Category: media

The combination of extemporaneous performance and preëxisting art form enacts a trust across time and space. In the heyday of silent pictures, filmmakers expected that their movies would be scored by a live musician, and thus silent films have always been a sort of incomplete form, waiting patiently for the act of creation to happen anew each time the film is shown. – The New Yorker

After Christina Randall was released from jail after a three-year term for battery and robbery, she finished a bachelor’s degree and hoped to get into social work — but with her incarceration history, she couldn’t get hired. So she started a YouTube channel on which, “in addition to sharing beauty tips, … she also talks candidly about life behind bars and the process of re-entry” to more than 400,000 subscribers. – The New York Times

Lionheart, by director Genevieve Nnaji, includes only 11 minutes of dialogue that aren’t in English. A statement from the Academy said that even though the name of the category was changed this year from Foreign Language Film to International Feature Film, the rules have not changed, and they require that a candidate film must have “a predominantly non-English dialogue track.” – The Hollywood Reporter

It’s probably no surprise that Hallmark channels have increased their annual Christmas movie count by 20 percent since 2017, but Lifetime has more than quadrupled its output in the last two years and Netflix has doubled its in that same time. – The New York Times

The news came from actress Dakota Johnson, who is to star in the feature, titled Crackpot; the item was buried deep in a news-and-gossip column at the trade website Deadline. The project could be a long-overdue bit of justice for May from Hollywood. – Slate

Like a pint-sized Cecil B. DeMille, we see Page in his family’s suburban Connecticut neighborhood as he wrangles his actors, gauges camera angles and shouts, “Action!” In cut-away interviews, the young Page expounds on French new wave directors and silent film stars with the intellect of the Pulitzer-Prize winning critic he’d become. – Los Angeles Times

Washington starred in the play on Broadway. So why take it to Netflix, of all places? Washington: “Not everybody has $200 to go and see a play on Broadway. … The economic diversity of our audience was really important to me, but also the global diversity of our audience, because violence with the police and bias with the police is not just an issue in the United States.” – Variety

Rhys, who starred opposite American actor Keri Russell in The Americans – and eventually became her partner in life as well – asked her who Rogers was. Rhys: “And then she launched into a two-hour monologue about how he influenced her life. That he was, and so many people said this, almost like a third parent or a baby sitter.” – The New York Times

This may be the last bow for the idea of fall TV. “The more that streaming becomes the default way people watch, the less that the concepts of time on which TV has operated — seasons, schedules, time slots — will matter. And with those customs will change the very culture of America’s essential medium.” – The New York Times

The only time you’ll see an actor with a disability in a Hollywood movie is when the actor isn’t disabled, and the movie is the kind of thing that disability activists call “inspo porn.” (Think Rain Man, The Upside, etc.) But at the Reelability Festival, “actors with a wide range of disabilities got to play an equally wide range of richly developed roles. … They were bolstered in this effort by something else notably unusual: A lot of those writing and directing and working on the films’ crews also were disabled people.” – Los Angeles Times