Tag: blogs

This year’s Best Picture race

The male-dominated Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) and the female-led Jay Roach’s Bombshell (2019) and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) are all Best Picture contenders, according to The New York Times. If so, then Gerwig may be competing with boyfriend Noah Baumbach and his Marriage Story (2019), which represents Netflix alongside The Irishman as well as Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes (2019). Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019), and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019) will be up against the as of yet unreleased Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell (2019), and Tom Hooper’s Cats (2019).

Film and native language preservation

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Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s SG̲aawaay Ḵ’uuna (Edge of the Knife) (2018) is the first motion picture ever to depict the language and culture of Haida Gwaii; fewer than twenty-four people speak Haida fluently. (Image Courtesy: The New Yorker).

One hundred sixty-five indigenous languages remain out of the three hundred spoken in North America before colonization, and tribal elders, humanitarians, as well as linguists are tapping into the power of film to preserve these dying tongues, according to The New Yorker. Following the release of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (2001), the first feature to be written, directed, and acted in the eastern Inuit dialect of Inuktitut, the likes of the Star Wars saga and Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo (2003) have been translated into Navajo. Iñupiaq filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacLean says, “In the academic space, the language survives; in the cultural space, the language lives.”

Agatha Christie’s cinematic renaissance

With the release of Rian Johnson’s Agatha Christie-esque whodunit Knives Out (2019) coming up November 29, the Queen of Crime is making a comeback after BBC One’s Miss Marple (1984-1992) and ITV’s Poirot (1989-2013) sanitized her writing, according to The Guardian. Johnson cites Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (2017) as well as even Kyle Newacheck’s Christie parody, Murder Mystery (2019), as inspirations behind his own homage. David Brawn of HarperCollins, Christie’s publisher for the last twenty-five years, says the darker, more psychological crime authors of the 1980s are the reason audiences stopped taking her as seriously.