A Cheaper Shade of Red (Carpet)

"As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their cars, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit."

—JG Ballard in Super Cannes

Cannes, France: stronghold of the xenophobic right all year long, kind host of the clergy of world cinema for a few glamorous days which this year are running the risk of being slightly less glamorous...
The jewelry due to be loaned to stars walking the red carpet has in fact being stolen, report Rhonda Richford and Gary Baumfor for the Hollywood Reporter.

"Chopard jewels worth more than $1 million have been stolen at the Cannes Film Festival, local police confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Friday. The jewelry was stolen from the safe in the Suite Novotel Cannes Centre room of a Chopard employee, an American, overnight."

#CannesThievesFestival

How the CIA Helped Disney Conquer Florida, Illegally

"Disney was a vicious anti-Semite and hater of communists - the creator of the world's greatest dreams of childhood who had never really known his own."

- JG Ballard


T.D. Allman over at the Daily Beast shares an except from his book Finding Florida revealing how "with advice from former CIA operatives and lawyers, Disney bought up the land for Florida’s Disney World and orchestrated a unique legal situation—and set up an unconstitutional form of government." [...] "Those who were there never forgot the day Disney inaugurated what truly would be a magic kingdom in Florida – magically above the law. The Governor and his Cabinet came down from Tallahassee. TV crews were in attendance, along with Florida's most eminent civic leaders. Right on schedule, the curtains parted. On the screen, Walt Disney gave his much beloved, self-deprecating smile, then announced that in Florida he was going to create a new kind of America, not just a theme park." [...] "A month before he died Disney confirmed it was all a trick. There would "be no landowners, and therefore no voter control," Disney responded, when asked how he planned to maintain control."

Liberal Screens, Illiberal Wages

Rowenna Davis over at the New Statesman reports on the unhappy conditions of Curzon Cinemas workers:

"The popcorn is gourmet and the folding seats are deep, thick and blue. Coutts cards are common, free-thinking principles are a must and Petis Chablis is £8.50 a glass. The Curzon is more than a cinema. It’s a statement of identity.
But for the staff who put in the shifts, the Curzon means something different. Short staffed and short-changed, the young workers propping up these cinemas are stagnating on poverty wages and zero-hour contracts. They man the box offices, staff the bars, clean the screens, support Q&As and cash up – but they can’t afford the wasabi peas they serve. On £6.62 an hour, it would take them the best part of two days to afford a bottle of one of the finer wines behind their counters."

The World Trade Center According to JG Ballard

"The vast commercial, industrial, bureaucratic organizations of the world that virtually run this planet and define everyday reality have no time for the individual, which is inevitable. It isn't necessarily a deliberate callousness. If you design a hundred-storey office block, whatever it is - the World Trade Center, for example - you put in the best possible ventilation system. But if the damn ventilation system conks out, about twenty thousand people are going to be suffocated. I won't say that this becomes an 'acceptable risk'; it's rather like the casualties on our roads. There is a built-in tolerance that is the effect of these systems." (JG Ballard interviewed by Jeremy Lewis in 1991)

"The World Trade Center has gone, but the shadows of the twin towers seem to lengthen [...] On the one side lies a fanaticism unrestrained by reason, and on the other a religious and self-important America, determined to remake the world in its own image, a comic-book culture driven by ruthless technologies." (JG Ballard in the New Statesman, 2002)

"[9-11] was a scene that had been rehearsed again and again, in US comic books and disaster movies - images of skyscrapers and aircraft flying into them. Whether intentionally or not, the 11 September hijackers were using our own deepest dreams of self-destruction...
11 September, in addition to the enormous human tragedy, was a raid on the collective unconscious of the Western mind." (JG Ballard in the Independent on Sunday, 2003)

Zero Dark Thirty

Is Kathryn Bigelow going to ("objectively") waterboard Sylvester Stallone for having sided with muslim fundamentalist in Rambo III?

#HistoryMadeinHollywood

On the Importance of Film Criticism

Oftentimes commoners, unfamiliar with the masturbatory pleasures of film criticism, ask themselves what the f*** is criticism for and who f***ing cares about what reclusive individuals have to say about a given film.
Well, the above video will dispell any residual doubt regarding the importance, dare I say, necessity of film criticism. It will also convert the skeptics and galvanize film critics to continue in their vital struggle to make sense of the screen. Enjoy it, seriously!

The Spirit of 2012

In what felt an almost mocking development, Steve Jenkins, the BBC head of film acquisition renowned for his support of independent cinema, has been made redundant as a result of the corporation’s ‘Delivering Quality First’ initiative. Delivering Quality First somehow did not make the headlines...