Octopus Overlords

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:45 pm Bruce Willis has started appearing in everything for which the check clears.

hepcat wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:10 am

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:45 pm Bruce Willis has started appearing in everything for which the check clears.

Christ yes. I was just going to mention that myself. It is truly amazing how many movies he's appeared in the last couple of years. They're almost all straight to video type stuff with smaller names. He must really need the money.

I read somewhere that sometimes he just appears briefly in them so they can put his name on the box and his scene in the trailer.

Edit: a quick look at IMDb shows about 20 films either finished or in production since the beginning of 2021.

I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:45 pm Bruce Willis has started appearing in everything for which the check clears.

I first heard of Emmett last September, while speaking with Adam Champ, an executive at Daro Film Distribution in Monaco. From his office in Côte d’Azur’s sun-drenched tax haven, Champ explained an inglorious but profitable slice of the film industry that is built around a certain category of actor — the kind of action stars and leading men who once ruled Hollywood and now make very good money appearing in very bad movies, most of them relegated to streaming services, video on demand (VOD), and late-night television in Europe and South America.

Among these actors are John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, and Sylvester Stallone. But perched atop the ignominious heap is Bruce Willis, whose prolific partnership with EFO Films, one of the biggest players in this niche of the industry, results in as many as four or five movies each year.

“With Bruce Willis, there’s almost a model for how he features in these movies,” Champ theorized. “One of my clients calls it a ‘geezer teaser’: You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie. But he’s actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically.”

In most of Willis’s movies for EFO, “sporadic” would be a generous appraisal of his presence. The actor clocks just seven minutes of screen time in Hard Kill, and in Extraction, he spends less than nine minutes onscreen. In the home-invasion thriller Survive the Night, audiences get almost ten minutes out of the actor, even if they aren’t his best.

The audience being teased by these brief performances seems to consist largely of men older than 35 who spent their teen years renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from their local video stores. In that era, as Bertrand Reignier, another Daro Films executive, puts it, action stars like Seagal and Van Damme made relatively cheap movies “with nothing to sell them except for the artwork on the box and maybe an action-packed trailer.” This demographic has now helped fuel the multibillion-dollar VOD market, a virtual replica of a Blockbuster Video.

What began as a traditional documentary about the legendary band King Crimson as it turned 50, mutated into an exploration of time, death, family, and the transcendent power of music to change lives; but with jokes.

In the Court of the Crimson King is a dark, comic film for anyone who wonders whether it is worth sacrificing everything for just a single moment of transcendence. It explores the unique creative environment of King Crimson, one in which freedom and responsibility conspire to place extraordinary demands on the band’s members - only alleviated by the applause of an audience whose adoration threatens to make their lives even harder. It's a rewarding and perilous space in which the extraordinary is possible, nothing is certain, and not everyone survives intact.