UrLogicFails

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I'm Richard Brody. I'm a film critic at The New Yorker, and today I'm gonna talk about the best performances of the 21st century. I'm gonna highlight American performances today. Maybe the chance will come up soon to talk about international ones.

Number five is Mahershala Ali in Moonlight. What he does with his character and with his bearing in embodying this character sets the tone for the entire film.

[dramatic orchestral music]

Feel that right there? You in the middle of the world.

Ali plays the role with a wry, sarcastic, yet involuntarily vulnerable undertone. It's almost as if he's whispering, murmuring the role of Juan.

My mama. She do drugs, right?

[birds chirping]

Yeah.

[footsteps falling]

Yet at the same time, Ali's very presence is commanding, decisive. It's as if throughout the entire film, not just the first sequence, even when he's absent, his power dominates the entire movie.

Number four is Miranda July in The Future. She actually plays two roles in her movie. In one of them, she lends her voice to the character of a talking cat. But what I'm most enthusiastic about is her performance as Sophie, a 35 year old dancer, who feels that her best creative years are on the verge of slipping away, and that she needs to seize the day, take control of her life.

Well, 40 is basically 50, and then after 50, the rest is just loose change.

Loose change?

Like not quite enough to get anything you really want.

Oh, God!

As a dancer and even more as an essentially creative and imaginative person, Sophie has a kind of obsession with a shirt she calls Shirty, and when she has an affair with a man she meets by a strange series of coincidences, she creates a dance with, for, and because of Shirty.

That is, for me, one of the most profound and moving moments in the modern cinema.

[melancholy music]

Miranda July, well, she's a great writer, but it's her balletic grace. It's her performance as a dancer in her own movie playing the role of a dancer that, for me, makes this movie transcendent.

Number three is Anna Paquin in Margaret. Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager. Lisa inadvertently causes a bus accident in which a woman is killed, and soon, this case takes over her life.

The entire point of the lawsuit was to get the guy fired so he doesn't kill somebody else.

Lonergan writes and directs the movie as a city symphony, filling it with the grand passions of urban life, and Paquin handles the intricate dialogue that Lonergan crafts for her with a deft, almost a rope dance-like precision that nonetheless is filled with the energy that expands to fill the city as the images do.

I think you're very young.

What does that have to do with anything?!

If anything, I think it means I care more than someone who's older because this kind of thing has never happened to me before.

No, it means you care more easily. There's a big difference.

And Paquin invests this character with a precocious authority and a preternatural sense of command that makes it one of the great teen performances in the history of cinema.

Number two is Helena Howard in Madeline's Madeline. The character of Madeline is a theater prodigy who has a significant role in a major theater company in Manhattan. Yet this very advanced young actress is also dealing with the regular problems of a teenager.

[kissing smack]

[Date] Where are you going?

Goodnight.

Are you goin' home? I mean, can I get a kiss without the hair in it?

[Madeline laughing]

The movie pivots on the relationship between art and life, between creative drive and personal problems. It's as if the continuity between Helena Howard as a teenager off screen, and Helena Howard as a prodigious young actress on screen is itself the essence of the dynamic that Decker captures in the movie.

Evangeline is gonna-

[liquid splashing] [Regina gasping]

And what Howard does as an actress in the life of Madeline and in the stage presence of Madeline reminds me of the great Gena Rowlands, who in John Cassavetes' film Opening Night, delivers the most remarkable performance of acting on stage in a movie that I've ever seen.

My hand! [screaming and wailing]

[Madeline sniffing]

This troubling, unsettling, ambiguous dynamic between life onstage and life offstage, between family life and creative life gives the movie, and above all, gives Howard's performance a terrifying power.

The best performance of the century is by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, which for my money, is also the best film of the century so far.

[lively big band music]

Do I look like the cat who caught the canary?

[people offstage laughing]

When Scorsese won his Best Directing Oscar for The Departed, his 2006 film, I felt that it liberated something in him, that some of the crazies that came out in Shutter Island went on full blast in the Wolf of Wall Street.

[Jordan and Mark pounding and humming]

[whistling] Yeah. [Jordan chuckling]

It's one of the great outpourings of creative energy, from a director and from an actor, in the history of cinema.

It's a story of greed as, essentially, a form of original sin. And Jordan Belfort has the unique skillset to make that greed seem eminently desirable.

[Donnie] Excuse me.

Yeah?

Is that your car on the lot?

[Jordan] Yeah.

[Donnie] it's a Jag? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How much money you make?

I dunno. $72,000 last month.

You show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, I quit my job right now, and I work for you.

Hey, Paulie? What's up?

No. Yeah, no, everything's fine.

Hey, listen, I quit.

What's more than two sides of his character, hedonism and a kind of consummate, slick professionalism, come together in an absolute fury of destructive, yet completely appealing energy.

And it's that very appeal that lends the movie its heart of emotional and intellectual, and even religious authority.

An interview with Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, and Emma Seligman.

A couple of personal highlights from interview:

Inside, the woman behind the ice-cream counter looks at Sennott with obvious delight as she orders a cup of vegan peanut-butter brownie honeycomb. “Oh my God! I love you on The Idol,” she says. Sennott looks briefly startled, then launches into a cheeky assessment of her performance on the series as Depp’s beleaguered assistant. “I am rocking that blazer,” she says. “Just wearing that blazer every day.”

The same woman turns her gaze to Edebiri. “You’re in …” she trails off, waiting for an assist, her mouth hesitantly forming a B — The Bear? Edebiri stares back at her, not unpleasantly but not helping to jog her memory, either.

Outside, Sennott sighs. “I feel like everyone hated us,” she says. She’s perpetually aware of and concerned about the feelings of everyone in her blast radius. Edebiri, while not exactly comfortable with being publicly perceived, doesn’t seem to adjust to her audience. She raises an amused eyebrow. “No, they literally loved us,” she says.

She also struggled to figure out how to be taken seriously by the crew, many of whom were older men.

“I’d never worked with that many men — that’s not a bad thing,” she says, carefully. The three start talking over one another.

“No, but it’s — ”

“They weren’t all — ”

“Some of them were very lovely, but it was just like — ”

“Yeah, and all of the women were — ”

Edebiri takes a breath. “Asserting authority to these 40-, 50–year-old Teamsters, who, again, many were truly lovely and wonderful, but there’s certain things about power and how power appears that they gave you a hard time for,” she says. “Honestly, it’s also you, your nature and your style, you don’t want to yell at people. Some of those men, or people in general, did not respond to it.”

The article does a pretty good job looking at the offer from AMPTP and explaining why it's not up to par with the WGA's expectations but I thought one of the more interesting parts was this:

Netflix's Ted Sarandos seems to be concerned with agreeing to terms that will used to set a precedent for other territories where Netflix has heavily invested in local production.

Some more details on the AMPTP offer include:

There are a number of problems with the AMPTP proposal, including the fact that leaving the decision [of the size of the writers' room] in the showrunner's hands [instead of making it mandatory] means that inevitably the studio will pressure some showrunners to opt against bringing in two more writers. And then there is the problem with the definition of "showrunner" itself. Some streamers have already begun making the showrunner position a non-writing one, instead making a producer or director the default showrunner and simply hiring a "head writer" to run the writers room. Which would take the writers out of the decision-making process entirely. And as several WGA members have suggested to me, the main thrust of the AMPTP proposal seems to be an effort to normalize the idea of a standard writing room size of a showrunner and two full-time mid-level writers. Which ducks most of the complaints the WGA members have had about the size of writers rooms.

Also, the proposal does offer up to 20 consecutive weeks of work, but only during the duration of the writers' room. Which doesn't address the problem of the current disconnect between the span of the room and the production of the show.

“Instead, on the 113th day of the strike – and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side – we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was,” the Negotiating Committee led by Ellen Stutzman, David Goodman and Chris Keyser said of the off-site sit-down with the CEOs and AMPTP chief. “But this wasn’t a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not 20 minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.”

It will include new post-credit footage.

I received this plant as a gift from my job a few years ago with no additional information. I was only watering it once a week since I thought it was a succulent and that succulents did not need much water; but I recently learned succulents do like water and I'm not sure if this is a succulent anyways.

Can anyone help me identify this plant and the correct care for it? (I apologize if this is a very obvious situation to most.)

(I'm not entirely sure if this is the right community to post this in, but I thought it fit. If it doesn't, please let me know)

Some highlights from the interview:

In stand-up, you do a bunch of intellectual labor to get a reaction out of people, whereas I’ve gone to concerts, and musicians will, in between songs, be like, “Water,” and everyone’s going crazy, dying laughing, and I’m like, “This room is so hot right now. If I could do a tight five, it would crush so hard.”

Now that I’m doing music, I see why, now, being a comedian would be so enticing, because to be a musician now, you have to be a comedian. You’ve got to post content. Music videos are going in a more Ludacris, Busta Rhymes sort of direction where it’s absurd, a little comical.

Increasingly, I’ve been trying to find alternatives to existing in digital spaces, or at least trying to figure out some sort of hybrid, because the internet I experienced as a young person is gone. The community, freeness, weirdness, and cross-pollination of that is something I want to recreate in my own work and the spaces I create.

A joke includes inherently tight word economy. It’s efficient. It’s almost like math.

When it comes to lyrics, the same rules apply, but there’s a little more room to wander and be more fluid, loose, and abstract. I think that released the pressure I was feeling with stand-up, where I’ve cultivated this voice and this way of speaking, and I like it, but I don’t think it can necessarily hold everything I want to say.

The first of the tools Denuvo is offering to Switch developers is Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection, a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy”.

According to Denuvo, the new tech can be applied to Switch games to block the ability to play them on PC emulators.

“Even if a game is protected against piracy on its PC version, the version released on Nintendo Switch can be emulated from day one and played on PC, therefore bypassing the strong protections offered on the PC version,” the company says. “This can happen with any of the numerous games available on Nintendo Switch.

PlayStation Portal remote player brings the PS5 experience to the palm of your hand. It includes the key features of the DualSense wireless controller, including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback*. The vibrant 8-inch LCD screen is capable of 1080p resolution at 60fps, providing a high definition visual experience that’s expected from the high quality games created by world-class developers.

PlayStation Portal is the perfect device for gamers in households where they might need to share their living room TV or simply want to play PS5 games in another room of the house. PlayStation Portal will connect remotely to your PS5 over Wi-Fi**, so you’ll be able to swiftly jump from playing on your PS5 to your PlayStation Portal. PlayStation Portal can play supported games that are installed on your PS5 console and use the Dualsense controller. It also includes a 3.5mm audio jack for wired audio. PS VR2 games, which require the headset, and games that are streamed through PlayStation Plus Premium’s cloud streaming, are not supported.***

PlayStation Portal remote player will launch later this year for 199.99 USD | 219.99 EURO | 199.99 GBP | 29,980 YEN. We’ll have more details soon on when pre-orders begin for PlayStation Portal.

While several studios and streamers have opted to cancel their upcoming events — most notably the Oppenheimer red carpet in New York set for Monday — Disney moved forward with the premiere, leaning on its theme park characters in the absence of the actors.

A while back I saw the DnD movie and Themberchaud really reminded me of a chonky little cat, so I decided to draw this up in Procreate a little later.

It’s not clear what happened with the Sega acquisition and whether Nadella ultimately approved talks. But in a Microsoft internal April 2021 merger review document, Sega was still listed as a key target. Microsoft had identified key areas for acquisitions in PC, mobile, and console across different markets, and Sega, Bungie, Zynga, and IO Interactive were part of a number of companies Microsoft was seriously looking at acquiring.