All That Link
Tuesday, February 9, 2021 at 10:30AM • A24 virtual two week engagment of Minari starts 2/12. Tickets now on sale!
• Vanity Fair's awesome annual Oscar special -- you'll remember I wrote a piece on Parasite last year for it! -- is arriving for subscribers. The cover story on Chadwick Boseman is available now even if you don't subscribe
• HuffPost on Michelle Pfeiffer's underrated skill as a comic actress
• AV Club a review of Mark Harris' new film biography book Mike Nichols A Life
More after the jump including Britney Spears, Pleasure, Olivia Newton-John, Borderlands, and still more showbiz obituaries (what is happening lately?)
• Variety Sam Neill talks about his long career, Jurassic World Dominion and his new picture Rams, an adaptation of the popular Icelandic film of the same name.
• Awards Daily Kirk Baxter on editing Mank
• Hollywood Reporter Olivia Newton-John is recording an album of duets. The first song released is a duet with her daughter
• Deadline A24 has picked up the buzzy Sundance porn-industry drama Pleasure and plans a release in two formats (the Sundance cut as well as an R rated version)
• Empire the cast for Borderlands, a movie adaptation of the popular video game, keeps growing with A listers and now includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis
• Cartoon Brew Shout! Factor now has the home distribution rights to Laika's features.
• IndieWire Kristen Lopez talks about Framing Britney Spears and how the "conservatorship" argument in the film never broaches the topic of disability
• The Ringer ... and the best review I've read on that doc.
RIP
• Jean-Claude Carriere Oscar wininng screenwriter (Discreet Charm of..., Tin Drum) has died at 89... we did a two part tribute to him a handful of years ago right here at TFE
• Haya Harareet Israeli actress of Ben-Hur and Siren of Atlantis fame has died at 89
• Giuseppe Rottuno, Oscar nominated Italian cinematographer (All That Jazz, Amarcord, Rocco and His Brothers) has died at 97
• Mary Wilson, co-founder of the Supremes has died at 76.
• Roy Christopher, 10-time Emmy winning production designer/art director of sitcoms, tv specials, and most of the big awards shows like Oscar, Tony, and Emmy has died at 85
• Moufida Tlatli, the first Arab woman to direct a feature film (1994's The Silences of the Palace), has died at 73
Reader Comments (9)
FREE BRITNEY
My 15 favorite Supremes songs:
1. You Can't Hurry Love
2. Love Is Like an Itchin' in My Heart
3. Nathan Jones
4. Love Child
5. Come See About Me
6. Everybody Has the Right to Love
7. When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes
8. I Hear a Symphony
9. Someday We'll Be Together
10. A Hard Day's Night
11. My World Is Empty Without You
12. Reflections
13. Up the Ladder to the Roof
14. Back in My Arms Again
15. Stoned Love
I could go on ...
Superstars are quick to be ridiculed as having money and fame and everything at their disposal best doctors etc but you can't escape who you are inside and Britney seems to have been running away from her career to find herself for at least 15 years,all the luck in the world to her.
It’s great to see that Vanity Fair piece on Boseman and really gives us a sense of what his campaign will look like. It seems like other celebrities will be talking about his performance and legacy. Is this what Heath Ledger’s campaign looked like? Or Peter Finch’s (if such a thing existed back then)?
People have constantly cited Britney's head shaving as a sign that she was having a mental breakdown. I never thought so. She was in a contentious custody battle with her ex who had accused her of drug use. I assumed Britney shaved her head to avoid a hair follicle test, which could have proved drug use in the previous 90 days. That wouldn't prove mental instability at all. It may have been sneaky, but to me it showed she knew what she was doing.
This is all speculation, of course, but conservatorship is such a dehumanizing thing. I don't know how people couldn't sympathize with her situation.
The Britney doc is... not good. I was a bit shocked if came from the NY Times given they offer up so little of any real journalistic substance. Even when confronted with the very people responsible (well, partly) for her torture right there in opposite them in an interview chair. It’s a film of half measures.
Conservatorships are something that only exist in the US, and they are generally reserved for patients with dementia and the like. Britney is no where near mentally incapacitated to the point of needing permission to leave her house and get Starbucks. They've got her enslaved and it's fucked up. She's almost forty years-old standing in front of a judge telling them she's fearful of her father and will not perform as long as he remains in control and the judge is like *shrug* lol. Of course there's a lot we don't know, I'm sure, but these pop stars lives are not nearly as glamorous as they appear. She's never truly been free.
It's also so sickening to rewatch what the media was like in the 00s. Truly dark that that mentality was ever the norm and I'm very glad, despite the bullshit that still exists, that we don't find it acceptable to bully people like that anymore. The way the world treated her was so sick.
But I agree that it wasn't a great doc and it didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know about her situation.
I feel bad for Britney as someone who probably got famous way too fast and eventually had trouble coping with it to the point that she married a loser and had kids with him and then just fell apart. I remember that performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards and... yikes. I remember Rhianna and a friend of hers laughing as I just cringed and I was like... stop, please.
I wasn't a fan of her but that was the first time I actually felt sad for her. I haven't seen the doc but I know enough that she needs people who really care about her to run her finances and such.