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Author
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Topic: Post your random news stories here
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-31-2015 11:47 PM
quote:
Two of Japan's most iconic exports are set to team up for what is likely to be one of the summer's hottest blockbusters. But in this case, the blocks will be busted by an unlikely perpetrator. In a press conference today, Toho Studios and Sanrio, Inc. announced their partnership for the forthcoming release of Hello Kitty vs. Godzilla, which is now in post-production in Tokyo and will be released in 3-D and IMAX.
Toho's head of public relations, Sankio Yamagnarli, said: "For many years, tokusatsu and kawaii have been hugely successful cultural exports. But they've never really overlapped. By introducing Hello Kitty to middle-aged horror movie fans and Godzilla to seven-year old girls, we're confident that we can create exciting new markets for these characters."
The studio's bosses are being tight-lipped as to what filmgoers can expect, but a leaked early draft of the script offers some clues. Hello Kitty lives with her family in the shadow of a nuclear power station on the coast. When a catastrophic accident causes her to grow to 150 feet tall and projectile vomit radioactive pink slime over a 20-mile radius, scientists realize that there is only one hope to save the world: Godzilla must be summoned from the ocean once more.
A further indication of the studio's determination to appeal to western audiences is that Taylor Swift has reportedly been signed to voice Hello Kitty, with the movie's theme song Back in the Cathouse expected to top the download charts.
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Rick Raskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1100
From: Manassas Virginia
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted 04-21-2015 06:32 AM
Avalon Theatre
By John Kelly Columnist April 20 at 5:39 PM
The Avalon Theatre on Connecticut Avenue NW started out showing silent pictures, but that doesn’t mean it was silent in the auditorium.
“I think the organ was there,” Kim Abraham said as we stood backstage — well, back-screen.
John Kelly writes "John Kelly's Washington," a daily look at Washington's less-famous side. Born in Washington, John started at The Post in 1989 as deputy editor in the Weekend section. View Archive
“I think it was on this side,” said Henry Passman, pointing to the opposite side.
Henry is the manager of the Avalon, and Kim chairs the board of the nonprofit that owns it. Bill Oberdorfer, the Avalon’s executive director, was there, too. The four of us were exploring some of the unseen crannies of the theater, which opened Feb. 27, 1924, with “When Knighthood Was in Flower,” a silent movie starring Marion Davies. Val Scannell was at the organ that night.
We’d stooped low at the bottom of the auditorium to slip under the screen. There’s a proscenium arch back there and a shallow stage maybe six feet deep. You wouldn’t want to mount a big dance number up there, but it would have been fine for lectures and choral presentations, which Kim and the others think may have once been offered at the theater, which originally was called the Chevy Chase Theatre and became the Avalon in 1929.
Bill Oberdorfer, left, is executive director of the Avalon Theatre and Kim Abraham chairs the board of the nonprofit organization that owns it.
I could find no references to any lectures in The Washington Post’s archives, but I did find that a Baptist church once used the theater for services. That’s ironic, given that shortly after the theater opened, local pastors complained about its showing movies on Sunday. Emmanuel J. Stutz, the manager, insisted that he would keep doing so. People were buying tickets, after all.
Stutz, The Post wrote when the theater opened, was “typical of the younger generation of theatrical managers who believe in making the theater a community asset. This small but growing group is demanding pictures of a better quality and is reflecting public opinion on the producers, and making their influence felt.”
A “community asset.” That’s what kept the Avalon from the fate of so many neighborhood movie houses: being torn down or turned into some other kind of retail space.
“I like to say the only reason we were able to save this theater is because there’s already a CVS down the street,” Bill joked. The drugstore chain moved into many of the District’s movie theaters, including the MacArthur and the Newton.
That a similar fate didn’t befall the Avalon is because Chevy Chase residents raised money to keep it going after it closed in 2001, battered by the forces that bedeviled so many old picture palaces: the multiplex, the large-screen TV. The nonprofit renovated the Avalon and had it open again by 2003. At 91, it’s the oldest operating movie theater in the city.
As we poked around behind the screen, we saw decorative elements that would have been visible in the old days, before the screen was moved forward: plaster medallions, scrollwork, wooden screens that would have presumably covered pipe organ machinery. Hanging from the walls were fixtures marked “Kliegl Bros.” These were the famous klieg lights, stage lights of incredible power. Bill pointed out the subterranean space where blocks of ice were once stacked. In Washington’s pre-air-conditioned summers, fans blew over the ice, primitive cooling for sweaty moviegoers.
Next it was up to the projection booths. Henry has run film through projectors all over town, including at the mighty Uptown, an assignment that must be like piloting a B-52. The movie business is nothing if not technologically evolutionary, however, and just as the Avalon became a “talkie” theater in 1929, so it became a digital theater in 2013. Gone are the big projectors and clattering reels. In their place, high at the back of each auditorium, is a machine about the size of — and as sexy as — an office copy machine.
During the Avalon’s revival in 2003, Kim Abraham worked on the restoration of a ceiling mural that Dana Westring painted in the 1980s.
Still, the magic shines out the front: “pictures of a better quality.”
The Avalon’s annual benefit event is Sunday. Mark Harris, author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” will discuss iconic films with NPR’s Susan Stamberg. If you don’t want to spend $250 for the reception and program, or $50 for the program alone, you can still see some of the landmark films from 1967. This week, the Avalon is screening “The Graduate,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “In the Heat of the Night.”
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Paul Mayer
Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under!
Posts: 3836
From: Albuquerque, NM
Registered: Feb 2000
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posted 05-12-2015 05:45 PM
From NPR:
quote:
Still Playing: The Theater That Saw The Birth Of Cinema
12 May 2015
By Eleanor Beardsley
Not far from the glitzy Mediterranean film festival venue of Cannes lies another town with a connection to cinema. There are no stars or red carpet, but La Ciotat has an even longer relationship with film, and boasts the world's oldest surviving movie theater.
Audiences are enthusiastic when the lights go down at the Eden. This historic cinema house has been showing movies for the last 120 years, which makes it the world's oldest cinema still in operation.
The Eden lies smack in the middle of the tiny town of La Ciotat, and in front of the Mediterranean Sea. As the story goes, one half of La Ciotat met the other half on its velvet benches.
Municipal employee Thierry Mabily says he's a pure product of the Eden. We sneak inside the cinema while a movie's playing so he can show me why.
"It was right here on this second-floor balcony, near that last pillar there, that my mother met my father," Mabily whispers as the film starts. "The year was 1958 and the film playing was The Four White Feathers."
La Ciotat is also the setting for some of the very first moving pictures, recorded by the pioneering Lumiere brothers on their invention, the cinematograph. Building on advances of the day by other inventors such as Thomas Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumiere patented their cinematographe, the first portable motion picture camera and projector.
Trarieux says the Lumiere family built a large mansion in La Ciotat when the brothers' father, Antoine, a successful photographer from Lyon, visited and fell in love with the Mediterranean light and color. One of the very first moving pictures, Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat, is said to have astounded Parisians when they saw it in 1895.
"That's the film of my grandmother coming on vacation," says Gilles Trarieux-Lumiere, Louis Lumiere's great-grandson. "Louis Lumiere took his camera, went on the platform and filmed his daughter arriving on the train."
The Lumiere brothers sent photographers carrying their cinematographes across the globe to record scenes of daily life. They were the first to project their films to audiences, in rooms that became known as cinemas. The screenings generated widespread excitement around the new technology.
During its heyday, and before television, the Eden played to packed houses, but by the 1990s, it had fallen into disrepair and closed. The building was nearly demolished, but a committee, led by Jean Louis Tixier, raised funds to save the Eden.
"Cinema should not be watched at home on a TV screen," Tixier says. "Cinema is about people breathing and having emotions together. Cinema is a collective, human experience."
Today the Eden's programming evokes the Lumiere brothers' spirit of exploration and sharing.
An enthusiastic Cesaria Granier has come with her mother to watch a documentary about a young man who sails to France from the Bay of Bengal on a sailboat that is its own ecosystem.
"We don't usually see films like this," says the 12-year-old. "It makes you realize, with ideas and the will, you can do anything."
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-05-2015 12:49 PM
I think I've found a Darwin award nominee.
quote: Daily Mail (my emphasis)
Man killed by giant 11ft alligator after ignoring warning signs and jumping into Texas bayou TAUNTED the beast before leaping into the water
A Texas man who was killed when an alligator attacked him during a late-night swim had mocked the beast before jumping into the marina on Friday.
Tommie Woodward, 28, ignored both the desperate pleas' of his friends and warning signs put up by employees at Burkhart's Marina in Orange when he went swimming around 2.30am at the private marina.
'He said blank the alligators and thereupon jumped into the water,' Orange County Justice of the Peace Rodney Price told KFDM 6, seeming to censor himself.
Price said Woodward 'almost immediately yelled for help' after he hit the water and an unidentified woman, who was unharmed, jumped in after him.
Michelle Wright, an employee at the restaurant, saw the entire horrific scene unfold after she pleaded with Woodward not to get into the water.
'Next thing I know this girl is screaming "an alligator's got him, an alligator's got him"', Wright told KFDM 6, recalling the scene.
'I don't even know how long it was, I saw his body floating face down and then he's up there for a couple seconds and then he gets dragged back down and pulled off.'
Woodward suffered severe trauma to a limb and his body was found nearby about two hours later, according to Orange Police Capt. Robert Enmon.
'I kept...calling his name and calling his name and he just, he was dead,' said Wright about her friend. 'And it's heartbreaking.'
The owners of the marina recently had spotted a large alligator on a few occasions, and put up a sign warning people to stay out of the water, Enmon said.
They estimated that the animal was longer than 11 feet.
The reptile could have been startled early Friday or was possibly protecting its habitat, Enmon said.
Authorities said alligators in the area had also been displaced by recent heavy rain which, combined with the fact that they're in breeding season, could make them more territorial, the New York Daily News reported.
'You've got to remember that alligators are a predatory species, they are territorial, and they will take advantage of an opportunity,' Enmon said.
Woodward was the first person killed by an alligator in Texas since 1836.
Authorities are not hunting the alligator but a private effort may be launched to capture it.
Woodward had only recently come to Orange from St Louis, making the move with his twin brother to work at a shipyard.
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