Emmy Watch: "Made-for-Television Movie"

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

El Camino

The Emmy race for made-for-television movie hasn’t exactly been the most interesting category in recent years. This category was merged with Best Miniseries in 2011 for three years, during which only six of the nominees were TV movies, and then it was unmerged. Actors in made-for-TV movies still compete with actors in mini-series though in shared categories. Last year marked the first time that not a single acting nominee came from a TV movie. That will definitely not happen this year given the quality of the contenders...

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Link on, Pete

• Vanity Fair Johnny Depp still having legal/financial woes. Being sued again
• IndieWire very thorough wide ranging interview with Vincent Maraval of the French movie production company Wild Bunch and how the arthouse market and Cannes have changed
• IndieWire from the sounds of this article on the visual FX work in Infinity War, the Oscar campaign is already in effect!
• MUBI Notebook a reprint of a 1972 essay about Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows when it was being reevaluated
• Film School Rejects Black Panther blu-ray review

• Gr8er Days awww, i missed this news about Carol Burnett's would be new sitcom, she backed out when the suits wanted a less unique show
• THR Jeffrey Tambor's first interview since being fired from Transparent
• /Film In unneccessary sequels with bad titles news: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard is coming
• Dread Central Ana Lily Armirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Bad Batch) has annnounced her next film: Blood Moon set in New Orleans
• NYT Ermanno Olmi, director of Cannes-winner Tree of Wooden Clogs dies
• The Guardian an interview with Chloe Sevigny about her 'Queen of the Scene' past, being in her 40s now, why she didn't name names with the Me Too movement, and her new role in Lean on Pete
• IndieWire CinemaScore gets super touchy about Martin Scorsese saying that their polling devalues cinema
• The Hollywood Reporter on CW's renewed and cancelled shows

Offscreen
• The Atlantic "I'm not Black, I'm Kanye" a devastating piece by Ta Nehisi Coates on all sorts of things including: Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the 1980s, and American history.
• Deadline Olivia de Havilland trying to keep her Feud lawsuit alives. Has appealed the ruling against her
• Playbill Meet the cast of Broadway's Moulin Rouge!

Transparent S4 E7-10: Everything's Alright?

by Chris Feil

E7 - "Babar the Borible"
I haven’t been quite sure what to make of this season of Transparent. Whereas the two previous seasons were fairly bold in creating seismic arcs for all of the Pfeffermans, this season felt like a chamber piece full of half-steps towards global politics and religion. The journey to Israel was an intriguing way to continue expanding the family history and contextualizing the show’s themes. But by the end of the season, the religious elements of the seasons feel more tangential and underdeveloped. Odd that as Transparent’s literal world got bigger, the show got unsatisfyingly smaller...

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Transparent S4 E4-6: A Widening Family Circle

by Chris Feil

E4 - "Cool Guy"

Maura wasted no time in discovering her father still alive in Israel to actually meet him, even if Allie led most of the confrontation. Upon meeting Moshe, it’s doubly infuriating that Maura has to do the labored explanation of her gender before Moshe even begins to explain himself for abandoning her. It’s two kinds of very personal injustice intertwining for something almost unspeakably painful - the kind of moment that Jeffrey Tambor has aced from the very beginning of Transparent.

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Transparent S4 E1-3: Off to Israel

by Chris Feil

The opening theme music to Transparent by Dustin O’Halloran always chokes me up. Something about its evolving images and sound carry the weight of the shared histories - LGBTQ, Judaism, and family - speaks to both the known and still secreted past that makes the Pfefferman clan all too relatable. Like the rest of us, they’ve been somewhere and it hasn’t been easy. But from the opening emotive thrum, the theme now incorporating pilgrimage images and a traditional Jewish instrumentation, this season announces that it’s going somewhere too.

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