Links: Movies (and TV) Matter, Garrel Picks Pics, Oscar's Centennial
Wednesday, August 31, 2016 at 11:10AM Thrillist "Why everyone was wrong about Warcraft" - the summer's most underrated movie?
MNPP great moments in movie shelves hits Young Frankenstein
The Wrap looks at Colton Haynes winning an HRC award. Why Colton, exactly?
Criterion Louis Garrel chooses movies from the Criterion closet. He likes Jacques Tati, Loves of a Blonde, and Amarcord among others
FlavorWire looks back at Madonna & Sean's Shanghai Surprise in its Bad Movie Night column
Telerama (in French) Alain Guirardie talks about his filmography - he thinks he can do better than Stranger by the Lake!
SBS hilarious satire video on White Fragility in the Workplace
Slate pits Bad Moms against Ghostbusters because women have to be pitted against each other!
NY Times on current film restoration anxiety asking the following question which I swear is going to give me regular nightmares:
What happens to an art when its foundational medium disappears?
Today's Must Read
Richard Brody at the New Yorker wrote a great piece called "Why Movies Still Matter?" that examines the critical circularity that leads people to write things like "Could This Be the Year Movies Stopped Mattering?” We're all inside this ororborus! Help. My favorite part is his contention that the rise in popularity of serial television is actually emulating the college experience. Interesting.
The experience that the watching and the critique of new serial television resemble above all is the college experience. Binge-watching is cramming, and the discussions that are sparked reproduce academic habits: What It Says About, What It Gets Right About, What It Gets Wrong About. There is a lot of aboutness but very little being; lots of puzzle-like assembling of information to pose particular kinds of questions (posing questions—sounds like a final exam), to explore particular issues (sounds like a term paper). For these reasons, television’s actual competition isn’t movies or museums or novels but nonfiction books, documentary films, journalism, radio discussions, and general online clicking. Serial television is designed to gratify the craving for facts to piece together and analyze. The medium seems created for the media buzz that’s generated by the media people who are its natural audience, and to whom the shows owe their acclaim, their prestige, and their success.
Then he goes on to investigate the personal versus the public in our cinema experience. Love this piece. So much to think about and not judgmental about those film or television! Or to quote another great writer...
TV and movies have been coexisting for decades, yet the number of people insisting one must vanquish the other remains constant.
— Farran Nehme (@selfstyledsiren) August 29, 2016
News
EW Emily Blunt hears what Julie Andrews says about her casting as Mary Poppins Returns
Guardian Anne Hathaway to star in Live Fast Die Hot the adaptation of a bestseller about new motherhood and responsibility
Variety Richard Linklater is making a sequel (of a sort) to The Last Detail (1973) called Last Flag Flying
/Film early photos from Woody Allen's Crisis in Six Scenes, his new streaming series
Towleroad Matt Bomer has signed on to play a trans sex worker in a new film called Anything. They're still not casting trans actors for trans roles which is a shame. Especially since we actually have famous trans actors now, proof that there's no reason to not cast them or think they can't win media attention themselves
Variety Stranger Things renewed for Season 2. (I liked Season 1 but a continuation of that story seems like a mistake to me. Better an anthology template!)
Comics Alliance Stranger Things' breakout "Barb" (Shannon Purser) will guest star on CW's Archie adaptation Riverdale
Awards Daily Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply will open the AFI Fest this year in November
FINALLY
In case you haven't heard ABC and Oscar have extended their contract. The Oscars will now be held on ABC through 2028 now. In extremely related news: 2028 is when the 100th Academy Awards will be held so imagine that centennial. If you'd like TFE to be around for that (so far away) please consider joining our monthly donaters --see sidebar -- because it's so not easy to keep making this site work each year, financially speaking.
Reader Comments (14)
I don't want to live in a world in where movies (and TV) don't matter (anymore)....
They all brought us here.
I still can't process the news about Sam Mendes' "James and the Giant Peach", but I hear the same production company is interested in hiring oil to work with water.
I can't imagine the 100th Oscars without TFE!
Rami -- thank you. xoxo
Mr. Linklater, you're supposed to be working on the next "Before" movie, please!
forever1267 , I have the next Before movie scheduled for 2022 if the previous time gaps are anything to go by :)
I watched 'Young Frankenstein' yesterday for the first time in what must be years, and although I never quite considered it to belong to the very core of my all time favorite movies, I was almost surprised how many of the lines by Wilder, Garr, Leachman, Mars, Feldman and Kahn I still knew by heart. And I maintain that in a just and fair world, Gene Wilder would have won an Oscar for that performance.
Richard Brody's article illuminates what I've felt to be true for quite some time: television watchers seem to be more concerned with how TV shows make them think whilst movie watchers are concerned with how movies make them feel.Logic/Reasoning vs Emotion/Viscera, etc.
I've already made my choice.
I've got a Shanghai Surprise t-shirt somewhere in my closet.
Thanks for linking us to that Richard Brody article. So many valid points.
NO to Matt Bomer as a trans anything. Leto's Oscar win still reeks.
MDA -- hmmm. this sounds suspiciously like tv is for intellectuals and i'm not okay with this distinction. There's something for both impulses in tv each year (which has 100s of shows) and at the movies (which has hundreds of movies). I really think one of the huge problems with culture is that people are extremely tunnel vision selective acting like there is only great premium cable & streaming stuff on tv and only soulless blockbusters at the movies and both ways of thinking are patently false. There is both cheap junk and priceless jewels in both artforms.
About the casting of Matt Bomer I must say that one of the great things about acting is acting, playing a character. If we say that Transgenders only play Transgenders then only gays can play gays or an actor of nationality can not play another nationality. It is my opinion.
I am very happy to read this. This is the kind of manual that needs to be given and the random misinformation that's on the other blogs