"There is, of course, an eerie prescience to She Dies Tomorrow, not just in its depiction of a pandemic (however absurd this particular one may be) but also in its bleak, spellbinding solitude; an existential plague, it turns out, is almost as effective as our current, real-life one in alienating us from each other."

Vulture | August 9, 2020

James Cromwell on 25 Years of Babe

Hollywood Reporter | August 9, 2020

The Ross Brothers: "There’s not one film of Altman’s that we don’t like, but Nashville is the holy grail. When we first saw it, we were so blown away that a film could feel so natural and lived in, and that influenced the way we thought about movies and made them from then on. On the surface it feels like just a bunch of interconnected moments, but a deeper reading shows that it’s about the fatality of America. Then there’s the editing, the use of sound, and the curious camera, which seems to be wandering, making us privy to every conversation it’s focused on. If we were ranking Altman films, this would be one through ten."

August 9, 2020

Max Richter: "Throughout my 20s and 30s I worked constantly. Weekends were nonexistent; I worked on multiple paid jobs to support my own creative projects. Now I have the luxury of taking this time off, I’m religious about protecting my weekends. Our lives are data-saturated.It’s psychologically demanding to live on screens 24/7. Sundays are for switching off. I treasure the time for recuperation."

The Guardian | August 9, 2020

"In the political epidemiology of this disaster, Trump, Xi and Murdoch are the super-spreaders. They are the three monkeys of virus denialism: see no problem, hear no problem, speak no problem. Trump and Murdoch – the feedback loop between Fox News and the White House – have helped to give the US, with just five per cent of the world’s population, a third of global coronavirus infections."
Fintan O"Toole: "Rupert Murdoch is a super-spreader of lies and misinformation on the coronavirus pandemic"

August 8, 2020

Guy Lodge: "Xanadu is 40 years old this week, but it may as well be 4,000, or a missive from an as-yet-unborn future. Nothing about it makes any sense, its birthday least of all. If you disassemble its many lunatic moving parts, however, you can sort of see how Xanadu was conceived in the first place, as the bloated outcome of the kind of zealous, coked-up “it’s X-meets-Y-meets-Z” studio pitches that Robert Altman skewered in The Player. The 1970s had been an awkward age for musicals, with the forward-thinking, adult-minded standalone success of Cabaret surrounded by the limp corpses of dud attempts to emulate the family song-and-dance blockbusters of the 1960s."

The Guardian | August 8, 2020

"Bob Greenblatt, Kevin Reilly Out Amid Major WarnerMedia Restructuring: Ann Sarnoff will oversee a newly expanded content group for the company, with Casey Bloys overseeing programming for HBO, HBO Max and linear cable networks."

Hollywood Reporter | August 8, 2020

How Do You Do, Fellow Kids: The Ankler Finds Studio Creative Bosses At Generational Distance From Audience

August 8, 2020

"Forget it, Ben, it's the Melrose lot."
Affleck Targets Chinatown Tattle As Writer-Director Follow-Up To Live By Night Detonation; No Word If He Will Take Role Of Polanski, As Philip Seymour Hoffman Played Capote

Variety | August 7, 2020

"ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish says that company's experience of employees working remotely will change how the company operates: "The experience sets the stage for further transformation and cost savings. Bakish says that Paramount is selling some titles to streamers to avoid a 2021 theatrical schedule "that is starting to look pretty full." Really just keeping tentpoles in theaters."

Twitter | August 7, 2020

Scott Macaulay: "It was shortly after these gallery crawls that I experienced something different while watching a movie or TV show. Characters entered a bar, shook hands, hugged, and something inside me flinched for a millisecond. You can’t do that, I thought, before instantly reengaging with the story.  My flinch, I realized, was because, this moment — post-virus, pre-vaccine and with an uncertain roadmap ahead — exists within some kind of experiential uncanny valley. What was commonplace just a few months ago now seems a bit off, incompletely rendered, while the contours of the future are fuzzy. Best-laid plans — like the collaborative efforts of guilds to map a safe way forward for production — are hitting the wall of U.S. testing capacity. (These plans recommend testing cast and crew three times a week and are predicated upon receiving fast responses — something the U.S. system isn’t providing at the moment, or at least not to struggling independent productions.) Meanwhile, commercial shoots, which are much shorter than feature shoots, are occurring but with their own strange wrinkles. One colleague describes a spot that’s shot in two versions — one with the onscreen talent wearing masks and one without; depending on where the U.S. is in terms of containing the virus, one or the other version will be used."

August 7, 2020

“Filmmakers Amy Seimetz and Kris Rey on friendship and filmmaking”

LA Times | August 7, 2020

Bilge Ebiri: “The secret of Steven Spielberg’s success is that he is a horror filmmaker at heart.”

Vulture | August 7, 2020

”Gone are decades-old restrictions on how studios package movies for theaters, plus an end to a ban on vertical integration. Today, a federal judge addresses the possibility that a major studio will merge with a major chain”

1949 Paramount Decrees Vacated

Deadline | August 7, 2020

Nicole Sperling: “Bob Greenblatt and Kevin Reilly are out at WarnerMedia due to a Jason Kilar-led reorganization that puts HBO Max front and center”

Twitter | August 7, 2020