Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:
VFX Reel of the Day:
See how much CG work went into the Oscar-nominated visual effects of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in ILM’s newly shared breakdown reel (via The Playlist):
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Cosplay of the Day:
That time a lightsaber battle broke out at Dragon Con between some Jedi, some dinosaurs and Deadpool (via Dragon Con):
Artist Juan Hugo Martinez has seamlessly inserted Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam into a DC Extended Universe scene with Batman and Superman (via Geek Tyrant):
Alternate Ending of the Day:
If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows wasn’t so set on being a kids’ movie with no violent killings, it could have ended a lot easier:
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Reworked Movie of the Day:
Remember Nine Lives, the new movie where Kevin Spacey is turned into a cat? Maybe you would have seen it if the trailers sold it as a horror movie, like this CineMash job:
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Vintage Image of the Day:
Elia Kazan, who was born on this day in 1909, directs Carroll Baker and Karl Malden for a scene in Baby Doll, which turns 60 this year:
Filmmaker in Focus:
With A Monster Calls due out at the end of this year, Jorge Luengo looks at J.A. Bayona’s trilogy of mother and son movies, also including The Orphanage and The Impossible:
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Actor in the Spotlight:
Ranker pays tribute to Tim Curry with a supercut of the actor laughing in his movies:
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Supercut of the Day:
Revisit the 1980s with this collection of old production company logos, including Cannon, Carolco and Orion (via One Perfect Shot):
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Classic Trailer of the Day:
The Battle of Algiers recently turned 50, and there’s an anniversary restoration version screening free at the Toronto International Film Festival this Friday. Watch the trailer for the 2004 re-release of the classic foreign film below.
The China team enters the stadium during the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Paralympic Games at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The games feature more than 4,300 athletes from 161 countries. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionHagen Hopkins/Getty Images
The international games featuring more than 4,300 disabled athletes from 161 countries opened in Rio de Janeiro amid reports that costs could outpace ticket sales and sponsorships, jeopardizing some aspects of the games.
But organizers say a last-minute push has boosted ticket sales and a bailout by the Brazilian government has helped save the event.
International Paralympic Committee president Philip Craven said he was notified just five weeks ago that funding for the games was tight.
“This is the worst situation that we’ve ever found ourselves in at Paralympic movement,” Craven told The Associated Press. “We were aware of difficulties, but we weren’t aware it was as critical as this.”
The AP reports that the city of Rio contributed more than $46 million and the Brazilian federal government chipped in another $30.7 million funneled through three state-run entities.
Even with that cash infusion, Paralympics officials say venues, seating, and staffing will be scaled back. But they promise no sports or teams have been cut.
Of course, they were speaking after the Russian delegation was disqualified as a result of a doping scandal. During the opening ceremonies, the Russian flag was seen in the ranks of the athletes from Belarus, in an apparent protest against the banning of the Russians.
Organizers say 1.6 million tickets have been sold, but that’s short of the 2.5 million available. Four years ago, the London Paralympics sold 2.7 million tickets, reports the BBC.
Nevertheless, for the athletes it’s all about elevating the international profile of the games.
“I don’t want the movement to plateau or become stagnant,” U.S. wheelchair basketball player Desiree Miller told the AP. Miller also competed in London.
“I want it to catch fire after Rio so by the time Tokyo comes around there’s not a person in the States or a person in the world that doesn’t know who a Paralympian is.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook discusses the company’s new wireless AirPods headphones during an event in San Francisco on Wednesday in which Apple also presented the iPhone 7. Bloomberg via Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionBloomberg via Getty Images
Apple had waited many years to send its very first tweet. It finally happened on Wednesday, with a release of a sponsored tweet, promoting the new iPhone 7: New cameras. Water-resistant. Stereo speakers. Longer battery life.”
Except — oops! — CEO Tim Cook had yet to announce the new version of the smartphone. When he finally did, he said, as always: “It’s the best iPhone that we have ever created.”
The long-running speculation about the new features on the phone proved largely true. The 7 and 7 Plus, for sale later this month, look very much like the 6 and 6 Plus, though ever-so-slightly lighter — and, yes, without a headphone jack.
“The reason to move on [is] courage,” said Apple’s Phil Schiller in revealing the change. “The courage to move on, do something new that betters all of us.”
Instead, new phones will come with special adapters that plug into the same port as a charging/data cord. But what Apple really wants you to do is buy its new $159 product: AirPods — wireless headphones that look like the buds of the regular Apple headphones but cordless — for an “effortless and magical listening experience,” as Cook put it.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, talks about the new iPhone 7 during an event to announce new products Wednesday in San Francisco. Marcio Jose Sanchez/APhide caption
toggle captionMarcio Jose Sanchez/AP
The new iPhone is also water- and dust-resistant, has a new home button that doesn’t physically click, stereo speakers, a bit longer-lasting battery, a reallyfancy camera setup (with low-light capacity and color recognition, and better zoom on the two-camera 7 Plus) and new body options in matte black and “jet black.”
These changes may seem like a far cry from significant iPhone overhauls Apple had done in the past to encourage users to buy a new device every two years. Some observers had argued this is a sign of iPhone’s maturing as it approaches its 10th birthday.
But Forrester analyst Julie Ask argues the iPhone 7 will pick up momentum after a possibly lukewarm response. “Consumers underestimate the engineering feats that the iPhone 7 brings, like the audio, camera, processing power, etc. in such a small package,” she said in a statement.
Shipping in mid-September, the new phones are priced starting at $649 for the iPhone 7 and $769 for the iPhone 7 Plus, which has a bigger screen. They will also start with a higher memory capacity of 32 gigabytes, as Apple gets rid of the 16GB option.
In other releases, the company unveiled a “Series 2” of the Apple Watch that is waterproof and includes a GPS — an appeal to the workout market of runners/hikers/bikers/swimmers/surfers, where the watch has faced persistent competition from other wearables.
The watch also gets in on the Pokemon Go craze of the summer with a game adaptation specifically for the device.
But perhaps a bigger gaming piece of news came from Nintendo, which announced that Super Mario is finally coming to the app store.
Shigeru Miyamoto, known as the father of Mario, took the stage to announce a new game called “Super Mario Run,” which you can play on the phone with one hand — “while eating a hamburger or eating an apple,” as Miyamoto said.
Shares of Nintendo, which as The Vergepoints out “has been slow to bring its iconic characters and games to smartphones,” jumped on the news. Apple’s shares didn’t see major gains.
How big a deal is the spending on drugs for rare diseases? Mark Airs/Ikon Images/Getty Imageshide caption
toggle captionMark Airs/Ikon Images/Getty Images
Rising concerns about spending on prescription drugs that treat rare diseases are overblown, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs.
“We wanted to focus on the true impact of orphan drugs,” said Victoria Divino, a senior consultant at IMS Health and an author of the study. Researchers at IMS Health, a health care analytics firm, and drugmaker Celgene Corp. looked at U.S. pharmaceutical spending from 2007 to 2013 on more than 300 drugs that had orphan approval under the 1983 Orphan Drug Act.
The Orphan Drug Act has long been considered a success for encouraging the production of hundreds of drugs for rare diseases. But the law’s very success has raised economic concerns as the number of high-priced drugs for rare diseases has grown.
The review found that orphan drug spending in the United States totaled $15 billion in 2007 and $30 billion in 2013, an increase from 4.8 percent of total pharmaceutical spending to 8.9 percent. The current study projects orphan drug spending will remain fairly stable as a proportion of total drug spending. That stands in contrast to other published reports that estimate orphan drugs will account for 20 percent of worldwide spending on drugs (other than generics) by 2020.
The rise in orphan drug spending since 2007, Divino said, was caused by an increase in the number of orphan drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The number of orphan drug approvals increased from 16 in 2007 to 33 in 2013, the analysis’ time period.
The Health Affairs article is the latest in a growing debate about the causes of high prescription drug prices and how orphan drugs may play a role. Drugs that win orphan approval have been cited for commanding premium prices, costing up to $300,000 per year or more, according to market research reports.
The Orphan Drug Act provides a seven-year exclusivity period that blocks competition and other financial incentives to companies that develop drugs for diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people.
The pharmaceutical industry’s interest in orphan drugs has escalated in recent years and, increasingly, doctors and researchers have raised questions about unintended consequences of the act.
Celgene has been one of the top beneficiaries of the orphan drug law. The company’s flagship drug Revlimid, which has orphan status for multiple myeloma and many other cancers, had sales of $5.8 billion in 2015. Evaluate Ltd., a London-based research firm, forecasts that Celgene will become the No. 1 orphan drug company in world, as measured by sales, in 2020.
“When those financial incentives become sort of an investment opportunity to take advantage of the Orphan Drug Act. That’s a huge, huge concern,” said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a national association for health insurance companies. AHIP released a paper in August that questioned prices on orphan drugs when they were being used outside of their approved orphan indication.
For the Health Affairs paper, Divino and her team narrowed their analysis to orphan drug spending on drugs when they were used only on the rare diseases they were approved to treat under the act. The researchers used a database estimated to represent 98 percent of overall U.S. sales.
“The number of orphan drugs is increasing but when we look at this line of the actual spending and the forecast as well … yes, there is growth but it’s a consistent linear trend,” Divino said.
Still, the authors’ write, “in a broader context, drug expenditures are minimal when considered as part of total health care expenditures.” Total orphan drug spending represented approximately 1 percent of total U.S. health care spending, according to the authors.
Divino said the study’s focus was on aggregate spending and they didn’t look at the effect of orphan drug prices on individual patients.
In an email statement, the pharmaceutical industry trade group PhRMA, said the study “reinforces that the overall impact of orphan medicines on payer budgets is relatively small and contrary to rhetoric, the percentage of medicines with both orphan and non-orphan indications is small.”
But AHIP and others say that not including the cost of orphans when they aren’t used to treat rare diseases skews the pricing issue for patients.
“It’s not really the true orphans we worry about. It’s about the other types of gaming and abusing the orphan drug act which drives up expenditures,” AHIP’s Krusing said.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine called on lawmakers last year to close loopholes in the act, saying the law’s financial incentives encouraged high prices and motivated companies to apply for orphan designation even when a drug is known to treat more common conditions.
The paper, published in the American Journal of Clinical Oncology, noted that seven of the top-10 selling drugs worldwide in 2014 had received orphan status. Those listed included popular drug such as Crestor, a cholesterol fighter, and Humira, for rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease.
“There are a lot of factors I think that have come up in pricing in general, but what people are getting a glimpse of is the sheer greed,” said Dr. Martin Makary, an author of the 2015 paper and professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service supported by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Follow Sarah Jane Tribble on Twitter:@sjtribble.
