Remember Occupy Wall Street? Remember how popular support for the protest soared and then dwindled as organizers proved to be disorganized and ineffectual? In his new film, The Company You Keep, Robert Redford examines why so many movements like OWS fail. "They don't always succeed, they tend to evaporate," Redford notes. "I was curious about why. And what was the cost [for] those people that so believed?"
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Shortly after outing herself as a stoner at her 19th birthday party, Miley Cyrus proved that her interests and causes are diverse...by releasing a video in which she offers her support to Occupy Wall Street. Naturally!
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Co-star Matthew Modine, promoting his short Jesus Was A Commie, explained why the notion to film the megabudget blockbuster at Occupy Wall Street was scrapped. "The wisdom of Christopher Nolan and his incredible team was that, while it seemed like a good idea to give [the protestors] an opportunity for work, to give them money, it would send a terrible message. At the end of the day, we're making a movie. What's happening down there is more important than that. To co-opt what's happening there and around the country... we didn't want to trivialize it. It was more important to respect what they're doing than to do anything that could potentially trivialize the political situation downtown." [indieWIRE]
Maybe filming background scenes at Zuccotti Park wasn't a great idea after all, or perhaps it was never really going to happen, but still: EW reports that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, which shoots this month in New York City, will not be using the Occupy Wall Street movement as a backdrop for one-percenter hero Bruce Wayne's latest shenanigans, despite speculations to the contrary. Probably a good idea, especially after the Occupy movement turned Oakland, CA into something resembling a war zone last night, tear gas and all. [EW]
Margin Call isn't the first film to peer into the moneyed, aspirationally heartless world of finance, and it's not going to be the last, but it's got a fair shot at being the one with the most masterful timing. J.C. Chandor's feature debut aims to offers insight into the mindset of bankers poised to plunge the country into the 2008 economic crisis because of their own reckless conduct, and it reaches screens as Occupy Wall Street has spread across the U.S. and internationally, fueled in part by outrage about a lack of accountability in the financial and corporate world. The film's not an indictment or a satire -- it's a tense but contemplative exploration of being on the other side of one of those mirrored skyscraper windows, of being in a precarious place of privilege, power and, most important of all, carefully guarded remove.
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The Occupy Wall Street protest movement may be loosely organized, but protesters in New York and in other cities around the country are firmly united in opposition to one faceless entity: Corporations. So how would the denizens of Zuccotti Park feel about a $250 million Hollywood studio film about a billionaire playboy hero coming to town to potentially use their protests as a backdrop?
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