Nelson George: “As inhumanly unrealistic as Tibbs was Sidney made him work. And by breathing life into such a creature, Sidney breathed Tibbs into me. James Bond might conquer the women. The charismatic young politician Julian Bond sparkled on my TV. Willie Mays was still roaming the San Francisco outfield. But Sidney’s heroic bearing made him the man I wanted to be. Today I know I’ve failed in my efforts to replicate Sir Sid. In 1967, however it all seemed possible. If he existed, so could I.”

“I have thoughts as an Indigenous person about the first two chapters of ‘The Book Of Boba Fett’ and I can’t keep them in… I am just one Anishinaabe woman and represent only myself… I know I’m not the only Indigenous person to identify with Tuskens.”
A Thread On Boba Fett And The Tuskens

“In one of the most audaciously conceived and meticulously crafted Hollywood films of the time, At Long Last Love, a musical set in the 1930s that tells its romantic story by means of nearly wall-to-wall performances of songs by Cole Porter, starring the quartet of Shepherd, Madeline Kahn, Duilio Del Prete, and Burt Reynolds, Bogdanovich realized a fusion of Hollywood classics and art-house styles that also endows cream-puff confection and raucous humor with an air of bitter melancholy. Before Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, before Elaine May’s Ishtar, there was the scandal of At Long Last Love, which the critics of the time heaven’s-gated, leaving Bogdanovich ishtarred and feathered.”
Brody On Bogdanovich

“Boyishly handsome, with neatly combed hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a signature bandanna that he wore knotted around his neck, Mr. Bogdanovich was alternately celebrated and despised, acquiring a reputation at the onset of his career for making friends with vaunted old directors just as quickly as he made enemies with younger colleagues.”

Virtual Sundance Announces Jurors: Chelsea Barnard, Marielle Heller, Payman Maadi for U.S. Dramatic Competition; Garrett Bradley, Joan Churchill, Peter Nicks for U.S. Documentary Competition; Andrew Haigh, Mohamed Hefzy, La Frances Hui for World Cinema Dramatic Competition; Emilie Bujès, Patrick Gaspard, Dawn Porter for World Cinema Documentary Competition; Joey Soloway for NEXT competition section; Penelope Bartlett, Kevin Jerome Everson, Blackhorse Lowe for Short Film Program Competition

“Heather Havrilesky loves her husband, you numbskulls. The humor writer and longtime advice columnist published an essay, “Marriage Requires Amnesia”—an excerpt from her forthcoming book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage”—in the New York Times. This led to an inexplicably angry Twitter fight among readers about whether she should leave her marriage. (Or whether her husband, wronged by this shocking display of dirty laundry, should leave her.) The argument for dissolving Havrilesky’s marriage is that she said, in so many words, she hates her husband. In The New York Times! Can you imagine? Surely, there could be no clearer signal that a relationship is over.  The argument against: Oh my god. Irony exists. Hyperbole exists. Please get better at reading. Havrilesky loves her husband, Joe Biden won the election, COVID-19 is not just a cold, the Omicron variant is bananas contagious, vaccines are safe and effective, climate change is real, the fascist threat we face is not coming from the left, Aristotle was not Belgian, the central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself,” etc. Not everything the internet treats as ambiguous actually is. Texts generally do contain evidence that certain interpretations are more valid than others.”

“Peter Bogdanovich’s breakthrough has become an indelible Texas movie, a stark, poetic, loose-limbed and ultimately very sad portrait of lonely Lone Star life. It’s set in fictional Anarene, which is based on the novel’s Thalia, which in turn is based on novelist Larry McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, where the film was shot. The Last Picture Show is both beautifully specific and universal, evoking small towns throughout North Texas in the years following World War II, or just about any other time. ‘One thing I know for sure,’ offers Eileen Brennan’s Genevieve, who runs the local diner. ‘A person can’t sneeze in this town without somebody offering them a handkerchief.'”
Chris Vognar On Last Picture Show At Fifty

SIDNEY POITIER WAS 94

“Yesterday film archive of Kazakhstan was burned to the ground during riots. As well as Central Russian Film Archive this was vault for master negatives of national movies & collection of one copy of every movie released in cinemas”

MICHAEL WILMINGTON WAS 75

“A poet takes words, thoughts and objects, talks colors and feelings, and makes them palpably physical and dancingly metaphoric. Occasionally he (she) rhymes; more often she (he) collides those words and thoughts into something (hopefully) pared down and memorable. Take Jim Jarmusch, a cinematic poet who also likes to claim a physical resemblance to that notably nasty movie bad guy Lee Marvin (a poet of violence). Jarmusch: He’s a poet… Perhaps only a guy who looks like Lee Marvin — and who founded the poetic tough guy club called “The Sons of Lee Marvin“ for himself and his friends would have the balls to make a movie where the hero (antihero), was a guy named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, is played by actor-driver Adam Driver, and is a (non-professional) poet — a movie where the major action consists of Paterson writing poems, reciting them, bantering with his versatile Iranian girlfriend Laura (Golschiateh Farahani), walking his dog, drinking (one) beer in the local bar and driving a Paterson New Jersey metro line bus around town.”

Golden Globes Will Be Tweet-Only. That’s It. That’s The Tweet.

Scream Won’t Scram: 3,500 Theaters On February 13

PETER BOGDANOVICH WAS 82

On Matrix Resurrections And Don’t Look Up: “Failing to understand why a movie about media infiltration and subliminal messaging might resonate with the paranoid Alex Jones is a prime instance of the intentional fallacy, or the mistaken attempt to interpret art based on the meaning the creator assigned it rather than on one’s own experience with it.”

A. A. Dowd, A. V. Club: “Woke up this morning to news that G/O Media has posted a job listing for my current position and those of several of my Chicago colleagues. This is nine days before any of us have to give the company a decision about whether or not we’re making the move to Los Angeles.”

The 2022 FYC Screenplays Are Here (pdfs)
Added: Red Rocket, Passing, Swan Song

Annette

Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar

Being The Ricardos

Belfast

The Card Counter

CODA

Dune

The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain

Encounter

The Hand Of God (digital book)

The Harder They Fall

The Humans

A Hero

Jockey

Last Night In Soho

The Lost Daughter

Mass

The Mitchells Vs. The Machines

Nine Days

Passing

Passing (digital book)

The Power Of The Dog (digital book)

Red Rocket

Spencer

Stillwater

Swan Song

The Tender Bar

tick… tick… BOOM!

The Tomorrow War

Doug Block: “I feel terribly for all the filmmakers who’ll be missing out on the Sundance experience in person. Especially for a few close friends whose films were selected, and for whom it would have been their first Sundance. That said, there are positives to glean from the decision to go all-virtual, aside from all the stress and uncertainty over Covid being lifted. It also levels the playing field to a large degree. With all the parties and networking and other distractions gone, focus will be placed on the films. Buyers and press will be able to see more films, and under the same viewing conditions. Docs and so-called smaller indie films will get more attention, and more discoveries will be made of new and emerging talent. That’s my hope, at least. Yet, still, it breaks my heart.”

“Passion: The Matrix Resurrections, where the filmmaker strides with serene confidence through an all-encompassing assault on the perception and popularity of the three films that came before, and upon the foolishness of expecting an artist to step into the same river twice.  Movies that look like the dreams or nightmares of the filmmakers, with the contrivance of financiers who permitted them to run electricity through their motion-capture devices, who then knew what attention to pay toward a spill of shadow, a judder of frame that instantaneously jolts the attention or just a weird little smile on a human face. Craft, yes, but also how a welter of felicities, most invisible to the average moviegoer, can and must sell the tale, bits of dream that adhere to our own steamy or seamy or simmering subconscious.”

“The refrain is easy: ‘Did you know The Matrix is an allegory for transition?’ which is thrown out as though it’s self-explanatory. To do the same for Resurrections would lead to the exact kind of literalized criticism trans film writers have ostensibly rallied against for years now. Andrea Long Chu already wrote the essay decrying the rigid application of trans thought onto the original film, and there is a part of me that wants to echo her nihilism. The Matrix does not have to be one thing so cleanly, and I think Lana Wachowski would agree. We as trans people don’t have to see ourselves on-screen to feel seen; we can live in the corners as we always have, hidden in platitudes about ‘becoming.’ The script for Resurrections shatters easy red-blue dichotomies with reckless abandon (the villain’s eyes may glow red, a rebel’s hair might shine blue) and transforms the Merovingian, a villain from Reloaded, into a babbling idiot spouting on about the inherent inferiority of sequels. This is a series so informed by the capital-T Trans Experience that it cannot help, by nature of its fabled form, but become allegory… Some early reviews suggested that the new film was primarily offering a metaphor for the loss of artistic freedom and the death of originality in the Hollywood blockbuster, as though it was a sly satire built on easy targets and jokes that winked to the audience .However, we’re watching Neo kill himself. Even he cannot escape the central contradiction that subsumes contemporary trans thought: aesthetic beauty obscuring visceral pain.”

Guillermo del Toro On His Never-To-Be “Justice League Dark”

IN-PERSON SUNDANCE CANCELLED
“We have been looking forward to our first fully hybrid Sundance Film Festival and our teams have spent a year planning a festival like no other. But despite the most ambitious protocols, the Omicron variant with its unexpectedly high transmissibility rates is pushing the limits of health safety, travel and other infrastructures across the country. And so, the Festival’s in-person Utah elements will be moving online this year. While it is a deep loss not to have the in-person experience in Utah, we do not believe it is safe nor feasible to gather thousands of artists, audiences, employees, volunteers and partners from around the world, for an eleven-day festival while overwhelmed communities are already struggling to provide essential services.  As a nonprofit, our Sundance spirit is in making something work against the odds. But with case numbers forecasted to peak in our host community the week of the festival we cannot knowingly put our staff and community at risk. The undue stress to Summit County’s health services and our more than 1,500 staff and volunteers would be irresponsible in this climate. It has  become increasingly clear over the last few days that this is the right decision to make for the care and well-being of all of our community.”