Category: media

Thandie Newton, on getting equal pay to the men of HBO’s Westworld for the upcoming Season 3: “It’s unprecedented. It’s — goodness; it shatters so much calcified pain, resentment, frustration. It just shatters it.”

Look, Australia only has about 24 million people, and not that many of them are in acting. So that means, when U.S. streaming services start bringing in the Aussie content by the bucketful, the viewing public is going to get the familiar “British actor” feeling (“What’s Snape doing as King Louis?”), except in an Australian accent.

The Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation says the public broadcaster’s English service earlier this month began destroying acetate transcriptions, as well as audio and video recordings that span eight decades, after converting the master copies into a digital format. The foundation asked the CBC earlier this year for time to find a suitable space to archive and preserve the material, but says it was turned down.

Although no cinema deal has materialized, the idea of Netflix buying a theater chain would mark a new phase in the company’s rapid ascent to become one of the most powerful players in the entertainment industry.

“The reaction to Matilda represents, in microcosm, many of the contradictions of contemporary Russian culture. It should have been a flagship Russian movie, … [and] originally had Oscar ambitions. Instead, the film’s reception was derailed by religious purists. Part of Vladimir Putin’s narrative is that he, too, is part of Russia’s imperial legacy. Some think that he believes he has been divinely ordained to play his role. In some ways, this has been an embarrassment for the government: they part-funded the film. But they couldn’t defend it, as the protesters were articulating one of the key tenets of Putin’s presidency: Russia needs to return to the greatness of the tsars and to its Orthodox church roots.”

“Five years ago, Haifaa al-Mansour made history with her moving and critically-acclaimed drama Wadjda, making her not just the first female Saudi filmmaker, but the first director to have shot a feature film in the kingdom. At the time, the idea of Wadjda being released on home soil was ludicrous: its cinema and theaters had long since been closed following the country’s adoption of strict ultra-conservative Islam in the early ’80s. On April 18, 2018, however, a new cinematic dawn broke over the kingdom with the opening of Saudi Arabia’s first cinema since the movie theater ban was lifted in December … [Al-Mansour] wrote to The Hollywood Reporter with her thoughts on the cinema opening, the “seismic shift” now sweeping over her home nation and why nothing will be the same again.

“If someone hands you a million dollars, they expect you to turn out an amazing product. It’s a huge thing to carry on your shoulders.”

Matt Zoller Seitz: “Shonda Rhimes’s Scandal, which ends its seven-season run Thursday night, is a rare revolutionary TV drama that never became full of itself. It dealt in controversy on the regular, tackling everything from racial politics and sexual power dynamics in a workplace to PTSD, executive privilege, and the efficacy of torture, even letting its heroine have a rare TV abortion that was entirely elective and presented as no huge deal. … Scandal was also a little miracle of genre fusion, somehow managing to be several seemingly incompatible shows at the same time.”