"It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one."

"Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way 'to get audiences back in theaters.' Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules.... Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?"

I'm reading "Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots? Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, has teamed up with Meta on a chatbot that encourages people to use their phones while watching a movie" (NYT).

In the last moments of the film "Sunset Boulevard," the delusional actress says, "There's nothing else — just us — and the cameras — and those wonderful people out there in the dark." But the phones have taken away the dark. The "wonderful people" are interposing lighted screens between each others' eyes and that screen that used to control the flow of light.

The delusion is over.

"Shh! You'll wake up the monkey" — We now know Trump's favorite movie.

There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't good enough. Oh, no! They wanted the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk, talk, talk... And who have they got now? Some nobodies — a lot of pale little frogs croaking pish-posh.... Words! Words! You've made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there is a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the orange, swollen tongue!

Yes, Trump was raving last night. In Colorado Springs. One of his many topics was the fact that a South Korean film had won the Best Picture Oscar:

"How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see? And the winner is: a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about? We've got enough problems with South Korea, with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year? Was it good? I don't know? I'm looking for — where? — can we get 'Gone with the Wind' back please? 'Sunset Boulevard.' So many great movies. The winner is: from South Korea. I thought it was Best Foreign Film. Best Foreign Movie. No. Has this ever happened before? And then you have Brad Pitt. I was never a big fan of his. He got up, said little wise guy statement.* Little wise guy. He's a little wise guy."

Now, the most interesting part of all that was saying "Sunset Boulevard."

Some people might say, no, the important thing was disrespecting South Korea or disrespecting films that are not American. But that's just his usual America-first rhetoric. We should be the best. Other countries may compete, and good for them, but we should play to win. Certainly, the film industry is a place where America has traditionally won big. So we should win every year.

Some people might say that the important thing was that when he needed to think of examples of American greatness in film, the first thing he thought of was "Gone with the Wind" — a movie that takes the Southern side in the Civil War and presents slavery in a positive light. How out of touch can you get? Or was he dog-whistling to present-day racists? Ah, "Gone with the Wind," those were the days! Is he nostalgic for old movies or for the Old South? Or is he just trying to sidetrack his critics into making weak accusations against him?

But I say the most interesting partis that after he cited "Gone with the Wind" — the most conspicuous Old Hollywood movie — he paused and said "Sunset Boulevard." Now, "Sunset Boulevard" is a great old movie. It's one of the few movies that has its own tag on this blog, one of my all-time favorites. But it is a smaller, more artsy, more film buff choice. It must be a movie he actually cares about. Does he identify with the main character, Norma Desmond? She's an aging actress, who has become sidelined, but she dreams of becoming big again, and it's all quite delusional. Think about what it means for Trump to identify with that... and then to find himself on the presidential stage.


________________

* Pitt's "little wise guy statement" — accepting the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — was: "They told me you only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week. I'm thinking maybe Quentin does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing."

IN THE COMMENTS: Temujin says something that completely resonates with me:

Does it bother you that Renee Zellweger doesn't look like Renee Zellweger anymore?

She's done something that has caused the most radical change in personal appearance since Jennifer Grey's nose job, and Jennifer Grey's nose job was clearly a nose job, so the puzzle was only about how much the nose affects the overall look of the face, not — as with Zellweger — about what was changed that caused such a radical overall change. But my question is in the post title. Possible answers:

1. No. You don't care. You don't care because you don't know this actress much or at all, and women in the business of making money through their faces are always doing one thing or another to their faces, and it really doesn't matter in the great scheme of things. What about Benghazi? What about ebola?

2. No. You don't care because Renee Zellweger made her mark as a young woman, edging out older women for the parts she got, and now the time has come for her to pay the price, to be edged out by someone younger. She's entering an entirely predictable phase, doing the various things that women do as they dig in their heels — their high heels — as time drags them over the finish line.

3. Yes. The woman always had a weird face, and I could always recognize her, which is not the way most actresses are in the movies these days. I can't enjoy movies too much when I can't tell the characters apart. Is that the same person that was in that other scene? I barely know. It's all so meaningless and generic. But Renee! Renee was somebody specific. Unmistakable. Now, she looks like every woman or maybe like that actress who used to be in a lot of things, maybe mostly as the main character's best friend, I can almost think of the name... damn... it's driving me crazy....

4. Yes. It's just terrible that women don't believe in the beauty of women as they age through the decades. Embrace the changes that come with age. Show us how that's done, if you have any character at all. Zellweger joins the chorus of celebrities who blare the message that only the young part of life has value and only unlined, unlived-in faces are worth our attention. And it doesn't even work, this plastic surgery and what-all. "There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five."

"What is your most outdated device? Why haven't you upgraded?"

"Are you proud of, embarrassed by or ambivalent about this outdated thing?"

Several answers at the link (which is via Metafilter), but this one got me:

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: “The ‘device’ that feels most outdated to me is my blog,” says Carr. “When I started the thing, in 2005, the personal blog was the iconic expression of ‘new media’; having one put you in the oxymoronic category of journalist-hipster. But the action has moved away from blogs, to the more conversational social networks like Twitter and their bite-sized bulletins. To be a blogger today makes you feel a little like Norma Desmond after silent movies were replaced by talkies: ‘I'm still big; it's the internet that got small!’”

He forgot to answer the question Why haven't you upgraded?

And, I will note, that he wrote a book. I thought the idea was most outdated. But then, the oldest thing you use might not be outdated at all. What very old technology do you use that you wouldn't disparage by calling outdated? What makes something "outdated"? Carr refers to where the "action" is. (I don't know that I care about that since I am old enough to remember the TV show "Where the Action Is.")

"Glenn Beck on the CNN 'Pit of Despair' and Why He Got Out of Cable TV."

Headline at Forbes, with the amusing correction:

An earlier version of this post quoted Beck saying the “Pit of Despair” was at Fox News. In fact, he was talking about his time at CNN when he made that remark. I’ve corrected both the article and the headline to reflect that.

Ha ha ha. Would that have been the headline if the mistake hadn't been made?

Before coming to Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. “I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, ‘I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,’” he said.*

Among his frustrations at both networks, he said, was the rigid, formulaic thinking about how to produce a talk show. “Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”

For Beck, who loves to amble around as he talks, it was an unwanted constraint. “I moved, and they couldn’t follow me,” he said. “I said to them, ‘Get me a sports director, please. Get someone with experience producing sports. Just tell them I’m carrying a ball. I think they can do it.’ But everybody in news was saying, ‘You’re supposed to stay here.’”

Even as Lucy wanted to get into show business, Glenn Beck wants to roam free.

"I'm drawing my own conclusions... My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances.... Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do."

Quotes from Naomi Wolf — author of that tome about the vagina — introduced by NYT writer Lauren Sandler with the hilarious sentence: "Looking at her bookshelves stacked with works by Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda and John Stuart Mill, she defended her research."

I knew the vagina monologued, but I wasn't really thinking about it resonating and echoing.

Another Wolfism:

“This is a time in which everybody is on the verge of a global awakening from a certain kind of torpor,” she said, eyes sparkling. “That’s why there’s this doubling down on the power struggle over the vagina. But this is a moment for women. We are going to have to reclaim the vagina as central to everything.”

Eyes sparkling... you just know Sandler wants you picturing that Norma-Desmond-slithering-down-the-staircase look of madness. Ready for my closeup. Closeup on my vagina!

It's central to everything!

"Don't get too excited, Meade. It will be this kind of kiss."

I wrote in September 2008 (before I'd met Meade in person) in the comments to a post based on the NYT headline "Obama to Dispatch Female Surrogates," which I'd said "put a picture in my head of Obama releasing an army of programmed fembots." That was some crazy "war on women" the last time around.

I love running across old byplay between me and Meade. And I also love running across these old political things that bear some relationship to what's happening today. But the women stuff was much more fascinating back then, when Obama had crushed women's dreams of the first woman President and McCain had released The Palin.

The new headline, "Obama Camp Turns to Clinton to Counter Palin," flips the image. It's not Obama, but the Obama camp -- a large, faceless group -- and now it's not a large, faceless group of women, but one particular woman, Hillary. Don't pin anything directly on Obama, and don't disrespect women by portraying them as nonindividuals.

Can you guess what got me to that old post? I'd searched my blog for the word "faceless" — trying to get to this blog post I'd written a week or so ago about the 3 times Obama called people "faceless" in "Dreams From My Father." That post followed on an inquiry into the story (from Obama's book) about how, as a boy, he'd shouted at and shoved a little girl.

There were faces then — big faces. Hillary. Sarah.

I Am Big, It's the Pictures That Got Small
Sunset Blvd. at MOVIECLIPS.com

They used to be big. It's the politics that got small.

Obama processing doubts about running for reelection.

Here's the moment in Obama's "60 Minutes" interview that struck us:



Transcription:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: ... And as Michelle reminds me, "You volunteered for this thing."...

KROFT: Have you and Michelle ever had a conversation about whether you should really seek a second term? Have there been any doubts in your mind about not running again?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No. Not because our quality of life might not be better if I were not president. Not because Michelle is so enamored with me being President. But because we both think that what we're doing is really important for a lot of people out there.

Hearing that, what stunned me was the way Obama processed the question in terms of his personal life with Michelle and seemed to reveal that he's not enjoying life as President and that Michelle isn't happy about it. Then he yanks himself out of that personal brooding and plugs in the appropriate, conventional, and utterly bland assertion that he's doing important things for people. And even that appropriate statement involves Michelle. Michelle and the "people out there."

People out there... what a phrase. It's so... Norma Desmond....

"This is where you start the movie about the hunt for bin Laden."

Okay. That's one idea. Suggest others!

ADDED: Kathryn Bigelow, director of "The Hurt Locker," has been working on a movie called "Kill Bin Laden." The idea there had been the failed effort at Tora Bora. So that's one place you could begin a movie: the battle at Tora Bora, when we thought we had him and then lost him. The center of the movie could be all the years of trying to find him, and the ending we all know very well.

That title, "Kill Bin Laden," reminds me of "Kill Bill" — which had "Vol. 1" and "Vol. 2." That title was interesting, in part, because so much else happened before "The Bride" eventually got around to Bill. I think a movie called "Kill Bin Laden" shouldn't be mainly a reenactment of the raid, much as we feel we'd like to see the movie we already see in our heads. It should have all sorts of other things about the people who worked on getting bin Laden. Show us some things we haven't been thinking about.

We have heard so many versions of the kill bin Laden. There could be a "Rashomon"-style movie, showing the raid multiple times, inviting us to think about what really happened and whether everyone is lying.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lincolntf said...

Start with a shot at the bottom of the ocean, slowly panning over a cast of crabs dispersing after finishing off what looks to be the remains of a canvas bag.

The body in the water... that's the "Sunset Boulevard" beginning.

Are we really going to watch the Oscars when we haven't seen the films?

Manohla Dargis writes:

TONIGHT, an expected 41 million Americans will tune into the 78th annual Academy Awards to watch a spectacle largely honoring films they have not seen and may never get around to watching....

There are all sorts of reasons why "Munich," along with "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Crash" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" were nominated for best picture (they're pretty good, for one) and a couple of reasons why we should care. Among the most obvious and discomfiting, however, is that Big Hollywood increasingly finds it difficult to make the kinds of high-profile movies that the industry likes to honor with its most important awards.

Well, I'm going to watch -- with TiVo to leap the longueurs -- because I like simulblogging this sort of thing. See! I simulblogged the Oscars last year. Wasn't that amusing?

The Dargis conclusion:

The crisis now facing Hollywood isn't unique to the movies; the atomization of the culture makes it hard to know what people want, particularly when they belong to a multi-everything society like ours. Still, something will be lost if Hollywood continues to downsize its ambitions and fails to make movies that connect with the mass audience, to make movies that speak to us as a unified whole rather than as a mass of self-interested egos, that give us a sense of collective identity and social cohesion. A nation of iPod-people, each staring at his or her individually downloaded film on the delivery system of his or her choice, seems a poor substitute for the oceanic feeling that comes with watching a film with a crowd, finding communion in the dark.

Yeah, well, that crowd is slurping gallons of soda and popping up to pee every 5 minutes, so spare me the old blather about communion in the dark -- which sounds like something Norma Desmond would say:

And I promise you I'll never desert you again because after 'Salome' we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!

Maybe we've about had it with being your wonderful people in the dark, communicants at your bogus church. Maybe this atomization of the culture is a good thing. We can find our affiliative connections over small things through blogging and other internet methods. And these will be much richer, better connections. Since the new movies can be made and distributed cheaply, digitally, real artists can reach out to us with film, and we will be here -- yes, with our iPods -- to listen to them.

Oh, but something will be lost? You're looking for "a unified whole rather than ... a mass of self-interested egos"? Excuse me if I -- ooh, I'm so egotistical! -- opt out of your dream, which reminds me, somehow, of all of my least favorite political schemes.

"None of us floozies was that nuts!"

Researching the update to the previous post, I wanted to track down the expression "bee-stung lips," which I knew went back to the 1920s. All signs pointed to the actress Mae Murray, "The Girl With the Bee-Stung Lips." The quote above is from her, commenting on the movie "Sunset Boulevard." What a great quote! I love the way it admits they were floozies and they were nuts! Born in 1885, she goes back to the really early days of film and, it seems, is quite forgotten, though bee-stung lips are still perceived as beautiful. I note that her lower lip exceeds her upper lip in size. Or does it? Here's a fabulous movie magazine illustration of her. Here's another. Beautiful!

Prince: "I don't run with that." First, he has the classic style of arrogance (and rightly so!):

Benjamin Disraeli: When I want to read a good book, I write one.

Prince: When I want to hear new music, I go make some.

Second, he has an opinion of the record industry:

''You know that guy who dances funny on 'American Idol'? The Asian-American kid?'' He means William Hung. ''That works for the record industry,'' he says with a laugh. ''We need somebody to release those kind of records.'' Does his implied critique include packaged popsters like Britney Spears, too? Prince begs off, not wanting to name names. Kinda. ''I mean no disrespect,'' he says. ''But I see it as my duty to school young people coming up. Lip-synchers? What does a kid -- what do other artists get out of that? I don't mind if Mariah Carey hits bad notes.''

Is he wallowing in the past?

''You know that old lady in 'Sunset Boulevard,' trapped in her mansion and past glories? Getting ready for her close-up? I don't run with that."

These quotes and much more are in a big article in the new Entertainment Weekly, which you can read here if you have a subscription. But go buy a paper copy, the one with Prince on the cover!

And Chris Rock has this to say in his new HBO show:

"Remember back in the day when we all would argue who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince...well, Prince won!"