• The Guardian An excerpt from Sarah Polley's new memoir concerning her child actor days on Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
• IndieWire Marcel the Shell is submitting as an Animated Feature. Will the Oscars accept it?
• Coming Soon The First Lady, which was meant to be an ongoing anthology series with new leads each year, has been cancelled. At least we got another tremendous Pfeiffer performance out of it!
The current Warner Bros / HBOMax Batgirl nightmare, our beloved Melanie Lynskey on Yellowjackets, Bong Joon-ho's next film, and Dev Patel as a real life hero after the jump...
• The Advocate an interview with Shirley Maclaine!
• The Envelope great interview with Melanie Lynskey about the success of Yellowjackets
• AV Club Season 2 of The White Lotus is coming in October (not too long to wait) with Jennifer Coolidge the only returning cast member
• IndieWire Bong Joon-ho has started shooting his first movie since Parasite. It's based on the sci-fi novel Mickey7 and stars Robert Pattinson as the titular clone. Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, and Naomi Ackie costar
• The Guardian staff chooses their favourite action movies
• Deadline Shea Couleé of RuPaul's Drag Race fame has joined the cast of Marvel's Ironheart series
• Banana Guide no that wasn't Neil Patrick Harris' actual dick in the Uncoupled dick pic scene
• IndieWire NEON is looking to sell to a deep pocketed buyer
• Deadline Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery will close the BFI London Film Festival
Batgirl concept art. The film had finished filming but wasn't through post production yet
This Week's Big Movie New Nightmare
• THR The new merger between Warner Bros and Discovery is leaving bodies everywhere. Several series were cancelled and A Scooby Doo movie and a Batgirl movie, both very far into production were scrapped altogether and won't be released -- even on streaming services
• Los Angeles Times the makers of Batgirl are reeling from the news
• IndieWire ...and the bleeding doesn't stop there. HBOMax is also removing titles (without warning) from their streaming service which were HBOMax exclusives but aren't performing well. Also for tax write off purposes (it's complicated).
In short, BUY PHYSICAL MEDIA IF YOU LOVE A MOVIE. The studios, which are now all owned by media conglomerates, do not view film as an artform. They simply do not care if any particular film exists or not. The impedning collapse of the streaming bubble will surely mean a new wave of "lost films"... it's the same kind of mentality (just under new lingo "content") that resulted in studios trashing or torching or losing negatives to thousands of films from the early days of the artform.
Offscreen
• Humanizing the Vacuum - insightful piece ranking all of Kate Bush's albums. "Hounds of Love" will always be #1 for me (favourite album of all time, any artist) but other than that quibble...
• Poorly Drawn Lines "A Brief History of Humans"
• Variety Dev Patel broke up a knife fight in Australia yesterday and the actors rep are using it to spotlight larger systemic issues so good on them.