Despite the minor controversy sparked by product placement in its made-for-China scenes, “Iron Man 3″ garnered almost $21 million in the Chinese box office, topping the one-day sales record set by “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in 2011.From the Hollywood Reporter:Online reactions to the film have been largely positive, but bloggers appear united in their consternation of the deliberate product placement that sees new a character named Dr Wu (played by mainland Chinese actor Wang Xueqi) consume a [milk] carton of Gu Li Duo. Not that audiences outside mainland China will get a glimpse of this, though: this scene is part of the film’s China release, a version which is four minutes longer than the normal cut seen everywhere else in the world.”Transformers 4″ is the next Hollywood studios film expected to follow the similar model of dual version releases.Continue Reading… … Read More
Must-see morning clip: Visiting the 9/11 museum
“60 Minutes’” Lesley Stahl went underground, 7 stories below ground zero at the tip of Manhattan, to give audiences a detailed look at the 9/11 museum, which is still being constructed.”I think any American that walks into this space is going to feel the emotion,” she told 60 Minutes Overtime. “It’s church-like. I felt the same feelings you feel in a cathedral,” she said.On what you will experience inside:”First of all, you’re going to be thrust back. You’re going to hear voices of people talking about what they were doing at that moment because all of us remember what we were doing at that moment. And then you’re going to see all the faces–3,000 faces–and it’s overwhelming to see the array of people.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Everything you were afraid to ask about “Upstream Color”
It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that a science-fiction relationship drama depicting the life cycle of a neurotoxin-cum-immortal force that passes from nematode to human to pig and back again might get audiences confused.What’s surprising is that it has them applauding.“Upstream Color,” an at-first-blush incomprehensible movie by “Primer” filmmaker Shane Carruth, has earned qualified raves since its first screening at Sundance this year. Said Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy:“The experience of watching the film, especially this first section, is highly visceral and sensuous; the images possess a crystalline clarity that is exquisite, and they’re dispersed in rapid rhythmic waves[...] All this will seem profound to some and mean nothing to those who never got algebra.”Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir struck a similar note:“I was immediately drawn in by the mysterious, meticulous world of vision, sound and sensation Carruth creates, with its blown-out digital color scheme and intimate focus, which simultaneously seems to be contemporary America and also an alien zone of disconnection and isolation.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Hollywood eyes Chinese audiences in latest movie trailers
China is not expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest film market until 2020, but it seems that Hollywood movies have already begun catering to a growing Chinese audience.Most recently, the makers behind the anticipated third-installment of the Marvel superhero series “Iron Man,” which was partially shot in China, announced that a different version of the film will be released, and it will differ from what audiences outside of China will see. The Chinese version of the trailer, which can be seen above, also differs from the movie’s American trailers, as it more prominently features Chinese actors and settings.Typically, when China releases its own version of a Hollywood movie, it means the film did not pass the sometimes-arbitrary standards of the nation’s media censorship group, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which is notorious for censoring anything that could be vaguely interpreted as offensive to China.Continue Reading… … Read More
I swallow my fear
Like scores of other Americans, I suffer from panic attacks, or as my insurance forms call it, Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I call it “the Panics,” since that gives it a zippy, old-fashioned flavor. I can’t pinpoint an exact cause, but it could be related to the fact that I’m Jewish, so I have a genetic propensity for ajeda, or that I’m a World Trade Center survivor, or that I grew up with a mentally ill and physically abusive brother. All of which add up to a perfect storm of anxieties, if I do modestly say so myself.What may be unusual about my anxiety is that I don’t fear people. I thrive on their company, and I’m more at home outside of my apartment, which is probably one of the reasons I love my job so much. I largely make my living as a professional sideshow performer, wherein I eat fire, swallow swords and escape from straitjackets for paying audiences. Oddly, I find the life-threatening aspect of my performance calming and joyous. Somehow, being a daredevil on occasion helps me feel more normal.Continue Reading… … Read More
Nick Gillespie Q&A with Hillsdale Collegian: “Live Your Life as a Work of Art.”
I recently spoke at Michigan’s
Hillsdale College, where
among other things, I gave a talk about
how the baby boomer generation is screwing over today’s
youth.
I also gave an interview with the excellent college paper there,
in which we discussed everything from gay marriage to Rand Paul to
Ayn Rand to what college students might do to prepare themselves
for the post-graduation world. Snippets:
Hayek or Mises?
I would have to say Hayek. What I like about Mises is his
axiomatic beliefs about certain things, but what I prize about
Hayek is his emphasis on the limits of knowledge. This seems to be
a really important concept that is constantly forgotten by people
in charge….
[A] controversial person here is Ayn Rand. What do you
think of her message?
I’m not a devotee of Ayn Rand. But what stands out about
Ayn Rand is that she and Jack Kerouac are the only fiction authors
from the 1950s who still have mass audiences that sell hundreds of
thousands of copies a year and rock people’s worlds. Many of the
questions that she raised are still relevant today. She probably
had as big of an effect on the left as on the right, foregrounding
individualism. One of her characters says “I’ll never live for
another person,” and, on a certain level, that’s grotesque for
anybody who is a parent. On another level, saying that in a world
of big government and big business, that’s a powerful
statement….
The title of your talk is
“Tonight you’re young, tomorrow you’re unemployed.” What should
young people do professionally and personally to handle
this?
Students today are much more professional than they used to be.
That’s mostly a good thing, but often there’s a sense that
everything has to be programmatic. I think I benefitted ultimately
from not being like that; it was just the world I was born into.
The best thing you can do is recognize that you should live your
life as a work of art. You should do things that are interesting to
you. You should follow what you find interesting and figure out how
to pay for it. ;
Read the whole thing.
And let me rush to say that it’s pretty freaking awesome to live
in a world where a college paper is posing the question, “Hayek or
Mises?”
When it comes to giving guidance to today’s youth, as the
ghostwriter of an advice column for Alyssa Milano back in my
Teen Machine heyday, I am required by common decency (and a
couple of court orders) to warn people that I am in way qualified
to do so. … Read More
Ghost towns of the Web
In this week’s installment of slimy games that scamster Web publishers play, AdWeek’s Mike Shields delivers a fascinating bit of reporting that fully delivers on its great headline: “Meet the Most Suspect Publishers on the Web: The rise of ghost sites, where traffic is huge but humans are few.”It’s a lesson in state-of-the-art online flim-flam, the generation of billions of advertising impressions and clicks through bot-generated traffic.Increasingly, digital agencies and buy-side technology firms are seeing massive traffic and audience spikes from groups of Web publishers few people have ever heard of. These sites — billed as legitimate media properties — are built to look authentic on the surface, with generic, nonalarm-sounding content. But after digging deeper, it becomes evident that very little of these sites’ audiences are real people. Yet big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on these properties.Continue Reading… … Read More
