Links: Scarjo Shifting, Brie Wrapping, Joss Returning, Cheetah Leaping

• Out Scarlett Johansson leaves the upcoming trans drama Rub & Tug post-backlash
• THR In unrelated news Scarlett is finally getting her Black Widow solo movie. Australian Cate Shortland (Lore) will direct, beating out finalists Amma Asante and Maggie Betts.
• MovieMaker the 25 coolest film festivals in the world (the giant A list fests are not listed in favor of quirkier ones that use their location in interesting ways.)
• Gizmodo only one Blockbuster video store is still open in the United States!

More after the jump including Die Hard, Danai Gurira, Tab Hunter, Joss Whedon, If Beale Street Could Talk, West Side Story revival, and more...

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Bergman Centennial: Death and "The Seventh Seal"

by Chris Feil

The Seventh Seal begins with some of the most enigmatic and iconic imagery of Ingmar Bergman’s career. Which is saying something considering the auteur’s filmography is composed almost entirely of meditative frames. Here Max von Sydow's post-Crusades knight Antonious Block is visited by a black cloaked Death and the two take part in a literal and intellectual game of chess. It’s a grave way to start a film, one that still endures for its thematic impact and how it establishes the rest of its stark narrative as spiritually timeless.

Named for the passage in the Book of Revelation marking the final opening of the apocalyptic scrolls and the resulting period of silence in heaven, the film lives in that quiet Godlessness...

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Blueprints: Emmy Nominees for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series

Full swing into Emmy season! Jorge looks at drama series first...

ICYMI: the nominations for the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards. 

Let’s take a look at the six shows that made the cut for Writing in a Drama Series. As in the Directing categories, writing categories highlight individual episodes rather than overall series, which makes it not uncommon for one show to have multiple nominations. However once "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" were off the air, this category has not had any doubling up! This year every slot once again went to a different show, from newcomers, to established favorites, to people in their last round of eligibility.

Let's see the elevator pitches and the stats (we love a good round of statistics) after the jump... 

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Emmy Nominations for 2018: Glow, Mrs Maisel, Game of Thrones, and the Snubbing of Mindhunter

Happy 70th, Emmys! The big awards night won't be held until September 17th (hosted by Colin Jost and Michael Che) but the nominations were announced this morning. The Emmys have so many categories that beware when you see any site that says "full list of nominees." Even the major news outlets (like Variety and all the massive circulation papers) do this while leaving out a shit ton of categories. In other words don't believe it when anyone says "full list". The only place that regularly shares that is the Emmy site itself. Here's the PDF. 

The behemoth, once again, is "Game of Thrones" which, after a year off, returns again to its throne of "Most Nominated Show" just barely edging out "Saturday Night Live," "West World" and "The Handmaid's Tale" all of which received 20 or more nominations. I was particularly happy about plentiful nominations for "GLOW" though it's worth noting that these nominations are not from the show as we know it right this second but from season 1 a full year ago. 

After the jump the major stuff and a few other categories that we're interested in... 

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Bergman Centennial: Persona and the Problem of "Motherliness"

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs this week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Lynn Lee

Persona has been called the Mount Everest of film critics, and no wonder.  For a film that clocks in at a lean 84 minutes and turns on a deceptively simple premise – a celebrated actress (Liv Ullmann) falls mysteriously silent and is consigned to the care of a chatty, insecure nurse (Bibi Andersson) – it contains multitudes.  In the 50-plus years since its debut, its potential meanings have been explored from almost every conceivable angle, be it existential, metaphysical, psychological, psychosexual, queer, feminist, the role of art and the artist, or just the film’s pure cinematic texture and experimental devices.  But Persona is a slippery beast: just when you think you have a theory as to what it’s “about,” it melts and reformulates into something else entirely.

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