Only the smart ones? I don't think you need to be Steven Hawking to figure that out.
"Charlize’s friends sound like they mean well, but when your friend is Stage-10 dickmatized to a raging deep-fried asshole like Sean Penn, you need to do a lot more than urge them to think twice about getting married. You need to book them an appointment with an old timey hypnotist who can wipe their memory clean of his angry squished nutsac of a face. And if that doesn’t work, you force her to watch Shanghai Surprise, Clockwork Orange-style, over and over and over until the mere sight of his face makes her shudder with second-hand embarrassment."
"4. Cars
Back when the Beach Boys wrote Little Deuce Coupe in 1963, there was a whole genre called “Car Songs.” Nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find someone under 35 who knows what a “competition clutch with the four on the floor” even means.
The sad fact is that American car culture is dying a slow death. Yahoo Finance reports the percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds with a driver’s license has plummeted since 1997 and is now below 70% for the first time since Little Deuce Coupe’s release. According to the Atlantic, 'In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.'"
(See the other article linked just below for the specific trend involving convertibles.)
7. Weddings
"Getting hitched early in life used to be something of a rite of passage into adulthood. A full 65% of the Silent Generation married at age 18 to 32. Since then, though, Americans have been waiting longer and longer to tie the knot. Pew Research found 48% of boomers were married while in that age range, compared to 35% in Gen X. Millennials are bringing up the rear at just 26%."
"Convertible sales have fallen 44% since 2004, and automakers have been significantly scaling back the number of models that are even offered. Data recently released from Experian Automotive indicates that the convertible is largely now a toy purchased by the rich."
"Naturally, all the Euro celebrities in their millennium long anti-Semitic bubbles are demanding Gaza be set free, just as soon as they can find it on a map."
Here's one more example of why Hollywood is becoming increasingly more interested in the international market:
"In only a few weeks, Paramount's Transformers: Age of Extinction has become the top-grossing film of all time in China, earning north of $300 million. What's more impressive is that Age of Extinction cost no more than $3 million to $5 million to market to Chinese moviegoers -- a stark contrast to the $100 million prints-and-advertising spend in North America."
"Why must we immediately criticize women for their looks? That seems sexist and shallow. If Lindsay were sober enough to speak, I’m sure she’d ask just to be judged on her work. And when you asked her what that was, she’d pretend not to hear you as she raced toward the water with her right tit bouncing up and down atop her rib cage like a tethered paddle ball."
"It’s fine to have girls in roller skates talking about tampons, but god forbid we have a dry vagina — mine’s not dry, just for the cute camera men out there."
"In one of their craziest scouting experiences, the Minnesota Twins have reached a deal with a 24-year-old pitching prospect who has thrown 100 mile per hour fastballs but has never been drafted.
Brandon Poulson was pitching earlier this month for the (amateur) Healdsburg Prune Packers. Now, the Twins are about to give him $250,000."
I don't agree that all of these were gratuitous. In at least two cases they were essential to establish a point or a specific POV, or to maximize the dramatic impact of a revelation: Sixteen Candles and Just One of the Guys. If you contend that the nudity is not integral to Just One of the Guys, you'd have to apply the same logic to Crying Game, and it makes no sense in either case, because film is a visual medium, which means that showing something is almost always the most effective and dramatic means to communicate. Sure, she could have showed up at his doorstep in women's clothes, but that would have been inferior storytelling and would have been totally lacking in drama and suspense. Her unexpected flash was a great cinematic moment in an otherwise forgettable film.
In some of the exploitation films mentioned, I'm not sure that you can argue that the nudity was gratuitous, since nudity itself was pretty much the point of the movie or at least an important part of the film's "guilty pleasures."
A perfect example of genuinely gratuitous nudity would be that scene between Nadine Velazquez and Denzel Washington at the beginning of Flight, since it is completely irrelevant to the film's point or central plot, and does nothing to establish character. Mind you, I'm not arguing that the scene should not have been there, or that the scene should have been done with suggestion rather than explicit nudity. I think gratuitous nudity is a good thing, or at least it can be a good thing, because I go to movies to be entertained and to see things I enjoy. Nadine's naked body certainly fit the bill.
The Kodak story is one of the saddest in corporate history. The company has its corporate HQ and primary operations in my home town of Rochester, New York. At the peak of the film giant's success, some thirty years ago, Kodak employed more than 60,000 people in the Rochester area. That number dropped to 3,500 when the company filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11.
Unfortunately for the filmmakers who still like 35MM film, Kodak is the only company that still makes it - and they want to close that division. Tradition-minded filmmakers would still like to have the choice between film and the new digital technology.
