The Burnt Orange Heresy is good but Sean Burns explains how Sony Pictures Classic’s theatrical-only roll-out, and critics not addressing it, is evil:
It depressed me this week to watch how many of my fellow critics have cautiously exempted themselves from this conversation. Colleagues whose actual job description is telling people whether or not they should go see a movie are now clamming up and claiming that it’s not their place to tell people whether or not they should go see this particular picture. Part of it is presumably my profession’s usual, mealy-mouthed obeisance in exchange for access. …So I guess there’s some kind of irony here in that “The Burnt Orange Heresy” is about Jagger’s sinister culture vulture blackmailing a compromised critic to create a phony narrative that will make them both millions, even if innocent people have to die for them to pull it off.
Alamo Drafthouse is evil and shitty in pretty much every way imaginable, Abby Olcese and Brock Wilbur report on the awfulness of the Kansas City location.
Richard Pepper says he felt the no talking policy was enforced by management in a way that specifically targeted films with majority Black audiences….Selena says she witnessed targeted harassment by management. “We’d be there for any Tyler Perry movie, or especially Straight Outta Compton,” Selena says. “Not only were we told to kick out individuals without a single warning, the management would get excited for this. I remember two managers bragging over how many people they kicked out of Straight Outta Compton, and the night manager saying ‘Oh, I bet I’ll get more.’”
The FAR is led to believe that one or two people around here like a TV series about corrupt cops. So to evil up a bit more, we preset the tale of Baltimore’s real life Strike Team Gun Trace Task Force. D. Watkins at Salon talks to reporters Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg:
They stole $200,000 from one guy that they were illegally tracking. They followed him, they got his keys, they broke into his house. Then they got a warrant after they’d already been in there, they broke open a safe, and filmed themselves breaking open the safe after they’d already stolen the money, to make it look legitimate. So they’re targeting really big-time people like that, but they’re also robbing homeless people on the street.
Jeff Maysh for Bloomberg Business tells the story of a 1992 Pepsi promotional stunt in the Philippines that promised a million pesos to one lucky winner and the deadly fiasco that followed an erroneous printing of 600,000 winning bottlecaps:
As days turned into weeks and then months, some 10,000 claimants filed suits demanding money. Molotov cocktails crashed into Pepsi factories and dozens of delivery trucks, their drivers dousing the flames with 7 Up. The Pepsi-Cola Hotshots basketball team changed its name to the 7-Up Uncolas. Executives began traveling with bodyguards, and the company moved American employees out of the country, save for one who’d worked in Beirut. “We were eating death threats for breakfast,” Vera, the marketing director, later told a reporter. At a riot in Manila, a 64-year-old protester named Paciencia Salem, whose husband had died of heart failure during a march, told a journalist, “Even if I die here, my ghost will come to fight Pepsi.”
Who could possibly vanquish all this evil? Leave it to Scott Pilgrim, whose film adaptation gets the oral history treatment from Entertainment Weekly on its tenth anniversary:
[Edgar Wright:] Usually, when you have studio meetings, you want to mention movies that are hits. Or maybe it’s not a good idea to mention only foreign films. With Scott Pilgrim, the only things that I could think of that were comparative in terms of the style were Amelie and Kung Fu Hustle. You know, both beloved films but not necessarily the two films that you’d mention in a big studio meeting.
