Category: media

Hmmm. “She effectively exerts her own gravitational force field, magnetized by strategically deployed invitations, introductions, magazine features and messages of support. If that disappears, particles previously held together by her atomic network will disperse and collide before renegotiating themselves into some sort of new order, which is one way of saying it would affect not just glossy magazines, but also the broader fashion establishment and the Hollywood-sports-fashion industrial complex.”

How did director Kay Cannon get the job of helming the new sex comedy Blockers – and making it “a harder R” than it had been in its original script? She went to a meeting. “Point Grey and Good Universe had a writer’s roundtable for Neighbors 2. They had invited a bunch of lady writers to give their lady perspective. When I come to that kind of a thing, I come prepared. I had my computer out and I was basically running my mouth and giving any ideas I had. From that, they thought I had the potential to do a nice job directing.”

This is a serious technology question: “With DVDs steadily joining VHS cassettes as extinct technology, what has become of the fun, insightful mixed bag that movie fans came to know as bonus features — the audio commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, bloopers, deleted scenes and alternate endings? Some of these extras have shifted to digital stores and streaming platforms. But can cinephiles access them as easily as they could when video rental stores prospered in every neighborhood?”

As agencies try to get into the production business during this time of streaming, not everyone is excited by the multi-tentacled operations. “The Writers Guild of America sounded an alarm in March to thousands of its members nationwide, arguing that agencies face a conflict of interest when they step into the producing arena. The union posed the question: Will an agency’s fiduciary responsibility be to the staff writer it represents, or to the TV series that it owns and on which the writer is employed?”

Constance Zimmer, who just directed an episode of UnReal: “I saw Greta Gerwig [an Oscar nominee for her directorial debut of Lady Bird] on a panel recently and she said, ‘When it’s your first time, that’s when you can fail.’ That was my approach. If you don’t go big, you don’t know if you could have done better.”

The director of (most recently) Isle of Dogs has affected not only other movies but also everything about our visual world, including Instagram and much more: “He has had a boggling influence over the rest of pop culture, too, on fashion, design, pop and social media. It ranges from Gucci’s billion-dollar renaissance, trading on various elements of Tenenbaum-chic, to the recent video for SZA’s Broken Clocks, where the singer and friends cavort in a very Anderson-like US holiday camp. And where there isn’t homage, there is downright parody.”

Are Indiana Jones and Lara Croft really meant to inspire kids to go into archaeology? “Although the character of Indiana Jones arguably raised the profile of archaeology as a whole, and Lara Croft could inspire young women to go into the field, both figures have little regard for the cultures whose histories they collect.”

The lead of this piece sums up the issues, really: “For four years after she left Grey’s Anatomy, Sandra Oh waited. She waited for offers to come in, juicy scripts that could come alive in the hands of her Golden Globe–winning talent. Sure, she did acting work here and there, … but there was nothing on the scale of Cristina Yang, the sarcastic surgeon she played on Grey’s for nearly a decade – a standout performance that turned the Korean-Canadian actress into a household name, and earned her five Emmy nominations in a row.”

“Look at the similarities: the Cold War secrecy between the US and Russia, the boardrooms packed with middle-aged men in suits, the supposedly infallible machine which is intent on slaughtering the people who built it. … And look at the convictions which underpin both works: that humans are intrinsically, self-destructively violent, and that anyone who believes himself to be 100% right is probably a dangerous maniac. It may be going too far to call 2001 a cynical political comedy, but if Kubrick hadn’t wanted us to laugh, … he wouldn’t have had a chapter entitled The Dawn of Man, in which man, having dawned, bashes another man’s brains out with a club.”