Category: media

“While Budweiser’s ad represents a glowing representation of the American dream, the truth is more complicated and, in fact, reflects a history of immigration that reverberates today.”

Raoul Peck, the director of “I Am Not Your Negro,” worked on James Baldwin’s writing for 30 years, and the movie for a decade. “The film was always experimenting with real feelings, with real stuff. … Each layer you add has a consequence. This is what I call montage filmmaking.”

And it was a political night at the DGA. DGA president Paris Barclay opened that with a clearly aimed statement: “If any person or any group of people, in the name of greater greatness, chooses to block, or to prevent, or to scapegoat, or to separate, or to divide the very people who are all about bringing people together, then we are going to stand with those people.”

First, there are the long, slow pans of the skyline. Then there’s the accent. And then, the people. “More often than not, either the portrayal is lazy, played out and riddled with cliches, or it’s broadened into a comedy routine to go down more easily.”

And what does The Crown, for instance, have to do with “the long history of Brexit”? “If its creators are up to the task, the series might well end up less a chronicle of a ruler than a dramatization of the referendum’s long history.”

Alfonso Cuarón’s son filmed a DVD extra for the 2011 film Gravity, starring an Inuit actor and community theatre director from Greenland. The extra film did so well that there was talk of a separate Oscar nomination for it – but the actor was paid a total of $4,000 and didn’t even know the film had done so well until NPR told him.

But the current “distant” fourth-place studio isn’t alone: “It is a crisis Sony shares with its Hollywood peers. In the UK and the US, revenue from streaming and downloads of films and TV shows passed sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs for the first time last year.”

Well, this is even more dramatic than a Bond flick: “For nearly a month Hamilton managed to avoid detection before escaping back to safety in England. Ten days later the escape route used by the Resistance was uncovered by the Nazis.”

“The suggestion that the Oscars be canceled this year stems in part from principle. The idea of artists being barred from attending the ceremony because of their country of origin is markedly against the global principles of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Though it’s often derided for its stodgy choices, the Best Foreign Language Film category does bring wider attention to international filmmaking.”

For instance, sex: “According to Hollywood, women can have completely satisfying sexual experiences without ever taking off their bras, and manage to reach euphoric orgasms within minutes. Girls never bothered with any of these tropes. From the show’s first episode, the sex was sweaty, it was weird, it was jiggly, it was unflattering. Which is to say: It was realistic.”