Michael Lang, 77, Co-Creator Of Woodstock

“Members of The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and some recipients of the group’s philanthropic grants are gathering at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a ninety-minute private event Sunday. The names of the film and television winners will be revealed to the world in real time on the organization’s social media feeds. Special emphasis, they say, will be given to their charitable efforts over the years.”

“What happens now with The 355? Well, it’s on a seventeen-day theatrical window and then heads to PVOD. In its forty-fifth day of release, like the rest of Universal’s theatrical slate moving forward, it will appear on the pay-tier of Peacock. The 355 will live on Peacock for four months, then head to Amazon Prime, available free to members, for another ten months, before moving back to the NBCUni streamer service. Somehow, some way, Universal will squeeze blood from this rock.”

Geoffrey O’Brien: “Guillermo del Toro has made something of a specialty of materializing ghosts—whether in the war-racked orphanage of The Devil’s Backbone or the dilapidated, moth-infested mansion of Crimson Peak—so it is perhaps not totally surprising he has chosen to resurrect William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, which culminates in just such an undertaking. Del Toro has tended to apply his visual invention toward conjuring plausible apparitions. In Nightmare Alley, by contrast, the spectral materialization in question is thoroughly fraudulent, and precipitates catastrophe for the man who has contrived it. Gresham’s book provides a virtual catalogue of the ways such phenomena can be faked—from palmistry and mindreading to well-funded pseudo-religious cults and the outer reaches of what its insiders call the spook racket.”

National Society Of Film Critics: Film, Director, Screenplay Drive My Car; Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers; Ruth Negga, Passing; Best Cinematography: Andrew Droz Palermo, The Green Knight; Hidetoshi Nishijima, Drive My Car; Anders Danielsen Lie, The Worse Person In The World

Berlin European Film Market Online-Only For Second Year

“In movies where the earth sustains damage or everyone dies, the narrative tends to either be about the promise for a world reborn or some kind of closure via a reaffirming of the status quo. I don’t know if Don’t Look Up is an especially great movie. It’s a disaster movie without catharsis—which maybe explains why it’s so polarizing. But there is something very of this particular zeitgeist in an ending that insists that there’s really no going back to the way things used to be and that there are no guarantees for redemption.”

“We genuinely think that this is an orphan film. If an owner emerges, certainly we’d be interested in hearing that. Somebody with proof. But as far as we know this film was abandoned.If we had been able to track down a name we would have pursued that. But there were no clues, and the fate of the person behind the camera that day is unknown.”
Rolling Stones Altamont Footage Found In Library Of Congress Archives; 26 Minutes Of 8mm Film

Disney Moves Yet Another Pixar Project To Disney Plus: “Given the delayed box-office recovery, particularly for family films, flexibility remains at the core of our distribution decisions as we prioritize delivering the unparalleled content of The Walt Disney Co. to audiences around the world.”

“It is part of the lasting significance of Poitier that he took on a burden he never asked for not as a curse but as a responsibility, and bore it not with resentment but with unshowy solemnity. For the first 20 years of his movie career Poitier was, as he often put it, ‘the only one’—the lone Black actor whom Hollywood allowed to carry a movie and knew would draw an audience, the only Black actor white audiences wanted to see, the only Black actor many African American moviegoers knew existed. He began his career fully aware of his singular place in movie history. And then, year after year, in film after film, he both earned it and fought to transcend it.”
Mark Harris On Sidney Poitier

Lyricist Marilyn Bergman Was 93

Jon Stewart Issues Video: “I am not accusing J.K. Rowling of being anti-semitic… Get a fucking grip.”

“I handled success poorly. When you’re hot, it’s a heady atmosphere — everybody kowtows to you. After all, you’re a director, creating illusions in your films, but it becomes hard to tell what’s an illusion and what’s reality.”
Mark Olsen On Bogdaovich

Joel Coen: “Making things simple and graphic was the way to go. Bruno Delbonel said it was like a haiku. There’s element one, element two, element three. Together you can say whatever you want to say. Everything else is clutter.”

Tim Grierson: “The Last Picture Show contains the DNA for so many teen comedies and dramas of the last half-century. Young people determined to get laid, both scared and entranced by the prospect of going out into the world, clinging to childhood friendships while realizing that those bonds don’t last: You can feel Bogdanovich’s film in everything from Diner to American Pie to a handful of Richard Linklater pictures. But few of those successors captured the clear-eyed poignancy that Bogdanovich conveyed. Filmed in black-and-white and shot in a classic style meant to make the story seem timeless, even mythic, The Last Picture Show is about things going away: a town, its closing-down movie theater, youth and innocence itself. But unlike so many films of its kind, The Last Picture Show isn’t nostalgic or particularly weepy about any of that. The movie understands that that’s the way it is. Life keeps moving. Things change.”

Joseph McBride: “Peter Bogdanovich may have always wanted to be Cary Grant. But I wanted to be Peter Bogdanovich. Even before I saw my first Bogdanovich film in 1968, I was an admirer of his erudite, intrepid interviews with directors, the same legendary figures I wanted to meet, and I understood how Peter was using those as a platform to become a director. I had that mistaken ambition back then too, not realizing that my true métier and pleasure was writing books. But as Abraham Polonsky once advised me about doing Q&A events with directors, ‘If you stand beside a director often enough, people will start thinking of you as a director.’ That notion served Peter well, and his early dreams of becoming an actor eventually gave way to his Ford-and-Welles-influenced passion for directing, which brought him great popular success for a few years before his oft-chronicled calamitous downfall.”

Third Annual Society of Composers & Lyricists Awards Postponed: “We are determined to keep this an in-person event, and, therefore, the safety and health concerns of those in our music community, our staff, and the production team are of the utmost importance.”

“I believe with all my heart that Mr. Poitier was as crucial in the odyssey of freedom and equality for Black Americans — for personhood — as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as Martin Luther King Jr. A clear descendant of Douglass’s rhetorical brilliance, he spoke the words of white people but from his own mouth. His projected image begot what is now a galaxy of other Black actors, doing acting as diverse and tiered as a shopping mall.”
Morris On Poitier

Scott Macaulay: “Sundance cancelled one year is an asterisk in the festival history books. Two years in a row forces a more serious rethink of the cultural and business cycles surrounding film sales, distribution and marketing. With COVID likely heading towards a manageable (with vaccines, natural immunity, therapeutics and some social interventions) endemicity, with annual winter peaks, what does that do—at least for the next year or two—to a calendar stacked with not just Sundance and Rotterdam but Berlin and the various guild awards? On Twitter, director and Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish has been urging filmmakers to consider festivals like Seattle that occur outside of seasonal illness peak times. Other colleagues have wondered whether the Sundance Satellite Screens concept could be expanded, with premiere events happening on the coasts alongside Park City. These are conversations that along with many others will surely kick up in earnest [once] the winter festival season is over.”

IMAX’s Richard Gelfond: “The conversation today is that for the right kind of movie, people really want a cultural, theatrical experience. Period. And they want to see the right kind of movie in a communal way with their friends and their family, and they want to share it the way they’ve always shared it. I know it’s easy to answer that question coming off Spider-Man, but because we’re in 85 countries, we found that to be true on a worldwide basis. In China, what’s now become the second-biggest movie in 2021, The Battle at Lake Changjin, did over $900 million. Chinese New Year comes in three weeks from now, and there are big movies people are going to come out to see in big numbers. I know that sounds like a bold statement, but the fact is, it’s true. We’ve seen it in Japan, too. Other models were tried in 2021, and they didn’t work. Whether it was the PVOD model or the hybrid model, they didn’t have an impact on audiences and create cultural events in the way that theatrical experience does.”