‘The English Patient’ Wins Best of Man Booker Prize

by Murtada

The English Patient, the novel by Michael Ondaatje, has won the Golden Booker prize. The one-off award, voted for by the public, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker prize. The shortlist of five novels was selected by a panel of judges from the 51 previous winners of the Man Booker, which honors the best novels written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. The book, which I read after the film won 9 Oscars in 1996, has always been a favorite. Not only for its beautifully written lyrical romantic love story but for its exploration of the fallacy of nationalism.

The characters in The English Patient - Hungarian, Indian, Canadian and English - form artistic allegiances rather than arbitrary ones based along geographical lines. Those themes resonate even more today, as we are in the midst of a of a volatile debate about immigration...

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The Link Visits

• Lit Hub interesting essay on the popularity of world-building in genre fiction
• Coming Soon Wreck It Ralph 2 has a scene with all the Disney princesses
• Cartoon Brew trailer for something called Another Day of Life which combines documentary footage with CG animation for a different kind of movie
• The Guaridan a five star review of the great silent film Pandora's Box, which y'all know I love. It's maybe my favorite silent

• The New Yorker the emptiness of the new Star Wars universe. I liked Solo more than most and disagree with a few key points here (Emilia Clarke had plenty of screen time to develop that character for example. She's just not an inspired actor is all) but it's still an interesting good read about the problem of prequels and self-consciously mythic work.
• Tom Cruise... speaking of self-conciously mythic. Top Gun 2 began filming
• Boy Culture Madonna gives her blessing to a book/movie deal that uses her music as backdrop for a boy's coming out story. It was a project mainstream publishers rejected. Bet they're sorry now that it has a six figure movie deal.
• Variety Angelina Jolie in David Oyelowo may be starring in a new fantasy drama called Come Away about the parents of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Say what? It's from Brave director Brenda Chapman
• Variety a report on the trouble of ultra cheap or ultra expensive movies in Japan. It's not just Hollywood that has a no mid-budget films problem
• Awards Daily the summer of Donald Glover
• Towleroad deleted scene from Love Simon featuring Colton Haynes

Theater People
• Stage is a new streaming service for theater fans launching this August. Taye Diggs is going to host the first three episodes of their debut talk show called "Crossovers" with Leslie Uggams, Billy Magnussen, and Tamara Tunie as initial guests
• Playbill Tony-bound musical adaptation The Band's Visit will launch a national tour in one year's time.
• TFE ← I just wanted to point you back to this interview we did with two cast members from the musical comedy Desperate Measures last year. The show was so successful it's reopening today at New World Stages for an open run with most of the original cast (including these two) rejoining. It is SO worth seeing so I hope some of you in NYC or visiting will make it!

Yes No Maybe So: "Book Club"

by Nathaniel R

First things first: how utterly fabulous does Jane Fonda look in the trailer for Book Club? She's 80 (!!!) Don Johnson isn't even 70 year but he should be so lucky. She looks great as a ginger. 

Now that the mandatory Jane worship is out of the way (I just saw Klute again -which is a renewal of breathless fandom for her gifts every time), let's break down the trailer for this romantic comedy of sorts about four golden girls who aren't willing to stop living and are dating again. Whilst they read books? We're really not sure how the books fit into it to be honest. Neither is the trailer...

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Dennis Quaid Still Has "The Right Stuff"

by Nathaniel R

Dennis Quaid as "Gordon Cooper" in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)

Have you noticed how many movie stars are doing audiobooks these days? (I have a friend who keeps raving about Armie Hammer's reading of Call Me By Your Name.) But it's not just current movies with complimentary audiobooks. There's a new audiobook out this week for Tom Wolfe's 1979 nonfiction bestseller "The Right Stuff" about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program in the 1940s and 1950s. Dennis Quaid is doing the audiobook honors this time and he famously co-starred in that book's Oscar-favored adaptation in 1983.  The Right Stuff (1983) won four craft Oscars in its year (splitting the below-the-line prizes with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander) and if you haven't seen it you really should. It's quite good.

Here's a little bit of Dennis's familiar comfy gravel voice reading the book... sadly it's not a scene about his character but a scene involving Fred Ward's character Gus Grissom.

Months of Meryl: Manhattan (1979)

Hi, we’re John and Matt and, icymi, we are watching every single live-action film starring Streep.

#3 — Jill, our neurotic protagonist’s chilly lesbian ex.

MATTHEW: So, you’ve just played a chatterbox and a near-mute, the former defined by her gaucheness, the latter by her almost ethereal warmth. What role do you take on next? Why, an ice queen, of course!

The overarching worldview of Woody Allen’s beloved Manhattan is cruel, chaotic, and self-absorbed, even as its fleet, monochromatic presentation retains the smooth and deceptive romanticism of that rightfully-iconic opening montage...

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