March 10, 2017

No Image

Best of the Week: SXSW Was Previewed, New 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Details Were Revealed and More

The Important News

Star Wars: Michael K. Williams , Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, Rough Night, Kong: Skull Island, Buster’s Mal Heart, Geostorm and The Lost City of Z.

TV Spots: Ghost in the Shell.

Behind the Scenes: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice visual effects reel and Logan ADR clip.

Movie Clips: Smurfs: The Lost Village.

Movie Pics: Mary Poppins Returns, Jurassic World 2, The Predator and Thor: Ragnarok.

Music Videos: “Beauty and the Beast” from Beauty and the Beast.

Viral Videos: Michael Fassbender stars in a fake Alien: Covenant commercial.

Movie Parodies: Get Out gets really political.

Mashups: Forrest Gump meets The Help meets Jeff Sessions.

Easter Eggs: Logan.

Casting Interpretations: David Harbour as Cable, Janelle Monae as Domino and Zazi Beetz as Domino.

Remade Trailers: Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the style of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and sweded Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Supercuts: Extraordinary women, heist movies and a tribute to Bill Paxton.

Short Films: After Sophie.

Our Features

Film Festival Preview: We highlighted the movies we’re dying to see at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival.

Interview: Jordan Vogt-Roberts on the influences for Kong: Skull Island and how it connects to Godzilla.

Screening Report: We celebrate the acclaim of Beauty and the Beast and its inclusiveness.

Comic Book Movie Guides: We make the case for Logan being X-Men‘s The Dark Knight. And we acknowledge how whoever plays Cable will also play Stryfe.

Home Viewing: Our guide to everything hitting VOD this week. And our guide to all the best new indie and foreign films on video.

and

MORE FROM AROUND THE WEB:

Let’s block ads! (Why?)


No Image

Falling Stars: Negative Yelp Reviews Target Trump Restaurants, Hotels

The Trump Grill at Trump Tower in New York City in December. Now that Donald Trump is president, online reviews of his hotels, restaurants and other properties have become much more politicized.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

hide caption

toggle caption

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

After purportedly stopping in at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach resort, not long ago, a visitor went straight to Google’s online review site to complain about the restaurant ambience.

“Very loud and distracting dinner atmosphere,” the visitor noted. “I just wanted a quiet peaceful meal, but White House staff and diplomats at the next table kept shouting out classified information.”

People who dislike Trump politically have found a new way of venting their fury and in the process perhaps hitting him in his wallet: They can leave a lousy review on sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google.

Of course there are also plenty of pro-Trump reviews from Trump fans. But since Trump’s nomination at the Republican convention last summer, negative reviews on Yelp and Google have begun outpacing positive reviews by a factor of 6 to 4, says Signpost, a marketing software company.

Some of the reviews are funny; others, just nasty.

“Not a pleasant experience,” noted one person about the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York. “I felt like I was going to be groped the whole time.”

“The person who runs these hotels is a giant racist which is pretty ironic for someone who is Orange-American. Would not recommend,” said another.

It’s not just that some of the reviews are snarky. More and more users have also been giving Trump’s U.S. hotels and restaurants one-star ratings, Signpost says.

“In February, in particular, we saw a spike in one-star reviews. There were about 160 one-star reviews written for Trump properties in the month of February alone,” noted Stuart Wall, Signpost’s founder and CEO.

For the Trump Organization, which didn’t return requests for comment for this story, that’s a potential cause for concern.

People who don’t even read reviews nevertheless may rely heavily on ratings systems to choose hotels and restaurants, research suggests. In fact, many people shopping for hotels begin by looking at the highest-ranked properties, which puts those farther down the list at a disadvantage.

Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca studied the impact of a Yelp ratings downgrade on restaurants in Seattle between January 2003 and October 2009.

“For independent restaurants, Yelp ratings matter a lot,” he concluded. “A one-star increase maps to about a 5 [to] 9 percent increase in sales.” He cautions that the impact is not as strong for chain restaurants and for well-known brand names, which certainly includes Trump.

For its part, Yelp tries to protect the integrity of its content by using humans to weed out politically tinged reviews.

For example, a banner is now posted on the page for Trump SoHo New York warning, “This business is being monitored by Yelp’s support team for content related to media reports.”

The site also uses software that “takes a whole number of factors into account as to whether we should trust or rely on that content, based on how much we know about that user,” says Vincent Sollitto, Yelp senior vice president.

But not all review sites use such software and even if they do, no program can screen out all politically motivated content.

Still, all is hardly lost for the Trump Organization, Luca says.

He notes that the company has talked about building more properties in the U.S. and abroad, and recently doubled the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee. That suggests that for Trump, the benefits of being president still outweigh the disadvantages.

“It seems that at least Trump thinks that the benefits of the brand-building of being president [have] a bigger effect than any negative effect that might be coming through an influx of negative reviews,” he says.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)


No Image

Trump Chooses Dr. Scott Gottlieb To Head Food And Drug Administration

Scott Gottlieb, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, speaks to reporters at the Reuters Health summit in New York in 2005.

Chip East/Reuters

hide caption

toggle caption

Chip East/Reuters

Updated 7:30 p.m. ET

Dr. Scott Gottlieb is President Trump’s choice to lead the Food and Drug Administration, according to a statement from the White House.

Gottlieb is a political conservative and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he has focused his research on the FDA and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

An internist and hospitalist, Gottlieb has played leading roles in various government health agencies, including as deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs at the FDA during the George W. Bush administration. Before that, he was a senior policy adviser at CMS working on the implementation of Medicare’s then-new drug coverage for seniors.

Gottlieb is a prolific writer on health care issues, particularly the pharmaceutical industry. He is seen as a strong supporter of that industry and has championed deregulation.

“I think Scott is absolutely qualified,” lawyer John Taylor of Greenleaf Health tells STAT. “He has good professional credentials and personal integrity, and a track record that shows the ability to make difficult decisions.”

While Trump has promised at various times to make fairly radical changes at the FDA, Gottlieb is a seen as a conventional choice for commissioner by a Republican president.

Earlier in the year, odds were favoring the nomination of Jim O’Neill, an associate of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel, a close Trump adviser. O’Neill created waves when he called for drugs to be approved as soon as they had been judged to be safe but before they are proved to be effective, as required under current law.

Should Gottlieb be approved by the Senate, one early target he may aim for is so-called off-label promotion of prescription drugs. The Obama administration issued tighter restrictions on how companies could market drugs for conditions not mentioned on drug labels — signifying the lack of FDA approval for that cause. Gottlieb has been highly critical of the Obama rules.

Gottlieb has many possible financial conflicts that could feature prominently in his confirmation hearings. He serves on advisory boards for several major pharmaceutical companies.

“Gottlieb is entangled in an unprecedented web of Big Pharma ties,” says Dr. Michael Carome, the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “He has spent most of his career dedicated to promoting the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Senate must reject him.”

According to the ProPublica website Dollars for Docs, Gottlieb received more than $400,000 between August 2013 and December 2015 in promotional talks, research, consulting and travel while practicing at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut.

As FDA commissioner, Gottlieb would oversee an agency that has regulatory power over a quarter of the U.S. economy, including not just pharmaceuticals but medical devices, food safety, cosmetics and other areas of human and animal health.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)