Category: media

Meryl Streep, basically – and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, sponsors of the Golden Globes and, for years, in real need of burnishing their image.

And that director, Tamara Jenkins, “is getting increasingly frustrated by its billing. ‘It’s not just a women’s infertility comedy. It’s about survival. It’s about humanity. It’s about growing. It’s about mortality. It’s about gentrification.'”

All you need is a high-quality cable subscription or high-speed internet and a subscription to HBO’s standalone service, and you too can see that “we may balk at seeing the economy of post-war Italy, which operated under quite different conditions, as an object lesson in the failings of capitalism for Americans today. But the way capital works in the neighborhood’s marketplaces should look familiar in many ways.”

Even Walmart joined with a movie studio to deal with its streaming service – but “two things make Disney stand out: decades of material and deep pockets.”

OK, FilmStruck will soon be no more, and everyone who loves movies is pretty angry about that. But the Criterion Channel has decided – probably because of thousands of tweets, right? or the more than 50,000 people who signed a Change.org petition – to launch its own streaming service in the spring. “Like FilmStruck, Criterion Channel will have its own supplemental programming for movie buffs, featuring cinema luminaries and behind-the-scenes footage.”

Why? Big budget Oscar bait, basically.

Seriously, is that ring on her finger just to remind us that she’s flipping us off and taking all of our money with every new book, movie, play, script, what have you? “At this point, the whole thing feels like a Cruciatus curse (often used on Muggles): it’s all very painful, and I wish it would stop.”

Before October, people could buy movies on the platform, but now? It’s … kind of like TV movies in the 1970s and 1980s. “‘Can we do ad-supported movies, free to the user?’ says Rohit Dhawan, director of product management at YouTube. ‘It also presents a nice opportunity for advertisers.'”

Perhaps. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of books are loved for their main character’s thoughts, but “while My Brilliant Friend is a brilliantly sustained exercise in interiority, it is also a noisy, messy, soap opera (as the index of characters, neatly captured in the TV credits by old-fashioned family photo tableaux, suggests).”