On Feb. 20, 1939, more than 20,000 yelling, cheering people packed New York City’s Madison Square Garden. They weren’t there for a basketball game or a concert. They were supporters of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that was ready for an alternative to democracy. They waved Swastika flags and raised quite a ruckus. And they were hardly alone in their mission, as the new PBS American Experience documentary Nazi Town, USA makes abundantly clear.
While most Americans identified fascism and the Third Reich as existential threats to civilization, many...
While most Americans identified fascism and the Third Reich as existential threats to civilization, many...
- 1/23/2024
- by Chris Vognar
- Rollingstone.com
"The Misfits" would be Marilyn Monroe's final film. The 1961 modern-day psychological Western was ravaged by her physical troubles on-set and the collapse of Monroe's marriage to the movie's screenwriter, Arthur Miller. And the emotional devastation of the movie's plot was reflected by what went on during its making, as Miller, director John Huston, and co-star Eli Wallach hatched a plan to rewrite the movie. The resulting adjustments would have had major consequences, changing the plot to raise Wallach's heroic profile and diminish Monroe's.
Wallach was an old friend of Monroe's from the Actors Studio in New York. According to Les Harding's "They Knew Marilyn Monroe," he credited the actress with getting him cast in "The Misfits," but by the time the movie was being made, something in their friendship had shifted. Beyond the rewrites, he used the movie to execute a couple of practical jokes on her,...
Wallach was an old friend of Monroe's from the Actors Studio in New York. According to Les Harding's "They Knew Marilyn Monroe," he credited the actress with getting him cast in "The Misfits," but by the time the movie was being made, something in their friendship had shifted. Beyond the rewrites, he used the movie to execute a couple of practical jokes on her,...
- 12/18/2022
- by Anthony Crislip
- Slash Film
Separating fact from fiction is tricky in the new Marilyn Monroe drama Blonde.
The Netflix film, which stars Ana de Armas in its central role, doesn’t take the familiar form of a Hollywood biopic steeped in research. Instead it’s based on the best-selling Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name from 2000, itself a highly fictionalised work emphasising the ways in which Marilyn was victimised across her life.
Similarly, the film controversially depicts some of the most traumatic moments of the Hollywood actor’s life, from her Los Angeles childhood in the 1920s and 30s to her death at the age of 36. But like any fictionalisation of a real person’s life, it raises as many questions as it attempts to answer.
Here is how some of Blonde’s most shocking storylines compare to what really happened.
Was Marilyn Monroe abused as a child?
Blonde depicts Marilyn’s childhood as deeply unstable.
The Netflix film, which stars Ana de Armas in its central role, doesn’t take the familiar form of a Hollywood biopic steeped in research. Instead it’s based on the best-selling Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name from 2000, itself a highly fictionalised work emphasising the ways in which Marilyn was victimised across her life.
Similarly, the film controversially depicts some of the most traumatic moments of the Hollywood actor’s life, from her Los Angeles childhood in the 1920s and 30s to her death at the age of 36. But like any fictionalisation of a real person’s life, it raises as many questions as it attempts to answer.
Here is how some of Blonde’s most shocking storylines compare to what really happened.
Was Marilyn Monroe abused as a child?
Blonde depicts Marilyn’s childhood as deeply unstable.
- 9/28/2022
- by Amanda Whiting
- The Independent - TV
Fifty-six years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains one of Hollywood’s most intriguing and glamorous figures.
Smithsonian Channel’s new documentary Marilyn Monroe for Sale, airing Dec. 23, goes inside the icon’s private world and personal possessions, looking back on Julien’s 2016 auction of her most personal belongings, including handwritten notes and rare photos.
“Pillboxes, make-up, prescriptions and love letters combine to show Monroe as she truly was — her habits, her challenges, her fierce intelligence,” executive producer Nick Kent tells People. “Some of the most revealing items on sale in this auction are the words Marilyn wrote.”
Everything from...
Smithsonian Channel’s new documentary Marilyn Monroe for Sale, airing Dec. 23, goes inside the icon’s private world and personal possessions, looking back on Julien’s 2016 auction of her most personal belongings, including handwritten notes and rare photos.
“Pillboxes, make-up, prescriptions and love letters combine to show Monroe as she truly was — her habits, her challenges, her fierce intelligence,” executive producer Nick Kent tells People. “Some of the most revealing items on sale in this auction are the words Marilyn wrote.”
Everything from...
- 12/20/2018
- by Dana Rose Falcone
- PEOPLE.com
Broad Green Pictures buys screen rights to biography detailing Williams’s life, from first Broadway success in 1944 to his lonely death in a New York hotel room
The Hollywood production company behind recent indie hit 99 Homes and Eden is making a biopic of American playwright Tennessee Williams, reports Deadline.
Broad Green Pictures has picked up screen rights to the 2014 biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by former New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr, and will now look for a screenwriter to develop the project. The volume was the Guardian’s book of the week in October 2014, with reviewer Sarah Churchwell praising a “compulsively readable, thoroughly researched” biography, while criticising Lahr’s propensity for “gaps and repetitions”.
Continue reading...
The Hollywood production company behind recent indie hit 99 Homes and Eden is making a biopic of American playwright Tennessee Williams, reports Deadline.
Broad Green Pictures has picked up screen rights to the 2014 biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by former New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr, and will now look for a screenwriter to develop the project. The volume was the Guardian’s book of the week in October 2014, with reviewer Sarah Churchwell praising a “compulsively readable, thoroughly researched” biography, while criticising Lahr’s propensity for “gaps and repetitions”.
Continue reading...
- 11/13/2015
- by Ben Child
- The Guardian - Film News
I am delighted Steve McQueen's serious and beautifully filmed movie was recognised at the Oscars but I found it oddly bloodless in spirit
12 Years a Slave is a remarkable film and I share the widespread delight that it won recognition at the Oscars in Hollywood, especially when there was always a risk that an enjoyable bit of immoral trash like The Wolf of Wall Street might have done some business at its high-minded expense.
But best film of the year? I hope not. It's a political film with a political message for our times – slavery isn't over when there are an estimated 21 million slaves today, so Steve McQueen reminded his audience on Sunday night. But Casablanca was a very political film too, plenty are, but dialogue, plot, character made them better movies.
By the time we first glimpse 33-year-old carpenter, Solomon Northup, author of a moving 1853 memoir and hero...
12 Years a Slave is a remarkable film and I share the widespread delight that it won recognition at the Oscars in Hollywood, especially when there was always a risk that an enjoyable bit of immoral trash like The Wolf of Wall Street might have done some business at its high-minded expense.
But best film of the year? I hope not. It's a political film with a political message for our times – slavery isn't over when there are an estimated 21 million slaves today, so Steve McQueen reminded his audience on Sunday night. But Casablanca was a very political film too, plenty are, but dialogue, plot, character made them better movies.
By the time we first glimpse 33-year-old carpenter, Solomon Northup, author of a moving 1853 memoir and hero...
- 3/4/2014
- by Michael White
- The Guardian - Film News
As Steve McQueen's Oscar favourite 12 Years a Slave opens at cinemas, Sarah Churchwell returns to the 1853 memoir that inspired it – one of many narratives that exposed the brutal truth about slavery, too long ignored or sentimentalised by Hollywood
In 1825 a fugitive slave named William Grimes wrote an autobiography in order to earn $500 to purchase freedom from his erstwhile master, who had discovered his whereabouts in Connecticut and was trying to remand Grimes back into slavery. At the end of his story the fugitive makes a memorable offer: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America." Few literary images have more vividly evoked the hypocrisy...
In 1825 a fugitive slave named William Grimes wrote an autobiography in order to earn $500 to purchase freedom from his erstwhile master, who had discovered his whereabouts in Connecticut and was trying to remand Grimes back into slavery. At the end of his story the fugitive makes a memorable offer: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious happy and free America." Few literary images have more vividly evoked the hypocrisy...
- 1/11/2014
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
Interweaving the biographical story of the Fitzgeralds with the unfolding investigation into the murder of Hall and Mills, Careless People is a thrilling combination of literary history and murder mystery, a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America. Careless People Author: Sarah Churchwell Edition: Hardcover, 432 pages Price: $29.95 Release Date: Jan 23rd, 2014 Publisher: The Penguin Press The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America’s carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final incredible months of 1922, Scott and...
- 1/8/2014
- by Pietro Filipponi
- The Daily BLAM!
From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
- 11/24/2013
- by Ali Smith, Robert McCrum, Tim Adams, Kate Kellaway, Rachel Cooke, Sebastian Faulks, Jackie Kay
- The Guardian - Film News
Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.
William Boyd
By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.
William Boyd
By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was...
- 11/23/2013
- by Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Tom Stoppard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, William Boyd, Bill Bryson, Shami Chakrabarti, Sarah Churchwell, Antonia Fraser, Mark Haddon, Robert Harris, Max Hastings, Philip Hensher, Simon Hoggart, AM Homes, John Lanchester, Mark Lawson, Robert Macfarlane, Andrew Motion, Ian Rankin, Lionel Shriver, Helen Simpson, Colm Tóibín, Richard Ford, John Gray, David Kynaston, Penelope Lively, Pankaj Mishra, Blake Morrison, Susie Orbach
- The Guardian - Film News
Tweet Of The Day | The Gatsby Factor | NPR's American Icons | Counterpoint | The First Time
All 256 two-minute episodes of new birdsong programme Tweet Of The Day (weekdays, 5.58am, Radio 4) will be kept online forever. This is the way all broadcasting is going, whether the programme-makers like it or not. You wonder how the above title will play 10 years from now, when the word tweet will be approximately as resonant as the word Betamax.
All access forever means you can compare The Gatsby Factor (Thursday, 11.30am, Radio 4), Sarah Churchwell's exploration of the enduring allure of Fitzgerald's novel, which appears in anticipation of Baz Luhrmann's hip-hop-inflamed movie version, with the programme Kurt Anderson made for NPR's American Icons series in 2010 and lives online (studio360.org). Neither has seen the new film. Consequently, Churchwell leads you to believe that The Great Gatsby is essentially unfilmable, because the elements of the story that...
All 256 two-minute episodes of new birdsong programme Tweet Of The Day (weekdays, 5.58am, Radio 4) will be kept online forever. This is the way all broadcasting is going, whether the programme-makers like it or not. You wonder how the above title will play 10 years from now, when the word tweet will be approximately as resonant as the word Betamax.
All access forever means you can compare The Gatsby Factor (Thursday, 11.30am, Radio 4), Sarah Churchwell's exploration of the enduring allure of Fitzgerald's novel, which appears in anticipation of Baz Luhrmann's hip-hop-inflamed movie version, with the programme Kurt Anderson made for NPR's American Icons series in 2010 and lives online (studio360.org). Neither has seen the new film. Consequently, Churchwell leads you to believe that The Great Gatsby is essentially unfilmable, because the elements of the story that...
- 5/4/2013
- by David Hepworth
- The Guardian - Film News
As Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic bursts on to our screens, it's not hard to see why this cautionary tale of the decadent downside of the American dream has returned to haunt us, writes Sarah Churchwell
They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably … But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist...
They called him an "ultra-modernist" and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just "so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class". When his third novel was published, on 10 April 1925, a characteristic review complained: "The boy is simply puttering around. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably … But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me." At the last minute, he had asked his editor if they could change the new novel's title to Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late. F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist...
- 5/3/2013
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
New stage and film adaptations of The Great Gatsby attest to Scott Fitzgerald's enduring brilliance and his relevance to our boom and bust age
In one of his most famous and personal obiter dicta, F Scott Fitzgerald once bitterly observed: "There are no second acts in American lives." The author of The Great Gatsby, arguably the supreme American novel of the 20th century, knew what he was talking about.
Few writers have ever enjoyed a more brilliant first act. Fitzgerald's 1925 debut was sensational in a way that's only possible in a feverish, self-inventing society such as the Us. This Side of Paradise was a first novel whose language, characters and attitude haunted the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald's phrase) like a hit song. A five-year creative spree followed, culminating in the book originally titled "Trimalchio in West Egg". As The Great Gatsby, it was a novel that had awestruck critics, led by the young Ts Eliot,...
In one of his most famous and personal obiter dicta, F Scott Fitzgerald once bitterly observed: "There are no second acts in American lives." The author of The Great Gatsby, arguably the supreme American novel of the 20th century, knew what he was talking about.
Few writers have ever enjoyed a more brilliant first act. Fitzgerald's 1925 debut was sensational in a way that's only possible in a feverish, self-inventing society such as the Us. This Side of Paradise was a first novel whose language, characters and attitude haunted the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald's phrase) like a hit song. A five-year creative spree followed, culminating in the book originally titled "Trimalchio in West Egg". As The Great Gatsby, it was a novel that had awestruck critics, led by the young Ts Eliot,...
- 2/5/2012
- by Robert McCrum
- The Guardian - Film News
Monroe and Thatcher might seem to have played opposite roles. But the biographical films My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady suggest that their similarities outweighed their differences
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, impersonation is fast becoming our culture's favourite form of acting. At least since Nicole Kidman's nose won an Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, famous actors have been applauded for pretending to be other famous people: Helen Mirren as the Queen, Michael Sheen as David Frost, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, the list of actors nominated for Oscars for impersonating famous people goes on and on. Now we have two more to add to the list, in star turns already accumulating predictions of Oscar nominations: Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, impersonation is fast becoming our culture's favourite form of acting. At least since Nicole Kidman's nose won an Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, famous actors have been applauded for pretending to be other famous people: Helen Mirren as the Queen, Michael Sheen as David Frost, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, the list of actors nominated for Oscars for impersonating famous people goes on and on. Now we have two more to add to the list, in star turns already accumulating predictions of Oscar nominations: Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
- 12/10/2011
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
Scala Forever, London
For cineastes of a certain age, London's Scala cinema still symbolises a golden age of repertory, reaching its apex in the 80s when underground classics by Kenneth Anger, George Kuchar and Russ Meyer screened alongside imports from the likes of Paul Verhoeven, new films by Jim Jarmusch and silent milestones by Pabst and Murnau. This season scatters the Scala's legacy across the whole of London, beginning with the film that launched the cinema, King Kong, and ending with the film that, arguably, finished it – Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, finally shown legally under the Scala banner. The Scala's catholic mix of high art and low trash is represented by a wealth of titles, but few wave the flag as boldly as John Waters's Female Trouble (pictured) or Curt McDowell's Thundercrack, still shocking after 36 years.
Various venues, Sat to 2 Oct
Chichester Film Festival
The programme for...
For cineastes of a certain age, London's Scala cinema still symbolises a golden age of repertory, reaching its apex in the 80s when underground classics by Kenneth Anger, George Kuchar and Russ Meyer screened alongside imports from the likes of Paul Verhoeven, new films by Jim Jarmusch and silent milestones by Pabst and Murnau. This season scatters the Scala's legacy across the whole of London, beginning with the film that launched the cinema, King Kong, and ending with the film that, arguably, finished it – Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, finally shown legally under the Scala banner. The Scala's catholic mix of high art and low trash is represented by a wealth of titles, but few wave the flag as boldly as John Waters's Female Trouble (pictured) or Curt McDowell's Thundercrack, still shocking after 36 years.
Various venues, Sat to 2 Oct
Chichester Film Festival
The programme for...
- 8/12/2011
- by Damon Wise
- The Guardian - Film News
Niagra—that underrated shocking pink, fake gold, candy-apple red noir—is proof that Marilyn Monroe could have been a great dramatic actress.* In that film she plays a femme fatale crass operator who is performing Monroe's signature wiggles and breathy pouts, catnip to men, to render them pathetically helpless. As murderous pleasure-seeker Rose Loomis, Monroe flashes glimpses of a cracked and rough character underneath all that shellac. While these subtle turns in characterization flaunt Monroe's basic chops as a performer, she would never again present that conflict (between self-awareness versus her "oops" innocent effect) as a simple binary opposition. Instead she would later use instinct and technique to embody these two opposing truths at once, which is the essence of comedy. Monroe could have been a great dramatic actress, but was instead a brilliant quicksilver comedienne who illustrated the comic effect of that kind of catnip. Or, as the exalted cinematographer Jack Cardiff stated,...
- 7/13/2011
- MUBI
Sarah Churchwell sees Hemingway through the eyes of his first wife
The 1920s is back in vogue: Baz Luhrmann is remaking The Great Gatsby, a staged reading of Fitzgerald's masterpiece proved a big success off-Broadway last year, and HBO's 1920-set Boardwalk Empire is the flagship programme of the new Sky Atlantic channel. And now comes McLain's The Paris Wife, the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, and their heady days in jazz age Paris. In fact, The Paris Wife also shares in the current fashion for biographical fiction, including Jay Parini's The Passages of Herman Melville, David Lodge's A Man of Parts, about Hg Wells, and David Miller's Today about the death of Joseph Conrad.
The story of The Paris Wife is familiar to anyone who knows A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of "how Paris was in the early days when we were very...
The 1920s is back in vogue: Baz Luhrmann is remaking The Great Gatsby, a staged reading of Fitzgerald's masterpiece proved a big success off-Broadway last year, and HBO's 1920-set Boardwalk Empire is the flagship programme of the new Sky Atlantic channel. And now comes McLain's The Paris Wife, the story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, to Hadley Richardson, and their heady days in jazz age Paris. In fact, The Paris Wife also shares in the current fashion for biographical fiction, including Jay Parini's The Passages of Herman Melville, David Lodge's A Man of Parts, about Hg Wells, and David Miller's Today about the death of Joseph Conrad.
The story of The Paris Wife is familiar to anyone who knows A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of "how Paris was in the early days when we were very...
- 3/26/2011
- by Sarah Churchwell
- The Guardian - Film News
Anonymous has been at it again. Following Primary Colors's version of Clinton comes O: A Presidential Novel. Mark Lawson on the tradition of insider political fiction, from Disraeli to The West Wing. A preview from tomorrow's Guardian Review.
Also in tomorrow's Review: Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage on why Anna Nicole Smith is a true operatic heroine, Andrea Levy on why she wrote Small Island, Stefan Collini in praise of Eric Hobsbawm and Sarah Churchwell on the scandalous Lillian Hellman
A successful political career demands a tradeoff between fame and anonymity. A leader needs to be known – an Obama, Blair or Clinton has the global recognisability of a rock star – but high-level politics also frequently depends on the exercise of secrecy. The unattributable briefing ("a party insider, speaking on condition of anonymity", "a source travelling with the prime minister") is a standard tool of political journalism, offering an early first...
Also in tomorrow's Review: Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage on why Anna Nicole Smith is a true operatic heroine, Andrea Levy on why she wrote Small Island, Stefan Collini in praise of Eric Hobsbawm and Sarah Churchwell on the scandalous Lillian Hellman
A successful political career demands a tradeoff between fame and anonymity. A leader needs to be known – an Obama, Blair or Clinton has the global recognisability of a rock star – but high-level politics also frequently depends on the exercise of secrecy. The unattributable briefing ("a party insider, speaking on condition of anonymity", "a source travelling with the prime minister") is a standard tool of political journalism, offering an early first...
- 1/22/2011
- by Mark Lawson
- The Guardian - Film News
Hampton Stevens in The Atlantic is worried about the new Great Gatsby movie Baz Luhrmann is mounting -- the big news this week is that Carey Mulligan was cast as Daisy Buchanan, joining Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire -- and frets that everyone else is worried, too: The hype around the casting of Gatsby is unusual enough—virtually unprecedented for a non-superhero movie. More interesting, though, are the arguments against making the film at all. New York magazine reported that Mulligan won the Daisy role under the headline "Should They Even Be Making Another Great Gatsby Movie?" Mulligan herself seems to think so. Reports say that she wept openly—in front of Anna Wintour, no less—when Lurhmann called to give her the news. Her fellow Briton, Sarah Churchwell, disagrees. Writing in The Guardian (UK), Churchwell argued that Luhrmann's film will inevitably fail to capture the majesty of Fitzgerald's work,...
- 11/19/2010
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
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