April 23, 2024

SAD: Jerry Seinfeld Says the ‘Movie Business Is Over’ and ‘Film Doesn’t Occupy the Pinnacle in the Cultural Hierarchy’ Anymore: ‘Disorientation Replaced’ It.

Jerry Seinfeld is finally a movie director with the upcoming premiere of his feature debut “Unfrosted.” Backed by Netflix, the star-studded comedy is a fictional account of the creation of Pop-Tarts toaster pastries. In a new interview with GQ magazine, Seinfeld reflected on his experience jumping into moviemaking for the first time so late in his career.

“It was totally new to me. I thought I had done some cool stuff, but it was nothing like the way these people work,” Seinfeld said. “They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea.”

Asked to elaborate on a more serious note, Seinfeld continued: “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”

So what, if anything, has replaced film? “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business,” he answered. “Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”

There’s no secret to good storytelling. Give audiences flawed but admirable heroes they can identify with, and then put them through hell on the way to victory.

It seems impossible that Hollywood can’t — or won’t — remember that simple lesson, but here we are.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN DOING STRAIGHT UP REPORTAGE:

And as Jonathan Turley writes: “Deactivated:” Columbia Reportedly Blocks Jewish Professor from Access to Campus.

Meanwhile, it’s back to the (virtual) bunkers for the rest of the students and faculty there, as the demons of 1933 and 2020 converge: Columbia University faces calls for tuition refunds as school moves to hybrid classes for rest of semester in wake of anti-Israel protests.

Exit question:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT HAD A REALLY GOOD RUN: After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip. “Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms.”

The faster eZ80 — introduced more than 20 years ago — remains in production.

Incredible.

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

SKYNET SMILES, KNOWING THAT THE TERMINATOR FINALLY HAS A BEST FRIEND TO ROMP AROUND WITH: Watch: Flamethrowing robot dog goes on sale.

A US company has built a flamethrowing robot dog that is available for purchase online.

Called the Thermonator, the four-legged robot comes equipped with an ARC Flamethrower mounted on its back, which is capable of shooting jets of fire up to 30 feet.

Designed by Ohio-based firm Throwflame, the $9,420 (£7,600) robot is not advertised as a weapon, with the manufacturer suggesting possible uses include wildlife control, snow and ice removal and general entertainment.

Throwflame described its creation as the world’s first-ever flamethrowing quadruped robot dog, capable of delivering “on-demand fire anywhere”.

What could possibly go wrong?!

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S COME TO THIS:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HIDDEN COSTS: California’s Exploding Rooftop Solar Cost Shift.

Regardless of what is driving utility costs higher, their impact on rates is multiplied when customers install their own generation and buy fewer kilowatts-hours from the grid. That’s because those households – whether they are customers of the utility or of a community choice aggregator – contribute less towards all of the fixed costs in the system, such as vegetation management, grid hardening, distribution line undergrounding, EV charging stations, subsidies for low income customers, energy efficiency programs, and the poles and wires that we all rely on whether we are taking electricity off the grid or putting it onto the grid from our rooftop PV systems.

Since those fixed costs still need to be paid, rates go up, shifting costs onto the kWhs still being bought from the grid. This will be less true for systems registered after last April when compensation for new systems was made somewhat less generous, but that applies to almost none of the systems installed before 2024, which are the ones I am studying here.)

A decade ago, this was a small concern, because rooftop solar was barely a blip in the total supply picture. In 2014, the homes served by these three IOUs got less than 2% of their electricity off their roofs. Today they get about 20%. As fewer kWhs are sold from the grid, retail rates must rise even more in order to recover the fixed costs of the system.

The problem has become particularly acute in the last four years. During that time, solar capacity on houses has more than doubled at the same time that the utilities’ fixed costs have escalated dramatically due in large part to wildfires and the need for grid hardening against them.

So Sacramento and Washington have been subsidizing activity that will make supporting the electrical grid unaffordable while pushing for the electrification of virtually everything.

But wait, there’s more: California ‘throwing away’ wasted solar power may raise electricity prices. “In California, there are 47 gigawatts of solar power installed atop rooftops, equaling out to over a quarter of the state’s energy. However, during the middle of sunny spring days, the energy produced exceeds demand, meaning prices for electricity will go negative, and solar power is thrown away.”

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

QUESTION ASKED: What Happened To World War II Movies?

The year 2008 marked a curious transition in the national mood.

It was the year Barack Obama was elected president. [Pat] Buchanan published his contrarian “Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War,” claiming that the World Wars were partially the cause of the West’s decline. It was also the year Quentin Tarantino directed “Inglourious Basterds”—a brutal satire of how war films are used as a tool of warfare and propaganda.

Some combination of stress from the financial crash, Obama-era moral relativism and ascendant isolationism fundamentally changed the public’s desires for constant WWII entertainment. Maybe people felt it was backward-looking or stale or merely had their minds on the present.

As a result, the tone of the genre changed.

“The Pacific,” “Red Tails,” “Fury,” “Midway,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” “Dunkirk,” “Greyhound” and “Masters of the Air” all felt more detached, less passionate, or more cynical than their predecessors. The sweeping orchestras and valor of prior WWII projects were replaced with reflections on the horror of death and the meaninglessness of war.

This turn away from the valorization of WWII actually began in the previous decade, in large part thanks to Harvey Weinstein, who bankrolled big screen adaptations of a number of morally-questionable novels, which were invariably Oscar-bait given their sharp contrast with the industry’s summertime obsession with “blowed up real good” action movies. As I wrote in 2017 during Weinstein’s stunning fall from Hollywood superstardom:

2008’s The Reader is based on a bestselling, Oprah-approved German novel that attempts to wipe away German guilt for the Holocaust. It starred Kate Winslet as a sexy slimline version of Sgt. Schultz, who knew nothing – nothing! – while serving as a guard at a concentration camp, because she was illiterate (and apparently deaf as well). Regarding an earlier Weinstein WWII movie, as John Nolte wrote in 2010 at Big Hollywood, “For those of you who haven’t seen ‘The English Patient,’ just imagine what Satan would’ve done with ‘Casablanca:’”

This film’s appalling philosophy all comes together in the final act after Laszlo and Katharine’s wicked ways come home to roost and they find themselves stranded deep in the desert. He can walk the three days out but her ankle is broken. Having to leave her behind with only a few days’ supply of water and food, her mortality clock is ticking and after a series of complications back in civilization, our “hero” deliberately sells out the British — the West — to the Germans in order to secure the plane necessary to save Katharine. He gives the Nazis (the Nazis!) crucial maps. Afterwards, when he’s informed that this act likely caused the death of thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians, Laszlo’s reply is like something you would normally hear from a James Bond villain…

“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”

….except that rather than be chilled and repulsed by this response, we’re supposed to put finger to chin and bask in the poetic profundity of it all.

Even Steven Spielberg, perhaps feeling guilty that Schindler’s List was a bit too on-the-nose, decided to get in on the act, in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, as Mark Steyn noted:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that ‘maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered ‘one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was ‘one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still ‘one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

Saving Private Ryan isn’t an anti-war film in the sense that, say, principled pictures like All Quiet on the Western Front are. Instead, as usual with Spielberg, it’s his take on his own childhood: it’s an anti-war-film film. As far as the real war’s concerned, it seems to be too much for him to comprehend. In a few coherent interviews, he’s suggested that the war was worth fighting because it produced the baby boomers. But it’s flattering him to pretend he has any view on the war one way or another: with his customary lack of imagination, he simply cannot conceive of a world where men are prepared, quietly and without fanfare, to die for their country. Perhaps he has a point: in a narcissistic Clinto-Spielbergian culture, it’s hard to see what would now drive the general populace to risk their lives.

In that sense, Saving Private Ryan is the antithesis of Casablanca: the problems of one human being are what count; it’s all those vast impersonal war aims that don’t amount to a hill of beans. You’d have more confidence in this general proposition if Spielberg weren’t so wretchedly inadequate at conjuring vivid human beings: Hanks’s unit is a perfunctory round-up of single-trait types – one Jew, one coward, all very unmemorable. The nearest to a real human being in the film is General Marshall, not just because he’s played by the sturdy Harve Presnell but because Marshall is an actual real human being and thus the director has something to latch on to. Otherwise, Spielberg’s approach to making drama is as impersonal as Ike moving pins around the map in the

“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”

As for the aforementioned Zone of Interest, it’s a massively overrated WWII movie that merely served as the preamble for its director’s trainwreck Academy Award speech:

Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall [Jonathan] Glazer’s fiery words.

“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October—whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.

Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.

In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.

Interesting choice of pin, though:

Which answers in part the question posed by Tyler Hummel at Hollywood in Toto at the start of our post.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll