“UK ‘rejected offer’ of visa-free tours by musicians in EU, despite blaming Brussels for permit blow”

Twitter To Trump: Tweet Relief: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.:

Michael Apted Was 79

Former Thessaloniki Film Festival Director Dimitri Eipides, Longtime Toronto and Reykjavik Programmer, Was 82

“Lovers Rock, a fictional story set at a house party in 1980, follows the partygoers, the girls dressed in jewel-like dresses, through a fluid and pulsating midsummer night of romantic pursuit. Kirchner chose to use an ARRI Alexa Mini, mostly handheld, to capture long takes on the dance floor. Describing it as a fever dream, he says that he and McQueen ‘wanted the camera to be a person at the party, a type of person that’s in love, a person that is lonely, a person that is anxious. Those long takes were coordinated very specifically, and some were just completely in the moment. We changed the lighting according to the narrative, the emotion of what was happening. We wanted it to feel contemporary in its feel, but also a spiritual representation of Black love./”

Josh Gondelman: “For years, I thought the photograph of Ben Affleck swaddled in a beach towel, gazing out to sea, was the platonic ideal of photographs of Ben Affleck. You know the image. Affleck stands, heels-deep in wet sand, eyes cast outward toward the horizon. You can almost imagine he is, like a reverse Little Mermaid, picturing a better life for himself underneath the sea, far from his earthly troubles and out of view of paparazzi photographers such as the one taking his picture at that very moment. You can’t fully make it out, but the shape of his vast back tattoo is visible. It’s a phoenix, which he described to Ellen DeGeneres as “meaningful.” Perhaps it signifies his own intention to rise from the ashes, real or metaphorical. The tattoo also communicates, with even more clarity, that he was the exact right choice to play Batman in Zack Snyder’s movies.”

A. S. Hamrah: “Many documentaries that look interesting nonetheless seem skippable to me when they’re playing in theaters. The ones I want to see I tell myself I’ll catch up with at home. I almost never do. It’s enough for me to know there’s a documentary out there about weird fungi or Creem magazine or any number of other things. I know I could see these movies if I wanted to, were I seized with the desire to observe, from my couch, beekeeping in Macedonia, Russian computer hacking, or Myanmar’s most prominent fascist Buddhist priest. Documentaries like that have replaced books and magazines for a lot of people. Many of their subjects would be better read about than seen. Documentaries can only cram in so much between the clever opening and end credits and the other animated sections that replace scenes the filmmakers either couldn’t shoot themselves or couldn’t find any archival material on. Sometimes when I’m watching documentaries like that, I fast-forward them at 2x and turn on the subtitles. While speed-reading and speed-watching, I often think: this would be interesting to read more about. I’m like Hollywood in reverse. I want those movies turned into magazine articles, maybe even books. Of course, the best documentaries go beyond all that and exist in the realms of the visionary or the minutely detailed and exhaustive, where both intense concentration and a kind of dream state are necessary and rewarded…”

Critics Choice “Super Awards” Inaugurate Sunday

Amnesty International on Hong Kong: “People have a legitimate right to take part in public affairs. Political opposition should not be silenced just because the authorities don’t like it.”

Grammys Postponed To At Least March As Pandemic Blazes L. A.

Estimated 2020 U. S. Box Office Lowest In At Least Four Decades; $2.3 Billion Versus 2019’s $11.9 Billion

Beijing Finance Crackdown Continues: Former Chairman of One of China’s Largest State-Owned Asset-Management Companies Sentenced to Death

“Festivals warn MPs that Brexit threatens UK “talent pipeline” and ability to book European acts: ‘The government need to get an agreement with the EU for touring acts to move freely’”

Jason Diamond: “Sammy’s also went by Famous Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, Famous Sammy’s, and Sammy’s Roumanian. It had ‘steakhouse’ in its name, officially, but it wasn’t that at all. It was a cramped basement on Chrystie Street, and it was, somehow, one of the most comfortable spaces in the city. This was the beautiful thing about Sammy’s: Rules never really seemed to apply. Now, though, its fate is up in the air. News started to leak out over the weekend that the basement-level storefront had been cleaned up, that the photos were gone, and the sign was down.”

“From the outside it might look “eclectic” or “wide-ranging,” but those of us in proximity know it’s a result of next-level procrastination, a fractured personality, and Singani 63 (how else can you explain his current insistence on using ONLY Mariah Carey GIFs ALL THE TIME?). Sure hope those Oscar telecast people know what they’re in for!” The 2020 Annual What-Steven-Watched List

“Five men spoke about similar encounters with New York-based designer Alexander Wang, who is facing an onslaught of sexual assault allegations, which he vehemently denies. Could a backlash hurt his business?”

Tanya Roberts Is Pronounced Dead Again

“A federal judge in California rejected claims by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca’s founders that The Laundromat, based on the Panama Papers investigation, was defamatory. U.S. District Court Judge Consuelo Marshall found that the movie was protected under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech. According to Marshall, moviegoers understand that the film is ‘fictionalized for dramatization’ and not based on objective facts about the law firm and its founders, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca.”

“It has to be said now that I have great affection for Love & Basketball and all of its romantic movie clichés. It was, when I first saw it, one of the first times I’d seen those clichés played out with a Black cast. Black characters playing a sport I loved, complicated Black families with complications that were not all that close to my own interfamily complications, but were familiar enough. In retrospect, I appreciate that the clichés were given room to flourish here, as they were in all of the mostly white teen rom-coms of the era. We are to believe, somehow, that Monica (Sanaa Lathan) is not attractive, but could be, if she would just do something with her hair. We get that scene—packaged within a school dance, of course—where Monica ‘becomes’ beautiful, her beauty pulled to the surface by the hands of her sister, accented by the pearls her mother places around her neck.”

Mr. Bean, Dad: “It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion.But what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘cancelled’.”