about being a writer..." And then Stoppard asked, "I'd love to know what's your process as a writer?" Later, after everyone had left, Rudd and I are riding back, and he goes, "Tom Stoppard asked me what my process was as a writer! Are you fucking kidding me? I've never felt like a bigger fraud in my life!"

With warning to US, North Korea marks end of Korean War

Quote
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korean officials warned the United States that another war on the Korean Peninsula would leave no Americans alive to sign a surrender document as the country marked Monday's anniversary of the armistice that ended fighting in the Korean War more than six decades ago.
Pyongyang and other cities around North Korea were decked out with flags and banners as North Koreans flocked to patriotic gatherings and mass dance celebrations to mark the anniversary of the July 27, 1953, agreement that brought the three-year Korean war to an end with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
North Korean officials took the opportunity of the anniversary to step up their anti-U.S. rhetoric and call upon the nation to redouble its devotion to the nation's current leader, Kim Jong Un, the third leader in the Kim dynasty, and prepare for a final showdown with Washington.
The anniversary is hailed in North Korea as a victory over the U.S., which fought with the South Koreans and U.N. allies against the North's forces, who were supported by China and the Soviet Union.
In a speech to veterans on Saturday, Kim Jong Un stressed the importance of instilling the country's young people with the same fighting spirit and devotion as the generation that experienced the war. But he also stressed that North Korea has a new ace in the hole — a nuclear arsenal of its own.
"Gone forever is the era when the United States blackmailed us with nukes; now the United States is no longer a source of threat and fear for us and we are the very source of fear for it," he said in the speech, the text of which was broadcast on North Korean television.
At a separate gathering held Sunday, Korean People's Army Gen. Pak Yong Sik, who is believed to be the country's new defense minister, said that if the United States does not abandon its hostile policies toward Pyongyang and provokes another war, the North is prepared to fight until "there would be no one left to sign a surrender document."
"It is more than 60 years since the ceasefire on (the) land, but peace has not yet settled on it," he told the meeting, which included high-level officials, veterans and diplomats stationed in Pyongyang. "The past Korean War brought about the beginning of the downhill turn for the U.S., but the second Korean war will bring the final ruin to U.S. imperialism."
The anniversary brought a festive atmosphere to the capital, with citizens using the holiday not only to show their patriotic pride by laying flowers before statues of North Korea's first president Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, but also to enjoy the warm summer weather at parks and ice cream stands.

nadam se da su uzeli i nešto da prezalogaje


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Pa vidiš da se pominju ti neki sladoledi. Severna Koreja slavi dostojanstveno.

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 27-07-2015, 11:43:08
North Korean officials warned the United States that another war on the Korean Peninsula would leave no Americans alive to sign a surrender document

šta ti je diplomatski rječnik

sa pjongjanškog parketa

http://www.beforeafter.rs/kultura/bogovi-pjongjanga/

Pogledao sam DENNIS RODMAN'S BIG BANG IN PYONGYANG Colina Offlanda, dokumentarni film o Rodmanovom pokušaju "košarkaške diplomatije" po uzoru na ping-pong koji je bio uvod u sastanak Nixona sa Maom. Mislim da je malo reći da je ovaj film izuzetno uzbudljiv pošto je reč o jednom od onih dokumentaraca gde vas ni dobro predznanje o događajima ne može adekvatmo pripremiti za prizore na ekranu. Preokreti, sukobi, neverovatne situacije se nižu u toj meri, da su verovatno i ljudi iz severnokorejskog protokola koji se najviše plaše objektiva dozvolili da im popusti pažnja i procure ovi snimci.

Rodman sa grupom NBA olupina igra turnir u Pjongjangu. Grupa bankrotiralih penzionisanih sportista, neki od njih lečeni alkoholičari, dolaze iz SAD gde žive na margini u SK gde dobijaju tretman sportskih heroja, što oni zapravo jesu iako su po svim drugim merilima života na zapadu potpune propalice. I paradoksalno na plećima ovih ljudi dešava se nešto što je jako blizu olimpijskoj humanosti i apolitičnosti.

Zanimljivo je videti film u kome Dennis Rodman, možda i ponajmanji "sportista" među legendama NBA zapravo nosi baklju "Velike misije", kao i toliko bizarno ponašanje koje razara čak i protokol jedne od najrigidnijih država na planeti.

NBA, na sve to, nije dozvolila da se u filmu koristi materijal Rodmanovih ili bilo čijih drugih igara i ova korporativna reakcija pokazuje zbunjenost celim događajem.

I događaji zbilja jesu zbunjujući, ali na kraju film se ispostavlja kao mnogo humanija priča o iskupljenju nego što bi se dalo zaključiti iz niza bizarnosti koje prikazuje.

* * * 1/2 / * * * *

Kako sam počeo i prestao da slušam radio uz B92

http://novipolis.rs/blog/28848/b92--pocetak-i-kraj.html

QuoteСтога, може да нам буде жао што Б92 више не постоји али Грци су за то понајмање криви, они су само еутаназирали једну одавно оболелу станицу.

By all means. Još polovinom prve decenije ovog stoleća su se mnogi ljudi koji su sarađivali sa B92 na onaj najprepoznatljiviji način osećali skrajnuto, marginalizovano, neželjeno. Kako si već negde rekao, medijska kuća koja se borila (između ostalog) za slobodno tržišno poslovanje kao važan princip je onda samu sebe zatekla da u kontekstu slobodnog tržišnog poslovanja mora da napusti mnoge svoje principe pa su mnogi autori još pre desetak godina ispadali iz kombine jer su bili nefotogenični, nedovoljno uklopivi u nove programske ideje, previše anarhični itd. Da se razumemo, dobar deo njih i ne mogu se nazvati medijskim profesionalcima u užem smislu ali to i jeste bio taj poseban identitet devedesetdvojke - kršenje ustaljenih obrazaca medijskog ponašanja a u ime nekakve nove energije itd. Samo se na kraju ispostavilo da to nije dovoljno marketabilno da bi firma od toga mogla da živi.

Sa tim appendixom što oni posle prvog talasa "nove energije" nikada nisu dopustili dolazak drugog talasa "nove energije" a ovi prvi nisu naučili da rade posao profesionalno.

S druge strane, džukački otkazi na B92 kreću posle 2000. i to daleko pre Grka. Ovo je dečja igra spram načina na koji su suptilno terani ljudi poput Freedoma ili backstabbovani ljudi poput Miška Bilbije itd.