| | | Colm Tóibín: will the Brexit fallout lead to a 'united Ireland'? | | by Colm Tóibín Oct 2, 2021 | | With negotiations souring an already uneasy relationship to England, the Irish novelist surveys the mood of his nation, and considers the prospect of unification In late 2010, I sat in a discreet space in the lounge of a Dublin hotel with two British diplomats who were planning the first state visit of Queen Elizabeth to Ireland the following May and were consulting widely. The questions were the basic ones: What should she say? What should she not say? Where should she go? Where should she not go? When I said she should visit a stud farm and get to see some horses, the diplomats were uneasy. Would that not seem too posh? I explained that following horses in Ireland was part of ordinary life. And also, if she didn’t see some horses, people would think that she was not enjoying herself, and, oddly enough, despite 700 years of strife, most people in Ireland would want the Queen to enjoy her visit. Continue reading... | | | | | 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... | | | | | 'His rage, his pain, his shame, they're all mine': Jeremy Strong on playing Succession's Kendall Roy | | by Hadley Freeman Oct 2, 2021 | | Strong’s role as the self-destructive media heir takes commitment – and the actor goes all in • Plus: inside the Succession writers’ room Earlier this year, Jeremy Strong left his apartment in Brooklyn, walked across the bridge to Manhattan and headed towards the far west side of the island, where he was filming the third season of the feverishly adored and heavily accoladed HBO series Succession. Strong plays Kendall, the alternately bullied and rebellious son of the vilified, Murdoch-esque media tycoon Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and Succession follows the jostling among the patriarch’s four children for his affection and respect, both of which he generally withholds. None of them is as visibly crushed by this as Kendall, who bears more than a slight resemblance to James Murdoch, even down to the dabblings in hip-hop. With every timid step Strong makes on screen, every apologetic dip of his chin when he starts to talk, he captures the pain of a son who knows he has failed to live up to his father’s expectations from the first time he cried. He won an Emmy last year for the role, beating, among others, Cox, in neatly Freudian style. Strong likes to walk while learning his lines, so on that day in New York as he was walking he was also talking, reciting a speech he would soon be saying to Cox, in which Kendall tries to curry favour with his father, but also to be seen as his own man. “Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghost-grey Tesla rolling to a stop, so I looked in it, and there was James Murdoch,” Strong says when we meet in a London hotel. “He looked at me and I looked at him, and there was a flicker between us. Then he was gone. So we had a moment.” 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... | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment