This was a charade, don’t tell me CA Dems couldn’t have gotten control of Bonta if they hadn’t really wanted to. They don’t care. The fewer people have good jobs, the less ability/resources to stand against their control. Shame.

I know of a film business vendor that wanted to upgrade the electrical system in their facilities. Los Angeles red tape would make them wait 1 year and cost $100k. They did it in Texas in 4 days and $5k. You reap what you sow. My @thr column:

I've always seen filmmaking technique and form indestinguishable from content. They are one and the same, just like you can't separate words and sentences from the story in a novel. You can break them apart into elements, but that's schematics. The holistic effect is the thing.

Munich has Spielberg's most identifiable filmmaking, as in it's a series of bravura camera and edit set ups - but it is not in my favorites of his. It is a masterwork film for sure in a catalog of absolute genius work, but the movie leaves me cold. The politics are unclear other than killing is bad - not that it needs to answer anything - but it is ultimately a very dispiriting movie. You can't put this direction ahead of Schindler's List on a technical level anyways. There's a lot more risky camera/actor bonding moments in that film that won't be seen simply because it's so fluid. That's the true mark of directorial genius - when your art is so infused into the experience it is hard to extract the formality of it. Just take the long shot of Nazis trying to kill a man where Spielberg runs background extras on the malfunctioning gun as a joke...in an Auschwitz film...about a Jew being seemingly executed. I don't think there's any filmmaker in the world who could pull that off. Like how do you even fucking come up with that, and then think you can skillfully find the tone to make that scene work and not blow the film up but also question the nature of God or luck. That's not just genius, that's insanity. I love Spielberg. He will always be the greatest of all time. Munich is great, but it's not the Greatest. The moral murkiness of Munich is the greatest for adulting people in the middle of their existential crisis, who need answers to be nihilistic. But give it a couple years, have a couple children, love your family, and life becomes meaningful again. What makes something Great reminds us what makes us Great. As skillful as Munich is, the meaning is as important as the movement.

The reason you see so few creative filmmaking careers go the distance is because the level of vitriol and criticism intensifies as you move up. That bar gets lower as kids spout crap at each other. They claw each other down and kill each other's mental states in the womb. However it does seperate the strong from the weak. I'm fine to get criticism or insults. It reassures me that the Great Filter is working and teflon skin sociopaths like me will be fine. Fire away.

I Play Rocky is an allegorical representation of the movie Rocky using Stallone's real story. However in real life is triumph is unequivocal. The movie is a box office hit and he wins an Oscar. In the movie he loses the match. It's really a parallel to Rocky 2.

Someone had an objection that I described Apollo Creed in the first Rocky as a "scary black guy." Another disagrees that Rocky triumphed over him because he lost the match. First, Rocky spends the whole movie thinking he may die in the ring. Apollo Creed describes Rocky as a "snow white underdog" that he'll beat up in three rounds. He purposely race baits the Italian vs black guy angle in the media for money. He's loudly black and he's scary on purpose. He's the damn antagonist. Second, Rocky loses but wins. It's literally the point of the movie. Do people actually watch movies or do they just reimagine details to reflect their political fantasies?

‘CLICK’ by #JISOO# debuts at #3# on YouTube Global Weekly Top Music Videos chart and ranks in 55 countries with 30.98M views, recording the highest-debuting song by a K-pop soloist this year.

The film festival circuit is broken because of the horror nerds. These dopamine chasers now inflict their limbic system on every film, cheering for lizard brain human suffering. Combine that with one sided political gatekeeping, a filmmaker on a festival podium is like a town square Inquisitor - aiming to vivisect as entertainment under the guise of moral superiority. It's why naked old women humiliation rituals like The Substance are hyped up into Greatest Movie Ever territory while doing their circuit, attracting a combination of prosthetic fetishists, convoluted feminism, and theater laugh exhibitionists. Meanwhile, the movie that seems to work the best at TIFF this year is I PLAY ROCKY - a studio movie from Amazon that is not an indie needing distribution at an Independent Film Festival. While the independent filmmakers must placate gore junkies who perverted the culture into medieval public executions, the studios are free to make emotionally cathartic material. The irony is their movie is about a making movies when movies were good, and also an independent movie about a white guy that that triumphs over a scary black guy. Try to get that into TIFF in 2026. It's hard to get an honest audience out of these things anymore. The gore junkies perverted it with the aura of a public execution with the veneer of respectability. Everyone's lying.

Don't know why Zack Snyder went to TIFF to premiere his movie. Unless he films himself giving Mark Carney a life saving blood transfusion while singing river to the sea, he's never going to win that audience over.