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Re: Venice Film Festival: Is Hollywood self-destructing?

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Dune Is Woke Shit

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Sep 6, 2023, 10:10:03 PM9/6/23
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Inside The Inferior Mind of The Rightist <now...@protonmail.com> wrote
in news:ud7abi$202ig$6...@dont-email.me:

> Nobody spends money for woke faggots.

https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0g9hldb.webp

This little faggot is one of the reasons Homo Hollywood is imploding.

With the release of Dune Part Two delayed, and many of the world's biggest
stars not attending the Venice Film Festival, the impact of the actors'
and writers' strikes is really set to hit home this autumn, writes Leila
Latif.
R
Returning to the Venice Film Festival towards the tail-end of the pandemic
in September 2021, a group of newly vaxxed, tested and masked film
journalists journeyed to the Lido to see a brilliant slate of films,
including sci-fi epic Dune, Campion's homoerotic western The Power Of The
Dog and harrowing feminist autobiographical tale Happening. It felt at the
time that, gratifyingly, cinema had weathered the terrible storm of the
previous 18 months, and only better days could lie ahead. Two years on,
however, and as the industry hits the Lido once more from today,
unfortunately an altogether different crisis has left it reeling.

More like this:

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– The 10 best films to watch in September

At present, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has lasted since
early May, and negotiations to end it are still ongoing, but both sides
are accusing the other of being unreasonable. To make matters more tense,
on 14 July SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild) joined the strike, and now
labour disputes involving both actors and writers have brought Hollywood
to its knees, with production suspended on the majority of its films and
television programmes.

The strikes also mean that the film festivals that populate the autumn
season will feel very different. In accordance with union strike
guidelines, the majority of Hollywood productions premiering at them will
have no actors or writers walking the red carpet or doing press. The
ramifications of this are potentially huge for some of the larger
Hollywood films like David Fincher's The Killer, with Michael Fassbender
and Tilda Swinton, and Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro,
in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan; none of those aforementioned
stars will be attending Venice, including Cooper, who despite being a
director as well as actor, will not attend, in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA.

A star-free promo trail

As Erik Anderson, editor-in-chief of AwardsWatch, which tracks Hollywood's
awards season and predicts its outcomes, tells BBC Culture, the absence of
these films' stars from their promo is extremely worrying for all
involved: "What is crucial about actors promoting their work first and
foremost is visibility. In the streaming era and the era of commercial-
free television, many audiences simply aren't aware of films and
television shows coming out until they’re here."

That's likely why two very starry films have been removed from the autumn
calendar entirely: last week, it was announced that perhaps the autumn's
biggest blockbuster Dune: Part Two, featuring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya
and Florence Pugh, would be pushed back from November to March 2024. And
before that another Zendaya film, romantic drama Challengers, from Call Me
by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, had already given up Venice's
coveted opening night slot and delayed its release to April 2024.

Dune: Part Two's release has now been moved from November to March 2024
(Credit: Alamy)

The Venice Film Festival, which is known to kick off awards season and
last year premiered major awards winners The Whale, Tár, Blonde and The
Banshees of Inisherin, is now in a tricky position. The festival claims
that, Challengers aside, its slate has remained unchanged by the strikes.
But the 80th festival, which, on top of Maestro and The Killer, is showing
new works by awards darlings Yorgos Lanthimos, Sofia Coppola, Wes
Anderson, Michael Mann and Richard Linklater, is premiering films that now
have an uncertain future. After all, these types of films benefit from
awards attention and as Erik Anderson lays out, "the SAG-AFTRA strike
stipulates that actors cannot attend awards shows so if there isn't a fair
resolution by the end of the year, the shows set for January (Emmys,
Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice) could become nothing more than a press
release".

Even without the influx of Hollywood into Scotland's capital, the
Edinburgh Film Festival found no shortage of enthusiasm for its slate –
Tamara Van Strijthem
But it's not all doom and gloom, as the strikes don't mean a wholesale
blanket ban on red carpet glamour. For one, non-US films are not bound by
the strikes, so new works from auteurs Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Pablo Larraín
and Nikolaj Arcel don't face the same restrictions. In addition to that,
interim agreements between the unions and certain US producers mean that
not all US film companies are being struck against. So not only are the
likes of A24 and Neon able to continue making films, but particular
festival-bound projects whose backers negotiated interim agreements – like
Michael Mann's Ferrari and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla – can deliver the
full Venetian premiere, press and all. When it comes to stars, that means
that the likes of Adam Driver, Jessica Chastain and Mads Mikkelsen will
still be seen in their glad rags.

And even without the full glitz and glam of US stars, film festivals have
already been thriving. This year's Edinburgh Film Festival saw some of its
most famous potential attendees unable to participate due to the strikes,
but for the festival's executive producer Tamara Van Strijthem, that
solidarity was a powerful statement. “While it would have been lovely to
welcome them, we also totally understand the importance of this industrial
action. All film festivals exist to showcase the fruits of filmmakers'
labour, so we mainly want to express solidarity with the screenwriters and
performers who are organising for a better outcome for cinema in the
future." And even without the influx of Hollywood into Scotland's capital,
the festival found no shortage of enthusiasm for its slate. "This year we
were glad that 71% of our cinema screenings were sold out including
international and local films," says Van Strijthem "showing there is a
real appetite for a broader array of cinema."

The long-term effects

But beyond the immediacy of what happens at the festivals, the knock-on
effect of the strikes is already looking deeply alarming, and will
continue to do so until a deal can be found: as well as Challengers and
Dune: Part Two moving to 2024, production has stopped on the latest
Spider-Verse and Mission: Impossible films, as well as Ridley Scott's
much-anticipated Gladiator 2. In a particularly bad stroke of luck,
strikes also reportedly shut down production on mega-hit musical
adaptation Wicked, whose first part is slated for release in November
2024, with just a few days of principal photography to go. Certainly,
there could be a stark 2024 ahead for Hollywood studios.

The most optimistic way to view the knock-on effects of the strikes would
be to hope that the absence of Hollywood studio content opens up space for
independent cinema and foreign films to fill the void. But the mainstream
US film industry could be doing irreparable damage to itself. As former
Paramount and 20th Century Fox CEO Barry Diller told CBS’s Face the Nation
programme in July, the strikes continuing, combined with other factors
such as the challenges faced by cinemas post-Covid and the huge losses
being incurred by streaming platforms, could "potentially produce an
absolute collapse of an entire industry". And no exemptions for festival
attendance can rectify that issue.

That cinema is facing such an existential threat right now is a
particularly strange state of affairs following the recent meteoric
success of "Barbenheimer", two critically adored films from visionary
directors, written with clear, unbridled creativity, and featuring casts
of talented movie stars, which strongly contrast with 2023's series of
commercially disappointing sequels and superhero franchise extensions.
Certainly, their success would appear to work in the strikers' favour –
for it suggests investing in singular talent is the path to profit. As
critic Mary McNamara wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "If the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios,
thought they could force concessions by continuing to leverage the notion
that America is out of the moviegoing business, 'Barbenheimer' proved them
wrong."

Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were released when the WGA strikes were well
underway, but their premieres coincided with the beginning of the SAG
strikes, with the Oppenheimer cast leaving the London premiere midway
through in order to join the picket lines. They had been able to do lots
of promo beforehand however, and as the last films out of the blocks
before everything changed, Anderson believes that they could reap the
rewards come awards season: "I think they were both set to do very well
but with a major competitor like Dune Part Two moving to 2024 it will make
it even easier. If any more films move, that path becomes almost
inevitable."

Even if the strikes resolve in time to allow Hollywood to resume normal
service for the Oscars et al, the damage that will have done in the
meantime could still be seismic – and the ramification for the studios
could extend far beyond Dune: Part Two's rescheduled premiere.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230829-venice-film-festival-is-
hollywood-self-destructing

Governor Swill

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Sep 7, 2023, 5:21:03 PM9/7/23
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On Thu, 7 Sep 2023 04:05:31 +0200 (CEST), Dune Is Woke Shit <du...@woke.shit.show> wrote:

It must be true because Hollywood has never had a writer's strike before.

Swill
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