THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION

“Well, we live in a technological age. Time has passed, and we have stepped over the ruins of our own societies, and our own civilisations, and we come now to the fruition of those things about which the human race has dreamed. We have flight and we have electronic assistants. The entertainment media – which are always very timorous and step very carefully out of fear and loathing – don’t know what they’re doing so much. So they go back, and they are catching up on the kind of science fiction – and they call it, in that ugly, ugly phrase, “sci-fi,” which those who have worked in speculative fiction despise, it’s like calling a woman a “broad” – they are catching up on ideas that were covered with hoarfrost 60 years ago. That’s why you have an overabundance of zombies and walking dead, and world war and asteroids from space. They have not yet tackled any of the truly interesting discussions of humanity that are treated in speculative fiction. But they are a break from standard 19th, early 20th-century fiction, and so they seem fresh to an audience that is essentially ignorant…”

“I keep reading books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked…”

“How could a film made on a low budget with a respected scriptwriter with a clear grasp of the material and not one, but three of the best character actors working today in the three main roles take so little money? Why did it fail? Who killed Judge Dredd? Let’s look at the evidence…”

“This latest technological “advance’ reaffirms one of my key beliefs:  We’re far too focused on technology these days  we are creating a lot distractions to what can make a film truly powerful.   So many of these new technologies threaten the magic of film by making the experience a little too “hyper real” if you will.     Having only one of 8 characters in focus during an important soliloquy, or another person crossing frame out of focus and motion blurred can be a good thing to make the audience become more immersed in the film…  they don’t need to see EVERYTHING to become “immersed” in my opinion…  Something to think about…”

“The BBFC, who have made great (and rather disingenuous) play of the fact that they no longer cut films except when absolutely necessary (a necessity caused by their own self-imposed rules rather than any evidence of harm, I should point out), recently carried out what they laughably call ‘research’ into public attitudes towards depictions of rape, sexual and sadistic violence (so, no leading phrases there…). In this case, 35 people across London, Bristol and Dundee were asked to watched and comment on a number of recent controversial films that had either been passed uncut, cut or banned. 

“Let’s think about that for a moment. 35 people in three cities – two in the South of England and one in Scotland. No serious scientific researcher or public opinion market researcher would consider this to be anywhere near the number and variety required to use to gain any level of information about public attitudes…”

“In June, director Martin Scorsese tried to show his 1993 film The Age of Innocence at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor for the past 40 years and a three-time Oscar winner, called Grover Crisp, the senior VP of asset management at Sony, for a 35mm print. But Sony not only didn’t have a print, it couldn’t even make one.

“”He told me that they can’t print it anymore because Technicolor in Los Angeles no longer prints film,” Schoonmaker recalled. “Which means a film we made 20 years ago can no longer be printed, unless we move it to another lab—one of the few labs still making prints.”

“Welcome to the digital world, movie version….”

I am imagining this as a real physical fight. In an ice cream factory. On a really hot day.