Saturday, October 20, 2018 at 12:26PM A collection of random tweets for your (hopeful) amusement...
"One for the new Dianne Wiest, please!" — me at AMC on opening weekend of The Mule pic.twitter.com/dXcb91KudI
— Matthew Eng (@Eng_Matthew) October 4, 2018
Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 5:38PM • IndieWire a brief interview with Steven Yeun about life after The Walking Dead -- strangely there are no questions about his new Korean movie Burning despite the fact that he's amazing in it
• THR Bradley Cooper getting an award from PETA for casting his own dog Charlie in A Star is Born. I mean.... the dog is perfection, so why not?
• Vanity Fair Fan Bingbing has broken her silence after disappearing. She is said to owe more than $100 million in backtaxes to the Chinese government
• /Film Trailer for The Conners series, essentially Roseanne without Roseanne
• The Guardian a wonderful interview with Samantha Morton about choices she made in her career, her new part on The Walking Dead, and why she was dubbed "difficult" in her early years of stardom.
• Playbill Emmy & Oscar winner Christine Lahti now starring in a play Off-Broadway about Gloria Steinem called Gloria: A Life. Steinem is quite the hot topic at the moment since there's also a biopic in the works
• Pajiba on the Bullseye rumors around Daredevil season 3
• Decider a Jeopardy moment that will go viral involving drag superstar Alyssa Edwards
• /Film Netflix will be releasing Paul Greengrass 22 July in 100 theaters (they're also rumored to be trying to buy movie theaters, which is odd considering how much they've worked to diminish the moviegoing habit)
• MNPP Luke Benward nine times
• Daily Beast and director Catherine Hardwicke reflect back on Twilight's success and the sexist aftermath
This Week's Must Read (s)
Wesley Morris has an amazing challenging essay about the new ways we discuss art and how they've come to center more on the artist and that person's perceived moral or representational correctness then the quality of the art. I loved reading this because so much of what he's saying I've seen happening and whenever I tried to put my finger on why it was frustrating me, I couldn't quite locate the target.
The essay also prompted this interesting discussion at Vulture among a panel of mostly female critics. I love the point raised that there's a way to discuss art in this new way while also balancing aesthetic discussion but a lot of younger critics haven't been trained in that way or encouraged to learn that skill in the charged political time we're living in.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 at 12:00PM by Nathaniel R
click to embiggenThe major Oscar hopeful that's played things closest to the vest this season is Vice. The trailer and poster (to your left) have both finally dropped today and other Oscar campaigns are probably shivering a bit. The film, from writer/director Adam McKay of The Big Short fame, is a comedy telling the true story of how Dick Cheney came to rule the world (albeit behind the curtain as the Vice President) and set the US on a sorry new course.
It's an all-star affair with Oscar winners Christian Bale (Dick Cheney) and Sam Rockwell (George W Bush), Oscar darling Amy Adams (Lynne Cheney), and Oscar nominee Steve Carell (Donald Rumsfeld) in political drag as figures we know and love hate. Alison Pill and Tyler Perry are also in the film (though they aren't featured in the trailer) as Mary Cheney and Colin Powell respectively.
After the jump the trailer and our Yes No Maybe So breakdown...
Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 7:00PM Murtada Elfadl reporting on the New York Film Festival
Early on in A Family Tour a reporter asks the lead character, a Chinese film director exiled in Hong Kong, why she makes political films. She answers that everything she makes is personal. Over the next two hours the film shows us exactly how the political is never separate from the personal.
The film is autobiographical, the director Ying Liang having lived in exile in Hong Kong since making When Night Falls (2012), a sharply critical look at the biased judicial system in China. He has switched the protagonist’s gender so we are following a female director (Gong Zhe) as she travels to a film festival in Taiwan with her husband and small child...
Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 4:00PM by Nathaniel R
Fan Bingbing in May at Cannes with other female superstars, a month before she disappeared.
We've mentioned this frightening story twice before in news roundups but since it's making another round through more mainstream websites today -- it takes the big ones time with the foreign superstars -- we should update you.
Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing (I Am Not Madame Bovary, X-Men Days of Future Past), who we always love covering in her Cannes appearances, is STILL missing. The media started suspecting that she'd vanished in July since she isn't exactly shy about public appearances, red carpets and the like...
