NYFF: A Family Tour

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...

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Where is Fan Bingbing?

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...

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Months of Meryl: Lions for Lambs (2007)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#38 — Janine Roth, a liberal network journalist faced with an ethical quandary.

JOHN: When Meryl Streep accepted her Golden Globe for The Devil Wears Prada in January 2007, she divulged a prophecy: “This has been such a fun year to watch movies because of you gals,” she said, citing fellow nominees like Annette Bening, Toni Collette, and Beyoncé. “[It] makes you want to cry with gratitude… until next year.” How could Streep have known that her 2007 would contain some of the most insipid and unwatchable films of her entire career?

In Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Streep switches sides from Rendition, her previous War on Terror drama, playing Janine Roth, an investigative journalist given an exclusive scoop by a hawkish, right-wing senator named Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) about a new military tactic being deployed in Afghanistan. Because Lions for Lambs was made under the same misguided inspiration of everything-is-connected political narratives like Babel, Crash, and Rendition, Streep and Cruise’s conversation is just one of three narrative threads...

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Months of Meryl: Rendition (2007)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#37 —Corrine Whitman, the ruthless head of U.S. intelligence.

MATTHEW: If the one-two punch of A Prairie Home Companion and The Devil Wears Prada in 2006 represent a high-water mark for Meryl Streep then 2007 might very well be the single oddest year in the actress’ career. How else to explain Streep’s decision to accept secondary and even tertiary parts in four independent-to-midrange projects that not a single Streep enthusiast has ever had the inclination to hold up alongside her most acclaimed or memorable works? Streep spent part of the prior year accepting prizes for Prada and, most excitingly, playing one of the all-time greatest characters in theater history on the outdoor stage of the Delacorte. During that period, Streep also found time to dip her toes into the murky waters of post-9/11 cinema for a second time, following up her monstrous mommy in Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate with an equally vile political puppeteer...

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My Fair Linky

• Los Angeles Times Black Panther wants the Best Picture Oscar. Is making plans to get it 
• Deadline If they want to keep Daniel Craig, the Bond producers have to move fast to replace Danny Boyle in the director's chair for the next Bond film. Here's the candidates they're considering. I love the idea of Yann Demange because '71 proved he can do propulsive nail-biting tension even without big stunts and budgets
• The Guardian fun report on the tragic lack of quality in Netflix's much-hyped romcom programming
• Awards Daily  Upcoming festivals and how they typically shape the Oscar race

• Broadway Blog Lauren Ambrose is leaving My Fair Lady early for a TV role so in steps Laura Benanti
• Variety New animated film in the pipeline called My Boyfriend is a Bear. Sadly it's not an animated gay romcom but what sounds like G rated beastiality for children.
• Coming Soon Elton John biopic Rocketman has a release date: May 31st, 2019. Bold move for a biopic, aiming for summer box office. Taron Egerton (Kingsman) stars
• Us Magazine Scott Eastwood is having sex "lots of it"
• EW Troye Sivan on his music and Boy Erased. When asked if Kidman is a fan:

I’m…not sure! She said in an article that she and Keith are fans. And I was really gagged by that. I just don’t know if it’s true or if she was just being really nice.

politics & showbiz
• THR how is the #metoo era affecting sex scenes and no-nudity clauses?
• The Cut tries to work out the complex contradictory feelings resulting from Asia Argento being revealed as both alleged victim and alleged harasser
• New Yorker "Crazy Rich Asians and the end point of representation"
• /Film on that Buffy reboot. "Talent of color do not need white tv show and film hand-me-downs" I like this article but this wave of 'diversity rebooting' has less to do with the white lens, I'd argue, than it has to do with Hollywood's typical modus operandi: regurgitate! regurgitate! regurgitate! That's what they know how to do.

Exit Track
Michelle Yeoh making the press rounds. Here's her interview w/ the HFPA (The Golden Globes).