The Woody Allen Interview (Which He Won't Read) | Hollywood Reporter

How has your wife, Soon-Yi, changed you?

Oh, well, one of the great experiences of my life has been my wife. She had a very, very difficult upbringing in Korea: She was an orphan on the streets, living out of trash cans and starving as a 6-year-old. And she was picked up and put in an orphanage. And so I've been able to really make her life better. I provided her with enormous opportunities, and she has sparked to them. She's educated herself and has tons of friends and children and got a college degree and went to graduate school, and she has traveled all over with me now. She's very sophisticated and has been to all the great capitals of Europe. She has just become a different person. So the contributions I've made to her life have given me more pleasure than all my films.

You're saying how you changed her. How has she changed you?

(Allen pauses.) Well, she's given me a lot of pleasure. I adore her, and she's given me a wonderful life. We've been married 20 years. And we were together for a few years before that. And she has given me the great years of my life, personally. She's a great companion and a great wife. She has given me a stable and wonderful home life and great companionship. I guess whenever you meet somebody and they're the right person for you, there is a great emotional contribution they make to your life.

But has she changed you in any way?

WTF dude? Are spouses SUPPOSED to change each other? Is that a thing?

U.S. Secret Bombing of Cambodia | rabble.ca

The initial operation was authorized by then President Richard Nixon, but without the knowledge or approval of U.S. Congress. The bombings became public knowledge in 1973, after which they were stopped.
The United States dropped upwards of 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, exceeding the amount it had dropped on Japan during WWII (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by almost a million tons. During this time, about 30 per cent of the country's population was internally displaced.

Laos: Thousands suffering from the deadly aftermath of US bomb campaign | World news | The Guardian

It is 50 years since the first US combat troops entered Vietnam in March 1965. During that notorious conflict, the US dropped more than 270 million bombs in Laos as part of a CIA-run, top-secret operation aimed at destroying the North Vietnamese supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh trail and wiping out its local communist allies.

One-third of the bombs failed to explode on impact and have since claimed an average of 500 victims a year, mainly children and farmers forced to work on their contaminated fields to sustain their families. Despite tens of millions of dollars spent, only 1% of Laos territory has been cleared so far.

Our Little Sister (2015) ***

A beautifully made film, guaranteed to lift your spirits and leave you with a warm and contented feeling with a bare minimum of schmaltz. Reminiscent of Ozu but doesn't achieve the gravitas of the master.

A Farewell to Ice by Peter Wadhams review – climate change writ large | Books | The Guardian

Wadhams puts this plainly. “There is no period in Earth’s history where the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 is as great as it is today.” The asteroid that finished the dinosaurs blasted 4.5 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, “yet the CO2 rate rise [in the aftermath] was still an order of magnitude lower than the current rate”.

via J Barger

Paul McCartney Looks Back: The Rolling Stone Interview

Are there people you can turn to now for advice about a new song or album?
In music, no. I rely on the experience and knowledge of what would have happened if I'd brought it to the Beatles. That is the best gauge.

What about life in general?
I have some very good friends. Lorne Michaels and I are pretty close. I can always go for a drink with him – we can talk pretty genuinely. I have relatives, my brother and my wife. Nancy is very strong that way. But music, no. It's very difficult. You can't top John. And John couldn't top Paul.

Wait, what???

Wetherby (1985) **

An all star British cast including the incomparable and radiant Ms. Redgrave are told to fill in the blanks basically and try very hard to do so. They don't quite succeed.

TCAs: Mitch Hurwitz Talks Secret 'Arrested Development' Project - Hollywood Reporter

On Wednesday, Hurwitz said he's actually recut the entirety of the 15-episode fourth season (episodes ran more than 30 minutes, with one as long as 42 minutes) into — wait for it — 22 episodes with a running time of 22 minutes.

Um, what?

It's true. And right now that creator's cut of season four — which even features new Ron Howard narration — is just sitting on a shelf. There's a lot of moving parts when it comes to Arrested Development, and who knows if those 22 episodes will appear on Netflix or some 20th Century Fox showcase of some sorts. How and when this private project of Hurwitz's sees the light of day is probably more business-based than any of us can figure out.

The important thing is just this: We need to see those 22 episodes.

Star Trek Beyond (2016) **

Marked improvement over the previous outing with some inventive action and a lot more of the "classic trek" earnestness and humor. Still way too many illogical scenes, gaping plot holes, and where the heck is Dr. Carol Marcus?

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) *

Ben is not the problem in this turgid, pompous and silly waste of $250M. What hath Christopher Nolan wrought?

The Big Short (2015) **

Making a watchable film that stays remarkably faithful to its non-fiction source material is no small feat but it's not something I want to see again.

The Conjuring 2 (2016) **

Effective jump-scare flick with some distractingly bad '70's period cliches (I don't recall the plethora of awful sweaters and sideburns). Nice to see some underused talent get some screen time.

Rock the Kasbah (2015) *

Another movie that takes an actual non-white, non-male person's hard fought battle and turns it into a story about a white male's struggle to redeem himself. Reprehensible AND a waste of a top notch cast. Incredibly cliched script including, but not limited to, a hooker with a heart of gold.

The Rewrite (2014) **

Watchable thanks to an appealing and adept cast but the director keeps piling on the cliches to its detriment. Hugh Grant is actually quite good in this weak romcom.

Love & Friendship (2016) ***

A period piece/romcom impeccably cast and performed, well directed by Whit Stillman. Clever, subtle, beautiful.

Festival Drops Band Whose Drummer Supported Brock Turner

“I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him,” Rasmussen wrote in a letter, obtained by The Cut, to Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky. “I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.”

Yikes where does one even BEGIN with such statements? Basic logic doesn't stand a chance. We must remember though, she IS a drummer. ;-)

How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic

Consider an unlikely thought experiment. If you could somehow attach an external speech mechanism to a crocodile, and the speech mechanism had access to the information in that attention schema in the crocodile’s wulst, that technology-assisted crocodile might report, “I’ve got something intangible inside me. It’s not an eyeball or a head or an arm. It exists without substance. It’s my mental possession of things. It moves around from one set of items to another. When that mysterious process in me grasps hold of something, it allows me to understand, to remember, and to respond.”

The crocodile would be wrong, of course. Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence. And this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description. Alas crocodiles can’t really talk. But in this theory, they’re likely to have at least a simple form of an attention schema.

Dame Helen Mirren: 'I love no longer being a sex symbol'

‘I have absolutely no beauty regime,’ she says in that perfectly modulated, husky voice. ‘I sunbathe – I know I shouldn’t but I love sitting in the sun. I drink wine and occasionally I’ll drink to excess. I eat French fries. I’ve never managed to go to the gym for longer than two months. I always forget to take my vitamins.

‘I’ve done everything but I haven’t done too much of anything – I’ve never had a Coca-Cola, ever. Sometimes I use hotel body lotion as conditioner for my hair. I’m not particular. Life is too short and too precious.’

Roetemeyer, Joanne "Josie" - Kutis Funeral Home

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going — Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
-- Kozan Ichikyo's Death Poem

The Good Dinosaur (2015) *

Unsettling combination of photo-realistic background animation (they have NAILED oceans, rivers, all things aquatic by the way) and Flintstones-style dinosaurs (who have developed language, agriculture and animal husbandry) in a by-the-numbers story. Disappointing from Pixar.