Category: media

Alice Guy-Blaché “should be heralded alongside early filmmakers like Georges Méliès and Auguste and Louis Lumière. She was one of the first filmmakers – some argue the first – to work with fictional narratives, beginning with her 1896 La Fée aux choux in which babies are born from cabbages with the help of a fairy.”

“The costume drama featuring this moment, a film called Matilda after the dancer, is not due out until October. Yet the release of trailers of that scene, and a few others depicting the torrid affair that follows, was enough to ignite a firestorm.” The opposing sides are “an artistic community determined to fend off any hint of Soviet-style censorship” and a religious nationalist faction that sees the film as an insult to Nicholas II (the crown prince in question) – and therefore, since the last tsar is now a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church, “an insult to the faithful, which is a crime in Russia.”

“Going to the movies” is a Proustian madeleine, a series of pencil marks on a doorjamb, a solution to crises ranging from heartbreak to parental exhaustion, a way of being separate but together, present yet adrift. It’s also something people don’t do as often as they once did.

“Because it’s not winning the Palme d’Or. In the screwy universe of Cannes awards, Coppola actually got the equivalent of fourth place, behind the third-place Jury Prize winner, Loveless (directed by a Russian man); the second-place Grand Prix winner, 120 Beats Per Minute (directed by a French man); and the Palme d’Or victor, The Square (directed by a Swedish man). Best Director is considered such a nonessential prize — unlike those other three — that there have been 12 separate years when the jury decided not to award it.”

“Over the years, I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an art form for a whole range of reasons: it’s tainted by commercial considerations; it can’t possibly be an art because there are too many people involved in its creation; it’s inferior to other art forms because it “leaves nothing to the imagination” and simply casts a temporary spell over the viewer (the same is never said of theatre or dance or opera, each of which require the viewer to experience the work within a given span of time). Oddly enough, I’ve found myself in many situations where these beliefs are taken for granted, and where it’s assumed that even I, in my heart of hearts, must agree.”

We won’t have this legendary series of mishaps to kick around anymore: “The former Monty Python member has been working on the project since 1989, persevering through setbacks so numerous that they inspired a documentary about the ill-starred project, 2002’s ‘Lost in La Mancha.'” Instead, we’ll actually have the movie.

It’s how we measure our public lives. “Going to the movies was and remains a centerpiece of our emerging social and independent lives. The movie theater was the first non-school-associated public place my parents let me go to by myself, with money. I still remember the thrill of meeting my friends under the marquee, parsing our dollars out for maximum snacking, giggling and rustling in our seats. Released at last from that stern sideways maternal glance, we were giddy with freedom.”

No, it’s not new to see an interracial couple on-screen (and even in Love, Actually), but “their depictions in early cinema were rarely ‘light-hearted’ or ‘happily concluded’ – both conventions of the romcom.”

Gal Godot proves that’s a nope. And maybe it’s better this way: “‘When it’s Ben Affleck playing Batman, it’s hard not to look at that and see Ben Affleck.’ When you see Gadot these days, though, all you see is Diana Prince.”