Yes No Maybe So: Jason Bourne

The Bourne Identity. The Bourne Supremacy. The Bourne Ultimatum. The Bourne Legacy. Miss Bourne If You're Nasty. Universal Pictures correctly assumes "You know his name" which is a brilliant tagline for the forthcoming fifth* entry in the franchise, titled Jason Bourne. In fact, it could well be a tagline for 60% of the franchises out there (the other 40% are led by concepts/groups, created "universes", or in YA dystopia cases >gasp< a young woman).

The question is are we excited to go another round with Matt Damon's leaping, punching, kicking, shooting, indestructable action man and the Oscar-nominated suits that are always trying to hunt him down? Let's find the answer together with our Yes No Maybe So game... 

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The Irresistible Danger of Matthias Schoenaerts and Michael Shannon

 As we continue Actor Month here's Murtada on Matthias Schoenaerts & Michael Shannon.

One might ask what do Matthias Schoenaerts and Michael Shannon have in common. A hulking body (stocky Schoenaerts and tall angular Shannon). Intensity? Yes but also a certain menacing danger that sweeps through in every performance. It's a danger that comes out sexy with Schoenaerts and somewhat evil with Shannon. One never knows what they are going to do next, and that's why they are so mesmerizing to watch.

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On the Linkfront

VF Hollywood Charlize Theron's son loves Emily Blunt... and Frozen
Pajiba posits that Grease 2 is the superior Grease and a feminist triumph
Gothamist On the Waterfront is coming back to movie screens on April 24th and 27th as a Fathom Event. It's rarely seen on the big screen, so go
Variety there is a Three's Company movie in the works. Because.
Guy Goald "The Garlic Awakens"

The Retro Set the 8 most cinematic Duran Duran music videos. They stole from Mad Max, The Night Porter and even Indiana Jones
Towleroad This is awesome. Salt Lake City is renaming 900 South (a pretty cool street as it goes in SLC) "Harvey Milk Blvd". In related news: SLC must have changed a heap since I lived there for this to happen
NY Post Cher: The Musical. It could happen on Broadway
The New York Times Abolitionist Harriet Tubman is coming to the $20 bill. Albeit in 2020. That'll be a fun follow up to the HBO biopic starring Viola Davis (if that one is still on... who knows?)

Vulture Mark Harris's must read piece on Hollywood's strange disrespect for Melissa McCarthy, ICYMI
Pop Matters Duncan Sheik talks about his music for American Psycho on Broadway 
Tracking Board interesting casting: Debra Winger and Tracy Letts will co-star in The Lovers for A24 as a couple planning to break up but having second thoughts  
Stage Buddy Jose interviews Joachim Trier on his first English language film Louder than Bombs

RIP
Variety famous wrestler and TV reality star Chynna, who even played superheroine She Hulk in a porn parody, is found dead in her home 
Guardian remembers director Guy Hamilton who made four James Bond films (including Goldfinger) and other films like Force 10 From Navarone and The Mirror Crack'd 

Oops
We forgot to share the first trailer to Oscar hopeful The Birth of a Nation. If you haven't yet seen it, here it is. 

Cannes Announces Its Critics' Week and Classics Selections

Cinephiles across the globe collectively held their breaths last week wondering whether the new Olivier Assayas or Lucretia Martel would make it onto the 2016 Croisette – his did, hers didn’t – as Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux unspooled the Competition, Un Certain Regard, Midnight Screenings, and Outside Competition line-ups. As if the promise of new adventures with Almodóvar, Dolan, and Park Chan-Wook weren’t enough, the recent announcements of the Critics’ Week and Cannes Classics sidebars present a whole host of new gems and old treasures to discover.

Let’s start with Critics’ Week, where a coterie of freshmen and sophomore directors compete for their own Nespresso Grand Prize. That would make this the branded stadium for spring-boarding international talents, such as Iñárritu (Amores Perros), Wong Kar-Wai (As Tears Go By), as well as Andrea Arnold and Jeff Nichols who are contending in the Main Competition this year with American Honey and Loving, respectively. The Critics Week features competition includes a number of films that examine schisms in national identities, and a closing selection of shorts featuring the directorial debut of human mystery box Chloe Sevigny. And speaking of people that could always be lurking over your shoulder; this is where David Robert Mitchell’s sexually transmitted horror film It Follows debuted back in 2014.

Critics’ Week 

• Albüm – directed by Mehmet Can Mertoğlu (Turkey)
• Diamond Island – directed by Davy Chou (Cambodia/France)
• Raw – directed by Julia Ducournau (France)
• Mimosas – Oliver Laxe (France)
• One Week And A Day – directed by Asaph Polonsky (Israel)
• Tramontane – directed by Vatche Boulghourjian (Lebanon)
• A Yellow Bird – directed by K. Rajagopal (Singapore)
  
  Opening Night: In Bed with Victoria - directed by Justine Triet (France) 

Cannes Classics
The festival also hosts restored films from the international canon. This year they'll feature honors for documentarian and institutional excavator Frederick Wiseman, as well as a master class with raconteur and all-around mayday man William Friedkin. In addition to that Friedkin talk, Cannes Classics will screen the divisive Sorcerer, his 1977 remake of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear – a film that sets a long fuse for a series of gut-wrenching flare-ups, a rattling exercise in tension. Ivory’s Howard’s End, Parts 5 and 6 of Kieślowski’s Decalogue, Gordard’s current repertory release Masculin feminine, and a bunch of other exciting classics will remind us why we were drawn to the cinema in the first place.

Any ideas how we could all split the cost of a yacht to the south of France this year?

HBO’s LGBT History: Game of Thrones (2011-)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we looked at the legacy of Larry Kramer via the rather hagiographic doc Larry Kramer in Love and Anger. And from the LGBT frontlines to the land of Westeros, we pause this week to talk about Game of Thrones which returns later this weekend. There’s obviously plenty to discuss in the George R.R. Martin fantasy series since sex and sexuality (not to mention its contiguity with violence) has been so central to debates surrounding the show. So I’m opting to focus instead on a minor character to single out perhaps the most underrepresented group of sexual minorities: asexuals.

When I taught gender and sexuality to college students, one of the things I’d often get asked when dealing with the ever-growing LGBT acronym was to explain all the letters. L, G, B, and T have always been pretty easy to identify (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans* and/or any of its variations, including Two-Spirited). It was once we went beyond those that you’d end up really understanding the way such an umbrella acronym encompassed plenty of identities. Q, for example, could stand for “Queer” or “Questioning”; I stands for Intersex while some people would point out that * is necessary given that some people in the community refuse any sort of label (you can read the Wikipedia article on the acronym to see what else often gets lumped in!). A for many stands for “Ally,” a curious category since it seems less a sexual identity than the rest; often I pushed students to also consider A as standing for “Asexual.”

Whether asexuals, who have grown increasingly vocal (if not quite visible) within the mainstream in the past few decades, belong within this broad umbrella group is a discussion in itself, but since we’re exploring the way HBO has tackled various sexual identities, I figured we’d look at the most overt attempt by the network to take on the issue of asexuality. And so we come to Varys (Conleth Hill) on Game of Thrones.

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