Dakota Johnson and the Art of Disdain

by Cláudio Alves

There are few things more enjoyable than watching Dakota Johnson take the piss out of one of her movies. It's even better when it's not simply done in the promo tour but within the flick itself. Some might find it disrespectful, but such are the privileges of our nepo baby extraordinaire. She's got enough bad reviews to satisfy those who dislike her approach and even some Razzie nominations to go with them. However, I'd argue Johnson's bizarre deliveries, the projections of disdain for bad scripts, might be a kind of secret weapon of hers. There comes a point where one starts to feel a kinship with the actress or even a sense that she's fixing rotten characterizations by simply not taking them too seriously…

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Showbiz History: The Help, Madame Butterfly, and the first superhero comic?

7 random things that happened on this day, February 17th, in showbiz history...

1904 Puccini's beloved opera Madame Butterfly premieres in Italy in what was essentially rough draft form. After audiences booed, he revamped it for four months and the streamlined version became a global success. The opera was based on the play by David Belasco. The story has made it to the big screen six times beginning with the silent film era. Two of the subsequent films were versions of the opera itself, one a Japanese film in 1954 and the other a French film in 1995. Have you seen any film version of this or the opera itself?

1936 The daily newspaper comic strip The Phantom launches (and is still running if you can believe it) essentially giving rise to the superhero genre...

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New Mutants and New Films. What did you see this past week?

Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.

I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...

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The Link Purple

• /Film The Color Purple musical is getting a film version. It will be directed by Black is King helmer Blitz Bazawule. No word on casting yet but I think we can all agree that Cynthia Erivo should reprise her Tony-winning role!
• Broadway World meanwhile Erivo has launched her own production company

WHEW we have a lot to get through still. More after the jump including the business of movie theaters, Tenet's opening plans, Polanski's losing request, Netflix cancellations, Tiger King's spinoffs, and LGBTQ icons in comic books and on HBO...

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10th Anniversary: Scott Pilgrim vs The World

by Nick Taylor

I first saw Scott Pilgrim vs The World with my mom at an advanced screening, the benefit of a summer-long stint in 2010 where my parent’s work received passes for secret audience test runs of upcoming blockbusters. The theater was decently sized and completely packed, mainly crowded with teenage boys escorted by parents, grandparents, and other miscellaneous chaperones, plus a good number of twenty- and thirtysomethings who likely read Bryan Lee O’Malley’s recently concluded graphic novel series. You can imagine any number of reasons why this movie would’ve played well to the teen boys in the audience, though it still amazes me how much everyone in the theater seemed to be having a good time with it. Ten years later and it’s still a reliable hit with my immediate family, and someone referring to it as Edgar Wright’s best film can get me on their side real quick...

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