vijay subramaniam

Tumba Dooraswami Stadium

I think it is very likely, if not probable at this point, that BACKROOMS will open above the second frame of THE MANDOLORIAN AND GROGU and send shockwaves across Hollywood boardrooms around what people *actually* want to see right now.

Low budget Alien

New poster for ‘SCARY MOVIE 6’. In theaters on June 5.

Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avary on what makes one a master storyteller: "I believe that when people go to movies they want to see the hero. I’ve long explored the anti-hero in films, and as I’ve grown older and kind of examined how people pattern off of movies that they see. I’ve started to kind of alter the kind of movies that I want to make. Look, revenge and wrath, that is the bread and butter of cinema, and you can be a young filmmaker and make a movie about revenge and it can be salacious and everything and fire endorphins and the serotonin levels jump. And you get called a master for making this. But a real master makes a movie about forgiveness. It’s really, really difficult to do." Is he right?

Water day

If the son isn't named Michael C. Jordan, I'm going to be very disappointed.

$33.1M opening day with zero green screens. Read that again. Project Hail Mary cost $200 million to make. Lord and Miller built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a practical set. Thousands of physical buttons, hundreds of real screens, a hatch modeled after ISS designs. The alien, Rocky, is a full animatronic puppet designed by Neal Scanlan, the creature shop legend behind the best Star Wars practical work. Ryan Gosling acted against a real puppet in every single scene. The movie has 2,018 VFX shots. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to Avatar: Fire and Ash, which ran over 3,500. The difference: Avatar builds the world digitally and asks the audience to believe it. Project Hail Mary builds the world physically and uses VFX to clean up wires, remove puppeteers, and paint in space backgrounds. One approach creates spectacle. The other creates presence. This is a $200 million bet against the last 15 years of Hollywood production logic. After Avengers: Endgame, the industry standardized around green screen stages and digital environments because it was faster and cheaper per shot. Studios could reshoot entire sequences in post. The tradeoff was invisible until it wasn't: audiences started describing blockbusters as looking like "video games." Snow White's $42M opening. The Marvels at $46M. Quantumania. Ant-Man built on a soundstage that looked like it. Lord and Miller went the opposite direction and spent more money on physical construction than most studios spend on entire VFX pipelines. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer who shot Dune, lit the Hail Mary with practical lights so the camera could move freely through real corridors. When Gosling floats in zero-g, that's wire work, not simulation. When he touches a panel, it's a real panel. Guillermo del Toro saw the film and called the commitment to practical sets and puppets "a goal, an aspiration, and a commitment. Especially now." The "especially now" is doing all the work in that sentence. He's talking about an industry where the default response to a $200M budget is to minimize physical production and maximize digital flexibility. Project Hail Mary did the opposite and just posted the biggest non-franchise opening day in domestic box office history. The audience can tell. They've always been able to tell.

It’s a privilege to make a movie. A bigger one to do it with your best friend. Bigger still to have so much help from so many brilliant artists and friends old and new. But the biggest privilege of all is when people you’ve never met give you their time and attention and take a seat. Without that generosity a film cannot exist. Thank you, friends. Thank you strangers. Hope you love it.

PROJECT HAIL MARY in IMAX 70mm, taken by projectionist Taylor Umphenour. This is what the movies were made for.

Carlos Alcaraz bag in Miami : youngest ever to win the 4 of them did he steal this bag from Steffi Graf ? big yikes from Alcaraz and the bag brand for erasing tennis history… not a good look

Official trailer for ‘LORNE,’ the untold story behind the creator of SNL. In theaters April 17.

Education. That’s the Portuguese flag sir.

Today, we're introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings. We live in a world of always-on listening devices. Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations. With Deveillance, you will @be_inaudible.

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” - Desmond Tutu

Marlon Wayans says ‘Scary Movie 6’ is going to “cancel the cancel culture.” “What we’re trying to do is bring back laughter. This is about bringing back comedy the way it used to be. I think the only way to do it is you have to cancel the cancel culture.” (Source: ew.com/marlon-wayans-…)

It should be the last week of February

Galgotia university’s final year project (that actually works) to catch returning rockets It’s called Gravity Arresting Launch Grade Orbital Trapping Indigenous Apparatus (GALGOTIA) Proud moment for humanity 🙌

An elderly woman in Kozhikode, Kerala, bravely stopped a scooty rider from misusing the footpath and sent him back to the road. Her civic sense and determination truly deserve appreciation.

IN BRUGES was released 18 years ago today. Acclaimed as one of the great black comedies of the century and the film that kick started the McDonagh/Farrell/Gleeson triumvirate, the making of story is as beautiful as the city it’s set in… 1/34