Category: media

“Ava DuVernay became attached as director. She has been blunt in the States in saying she rewrote much of the screenplay. How do you react to that?
“Those claims are highly exaggerated. … She has told the story very well though it’s not quite the story she was given.”

“Sometimes it ends up on DVD and remastered Blu-Ray, and what have you, and sometimes I think they make too big of an effort with the cleaning process.”

“Imagine a category that rewards excellence in blending fact and fiction in in an original manner (this is distinct from Best Adapted Screenplay, which celebrates the adaptation of a previous, distinct work.) … This is a category that doesn’t nitpick the details, but appreciates a film’s attempt to bring together the realms of fiction and nonfiction.” And it might shut the nitpickers up (but probably not).

“Here is the question I’m trying to answer: What will happen to me – an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child – if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? … Or will I simply go insane?”

“While we all know about the major controversies underpinning this year’s [awards race] – such as the shameful lack of diversity in this year’s #OscarsSoWhite nominees – no film is immune from its own internal drama. Here’s a look at some of the specific quarrels and criticisms that have plagued 10 of this year’s nominated films.”

Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida): “It’s not a nice feeling, and I also feel a bit embarrassed for my country, which I’m very proud of in most ways. When it happens, and they said Ida is an unpatriotic embarrassment, I think, ‘My movie’s not embarrassing. This is embarrassing.'”

Edward Rothstein: “The historian is starting to be perceived as a pedant. And the ‘Gotcha Game’ – as one critic has called efforts to call out film inaccuracies – is being portrayed as a culturally philistine enterprise. … Actually, if these films didn’t make such claims on history, they would get considerably less attention. History, they insist, matters. But some also claim its mantle disingenuously, in order to give authority to their manipulations. Fact-checking is important because it helps disclose what is being changed and why.”

“The spat began earlier this month, when director Feng Xiaogang lambasted the popularity of a spate of recent Chinese movies based on popular reality television shows. … That hurts genuine filmmaking, he argued, because it draws investor money away from more serious movies.” Arguing back was no less than the People’s Daily (sounding not unlike The Wall Street Journal, actually).

“Slate film critic Dana Stevens takes a closer look at Arquette’s remarkable performance as Olivia, the doughty single mother in [Boyhood,] Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making coming-of-age story.” (video)