Brooks Barnes: “Been offline (moving apartments) and return to see this Michael Keaton craziness. I was referring to the one film that Keaton has been announced as being in, not a set of his own Batman films. If I had info on him beyond ‘The Flash,’ I would have obviously put it in my article”
“As an American, I am thrilled to see Vice President-elect Kamala Harris enter the West Wing. As a porn star, I am terrified. I respect Harris for seeing gays and women of color compassionately. After four years of Vice President Mike Pence, it’ll be nice to see someone make the executive branch empathetic again. Still, I doubt Harris’ executive empathy will extend to exotic dancers, porn stars, strippers, prostitutes, or erotic masseuses: The Vice President-elect brings a lifetime of animosity toward sex workers to Number One Observatory Circle.”
Reed Hastings: “I don’t see any positives, Not being able to get together in person, particularly internationally, is a pure negative. If I had to guess, the five-day workweek will become four days in the office while one day is virtual from home.”
“Some of the big companies that announced permanent remote work policies this year included a major caveat — workers who relocate to less-expensive areas can expect less pay. ‘The majority of managers are still imagining that the world is going back to the office when this is over, and a large number of companies that are making the leap to remote are kneecapping their efforts with shit like differential pay, where anyone who actually wants to move somewhere other than Silicon Valley has to take a large pay cut.”
“Hollywood guilds and labor unions are recommending that in-person production of television shows and independent films be halted. Mayor Garcetti said that one person contracts the coronavirus every six seconds in Los Angeles County.”
“Chinese Blockbuster Filmmaker Is Probed for Fraud: the producer of China’s highest-grossing movie, Wolf Warriors 2, is under investigation by regulators for alleged bookkeeping fraud”
“It will be possible, for the first time, to see Ambersons in its entirety — all 132 minutes. The version I have created is now in exact synchronicity to the cutting documents of March 1942 and runs 131 minutes and 45 seconds. But the characters at this point are only the first sketches, pencil tests. The task is to fine-tune the performances, aided by critical feedback. The film must next go through revision, after which it will enter the ink and paint stage where the characters will be refined with added details, along with further details in the sets and background characters. The goal is not to create a photorealistic recreation of the lost material, but rather to capture it artistically and subtly, in something not unlike the film’s original storyboards — a charcoal-and-pencil drawing come to life, so that the viewer is both aware of what is new, but also able to appreciate the film as a complete narrative. I compare this effort to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, a method of repairing damaged pottery that does not attempt to conceal the breaks, but highlights them, so that one can both appreciate the work as a whole, while also seeing the cracks that highlight its history as an object.”
“Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival, the biggest movie-TV event in Scandinavia, will isolate a single film enthusiast on the bleak North Sea lighthouse island of Pater Noster. There, totally alone, with no iPhone nor even a book, they will watch the festival’s 60 premieres over a week. The Isolated Cinema has its origins in a hardening of health and safety regulations for Swedish cinema theaters, said Jonas Holmberg, Göteborg Film Festival artistic director. When regulations capped attendance in smaller cinemas at 50 spectators, the festival considered staging an on-site event with multiple screenings of individual films. When the seating capacity dropped to a maximum eight attendees, Göteborg decided to turn ‘a negative restriction into an existential event.'”
Mark Harris: “The pathbreaking movie director Joan Micklin Silver got to have a career that almost no woman was allowed to have, and did not get to have the career that she deserved. Such is the paradox of the pioneer: You get to go where very few have gone before, but when you get there, there’s nobody to pull you up or push you ahead. You make your own way, and withstand the indifference, the hostility, the condescension, and the people who treat you as a curiosity or a slightly troubling anomaly. Silver experienced all of that. Her list of credits is, given what she had to face, impressive. It’s also an indictment of the industry in which she worked; the successes followed by long gaps, and the made-for-cable movies that stand in for the feature-film opportunities that never existed, testify to the inequity that she could not overcome but did manage to fight to a draw, which in fact constitutes a win. And — most important — she got to make some good movies that, decades later, are still worth watching…”
Roku Strikes Quibi Pyrite?
”Jay Giampietro photographs the shuttered movie theaters of New York, and looks back on 25 years of filmgoing memories in the city.”
“Chinese billionaire Jack Ma disappears from his own reality show after criticising regime”
“The Canadian arts, entertainment and recreation sector is the “furthest from recovery,” according to Statistics Canada”
“Tarantino is an insipid schlub. Scorsese is bespectacled but staid. Spielberg is too sedate. Spike Lee is lurid and inimitable. Coppola? Please. Only Wes Anderson’s sartorial affectations inspire young men to emulation. The reason: His style is the accessory to his films. Wes Anderson and his art are not merely affected, they are hipster and twee as fuck. I am neither the first nor the last person to allege this. I have read more than one scholarly article that has either blamed or credited Anderson for the invention of hipster cinema. Because, in a Wes Anderson film, the mise-en-scène will always be wantonly fastidious, the cinematography will be aggressively precise, the ensemble cast ridiculously earnest, the hues extravagantly pastel, the plots cloyingly elaborate, the props unduly precious, and the soundtrack will often be late 60s or early 70s rock. For a preening, affluent, bookish, cocksure, emotive, post-pubescent white male with more than a few obsessive compulsions, there are no finer qualities in film. Anderson is, truly, the stuff that white men like.”
Anand Giridharadas: “There is this kind of Jonathan Franzeny view out there in the artistic realm that if you are operating down here in the world of the tweet and the TV hit and the clapback, you’re not serious up there. How do you think about that spectrum of seriousness?”
Jeremy O. Harris: I had to just give it up. Because already there was going to be a veneer of me not being serious enough because I am Black and gay. And I’m also charismatic, right? So those three things, combined, make people inherently distrustful of how you move through the world. And when I saw that people were getting upset with me, or side-eyeing the success I was having, or denigrating the success I was having because I was utilizing the things that make people popular in the age of social media — like Twitter, Instagram, retweets from people like Sarah Paulson or the lead singer of Grizzly Bear in relation to the first run of “Slave Play” — I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to police this if I was also going to try to be successful. Because those articulations that I wasn’t serious enough were attempts by people who hold the keys of power to keep the keys. When my play was going to Broadway, I had suddenly jumped 30 years ahead in my career. And I wanted to remind people that I was still 30. I had just graduated grad school. There was a lot of experimentation that I wanted to do along the way of figuring out what my voice is and how I wanted to use it.”
A Vital Read On Shifting Sands: “Every year, respected home entertainment executives leave jobs — and sometimes the business. Some are laid off — in the press, you’ll read they are leaving “to pursue other opportunities.” Others find work in another field, while some retire. This unprecedented year accelerated the evolution of home entertainment from the physical to digital, from transactional to streaming. The home entertainment industry lost some of our best, as studios are restructured and reimagined for what everyone seems to think will be not just the next chapter, but a whole new book. I’m singling out six industry veterans who left the business this year…”
Sam Pollard: “The thing that’s fascinating about this material is its understanding that Dr King was a human being. He’s put forward as an iconic presence, but I felt strongly that we wanted to represent him in a more complex way. He was a man, and like many of us, multitasking. He was leading the struggle, while dealing with his personal life and its baggage. He was wrestling with the choice to speak out against Vietnam, and the backlash he received from that. He was dealing with the knowledge that he and his associates were being constantly watched by the FBI, which also took its toll on him.”
Director-Producer-Writer Joan Micklin Silver Was 85
Judge Remands Danny Masterson Sexual Harassment Suit To Scientology Religious Mediation
“WHAT WAS THE RESTAURANT? To put the question in the past tense implies that it’s no longer possible to ask what the restaurant is. In time that may come to seem a ridiculous position; in many parts of the world outside the United States, where restaurants are holding firm in the face of the coronavirus, it already seems moot. But for now, anyone walking the center of any major city in this country would find it difficult to dispute that the American restaurant as we once knew it is an artifact of history. The US hospitality industry lost almost 5.5 million jobs in a single month at the start of the pandemic; 2 million more people are currently unemployed than were pre-Covid. In New York, over a thousand restaurants have perished since March. This massacre has disproportionately affected workers of color, who made up more than three-quarters of the city’s pre-Covid restaurant labor force, and the working poor, which is the only way to describe the vast mass of people employed in an industry with an average salary of $33,700. Restaurants have been brought to their knees at precisely the moment when the nourishment of the country is most in peril: since the start of the pandemic the number of Americans facing food insecurity has climbed from thirty-seven million to fifty-four million. This year of death and hunger closes a period in which the restaurant, aided by social media and its mimetic logic of aspirational consumption, enjoyed an imperial phase of growth and influence. Neither inhospitable margins nor a famously high rate of failure for new businesses had, writ large, held the restaurant back… For many they became a totem, a lodestar of in-group identification, a shorthand for cultural savvy and openness to experience. The person who frequented the right restaurants was living their best life; the restaurant agnostic was a cultural heathen, left behind by the great hungry tide of progress.”
Ira Deutchman: “This article by Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott clearly articulates a lot of what I’ve been thinking, talking and writing about for the last nine months. Theatrical moviegoing will not die, but it does need some rethinking.”
