Doc Corner: David France's 'How to Survive a Pandemic'

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries about the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t rare. Just over two years into it, and already a long list of titles exist claiming to offer us insight into some area of the response. Some have worked (Nanfu Wang’s In The Same Breath, Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s 76 Days—both shortlisted for the Oscar) while others haven’t delivered where you would expect. They have been sometimes rushed, likely out of sheer determination to be completed in time for relevance, little knowing just how deep we would be without a clear exit. Because of this reason, many are dated by the time we get to see them.

How to Survive a Pandemic is unfortunately more of the latter. The film is something of a curiosity for its director David France. Curious because despite having the weight of timeliness on its side, Pandemic lacks the propulsive immediacy of his earlier films How to Survive a Plague and Welcome to Chechnya.

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Claudio's Best Shot Pick: The Godfather (1972)

The next episode of our series, ‘Hit Me With Your Best Shot,’ arrives tomorrow night. It’s focused on The Godfather on the occasion of its new restoration. You still have time to participate. For now, as something of a preview, here’s Cláudio’s entry.

The Godfather is one of those canonized classics about which there is nothing new to say. Its themes and visual strategies have been overanalyzed ad nauseam across decades, from Coppola's Viscontian staging to Gordon Willis's shadowy cinematography. Choosing the best shot from such masterpiece and justifying that choice is thus a complicated exercise where one risks obsolescence, repetition, utter failure. Indeed, of this season's best shot challenges, this was the hardest...

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Awards Calendar 2022/2023

If you're eyes rolled when you saw this headline that means you still need more recovery time from the fiasco that was the 2021/2022 awards season. But time marches on and now we must draw our attention to the next wave of awards shows. We'll update this post periodically and republish.

APRIL 2022
28th Tony Eligibility Ends

If a show hasn't officially opened by this date, it's not eligible until 2023. The following shows are expected to be eligible: 13 original plays (Birthday Candles, Chicken & Biscuits, Clydes, Dana H, Hangmen, Is This a Room, The Lehman Trilogy, The Little Prince, The Minutes, Pass Over, POTUS or..., Skeleton Crew, Thoughts of a Colored Man), 7 play revivals (American Buffalo, For Colored Girls who..., How I Learned To Drive, Lackawanna Blues, Macbeth, The Skin of Our Teeth, Trouble in Mind), 7 original musicals (Diana, Flying Over Sunset, Girl from the North Country, MJ, Mr Saturday Night, Mrs Doubtfire, Six), and 4 musical revivals (Caroline or Change, Company, Funny Girl, The Music Man). It is our dream to one day get press invites to ample theater so we can do a once weekly column on that as a cultural sidebar.

MAY 2022
3rd Tony Award Nominations Announced
31st Emmy Eligibility Ends

The eligibilty period began on June 1st, 2021 (The debut seasons of Disney+'s Loki, Netflix's Sweet Tooth, Apple TV's Physical, AMC's Kevin Can F*** Himself, and Starz' Blindspotting and the second season of Hulu's Love Victor will thus be eligible despite feeling very 'old' by voting time) and ends on this date. If a show has aired enough episodes (six) to be considered a series by May 31st, 2022 its 'hanging episodes' (airing after this date but before the balloting ends in June) still count. The Emmys have fixed some of their rules so now if a film has qualified for the Oscars or has had a mass theatrical release (more than 70 theaters) on a single day, it is no longer eligible for the Emmy, so that should end the double-dipping that used to occur. More film festivals are now including TV programming but festival screenings do not interfere with Emmy eligibility... 

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I'll Link to That: Pedro, Liza, 'The Northman', and Anthony Bridgerton

• The Guardian ranks Liza Minnelli's 20 best films. You can quibble with the order but there's so much good stuff in here; very happy to see the wildly underrated Lucky Lady make it all the way to #7
• IndieWire looks at the first take reactions to The Northman (which are wildly positive as first take reactions tend to be) 
• AfterEllen here's something a bit unexpected. Pioneering lesbian rockstar Melissa Etheridge has released a graphic novel AND announced a week-long event in Mexico called Etheridge Island which is aimed where she and Ani DiFranco and other artists will perform

Upcoming music biopics, You Won't Be Alone, Killing Eve, Bridgerton, Pedro Almodóvar, Mad God, and more after the jump ...

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❤️ Carrie Coon

Sometimes celebrity twitter is a delight.

Same. https://t.co/ldexWlUCUW

— Carrie Coon (@carriecoon) April 6, 2022

Carrie Coon is stealth one of the greats, whether she's just being an awesome actor, politically goodhearted person, sharing her cinephilia online, or just being funny as in the tweet above. You should follow her on Twitter where she regularly shares what movies she's watching (she watches a lot of movies so naturally we're endeared to her) and on Instagram. I once saw her and her husband playwright/actor Tracy Letts get into a cab here in Manhattan and it was such a stupid thrill seeing them in the wild since they're both such brilliant artists.