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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Streaming was supposed to stop piracy. Now it is easier than ever | | by Alex Hern Oct 2, 2021 | | With new streamers constantly launching and lockdowns changing watching patterns, film and TV piracy is mounting a comeback. Can anything be done? In the 2000s, I arrived at university to vast libraries, thousands of strangers and the riches of academic life – plus a gigabit broadband connection that would be used on downloading pirated versions of every piece of entertainment ever made. In between essays, I watched classic movies, listened to vast discographies, and binged the entire run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That particular choice might mark this story out as one that belongs firmly in the past, but piracy itself is far from dead. We are living in a golden age of streaming. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ are pumping out award-winning shows. Britain’s public service broadcasters have more box sets than you can consume in a lifetime. If you have a niche interest, someone is streaming it for you somewhere: Sony’s Crunchyroll for anime fans, BFI Player for film buffs, Sky’s History Play for those who really like ancient aliens. And even before the pandemic forced film studios to experiment with simultaneous cinema and home releases, we had access to more films and shows than any other point in history. Continue reading... | | | | | Streaming: at home with the 2021 London film festival | | by Guy Lodge Oct 2, 2021 | | For those who still can’t be there in person, this year’s LFF is putting some of its best titles online, from a riotous Iranian family road trip to Stephen Graham as a chef on the edge
The London film festival kicks off next week, and after a 2020 pandemic edition that played out mostly online, organisers of the UK’s premier film festival are stressing the joys of returning to the cinema in all its glory. That’s great news for some of us – but those elsewhere in the country might feel excluded from the feast after getting a virtual place at the table last year. Happily, the fest hasn’t forgotten the ground gained in terms of accessibility, and is offering a digital programme of 30-odd features available to stream on the BFI Player – each for a 24-hour window after its festival premiere – alongside a programme of free-to-view shorts. It’s a smaller menu than last year’s, but it’s a well curated one: while the presumption at hybrid festivals like this is often that the dregs of the programme are thrown online as a grudging concession, this selection contains a number of the very best films in the lineup. Continue reading... | | | | | Jeffrey Wright: 'There's a relentless, grotesque debasement of language in the US' | | by Steve Rose Oct 2, 2021 | | Cinema’s classiest actor on being wooed by Wes Anderson for The French Dispatch, playing Bond’s CIA buddy Felix and why he’s fighting for thinkers in an age of vulgarity With his soulful gravitas, rich vocal tones and understated cool, Jeffrey Wright is one of those actors who brings dramatic heft to anything in which he appears. Which, these days, is an awful lot. He broke through on the New York stage, winning a Tony award for 1994’s Angels in America, then on screen with his portrayal of Jean-Michel Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic, and he has not stopped since. As well as voicing Marvel’s animated series What If…? he will be seen in the coming months as James Bond’s CIA buddy Felix Leiter in No Time to Die; in a new series of Westworld, and as James Gordon to Robert Pattinson’s Batman. Meanwhile, Wright has joined the Wes Anderson Extended Universe with The French Dispatch, a characteristically intricate hymn to New Yorker-style journalism. As we speak, Wright is in Spain working on Anderson’s next movie. “I feel I’m part of the travelling troupe now,” he says over Zoom, at the end of a day’s shooting So how did you join Anderson’s troupe? I’m imagining an embossed invitation slipped under your hotel room door …
I got a call in the normal way from my agent. I hadn’t met Wes before, but he had seen most of the plays that I’ve done in New York city and I had no idea. He invited me to [renowned Parisian cafe] Le Select, and we had a nice lunch and maybe a bit of wine, and he described to me the film and this character, Roebuck Wright, which he had written with me in mind. He described the character as this kind of Frankensteinian mixture of nonfictional figures. He mentioned James Baldwin. He mentioned AJ Liebling, who was a food critic for the New Yorker. He mentioned a little bit of Tennessee Williams. It was fitting that we were at Le Select because that was one of Baldwin’s haunts. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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