Company declines to release film starring and produced by Spacey, who has been accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour
Pádraig Collins
Saturday 4 November 2017 04.37 GMT
Streaming network Netflix will cease working with Kevin Spacey on its show House of Cards and is also declining to release a film starring the actor, who has been accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Marriage Story review – everything you always wanted to know about divorce
Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are terrific as a couple facing the awful aftermath of their relationship in Noah Baumbach’s heartfelt drama
A
ll marriages are a mystery to outsiders, they say, and even more so to the married people themselves. In 2013, writer-director Noah Baumbach got divorced from screen star Jennifer Jason Leigh, and, until Leigh presents us with her own fictionalised movie version of their breakup (and who knows if she hasn’t considered it, or is considering it), we won’t have anything approaching the complete creative picture. Until then, here is Baumbach’s superb Marriage Story, a glorious laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud portrait of a relationship in its death throes.
This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around. It would be reductive to call it autobiographical, but it is notable how scrupulously generous his movie is to the soon-to-be-ex-wife figure, played impeccably by Scarlett Johansson. It is adroitly balanced and emotionally calibrated, although there are incidental details about who is the first to lawyer up, and a 55/45% split in the child custody arrangement. I wonder what Leigh makes of these points.
On Thursday, Netflix announced a new original series based on Midnight’s Children, Sir Salman Rushdie’s seminal work of fiction.
Midnight’s Children (1981) is a literary tour de force that has won multiple accolades, including the 1981 Booker Prize, the Best of the Booker twice - both in 1993 and 2008, and the James Tait Memorial Prize. The critically acclaimed and hugely successful novel is considered by some to be amongst the 100 best novels of all time by the Modern Library. It is considered a groundbreaking example of postcolonial, postmodern and magic realist literature.
Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t watched this particular episode of Black Mirror yet.
It’s already ruined our lives, according to the rest of Black Mirror, but now, the internet would like to ruin “San Junipero.” By most accounts, that episode, which centers on a romance between Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Kelly and Mackenzie Davis’s Yorkie, interrupts the rest of the cynical gloom of the rest of season three of Black Mirror like sunshine breaking through the clouds (or rants about the Cloud). The two characters turn out to be avatars of two near-dead humans, and by the end of the episode, both cheat death and decide to live with each other in San Junipero’s Belinda Carlisle afterlife.
Inside “San Junipero,” Black Mirror’s Uncharacteristically Beautiful Nostalgia Trip
Charlie Brooker and Gugu Mbatha-Raw explain the choice to focus on a same-sex couple without giving them a tragic end.
by LAURA BRADLEY OCTOBER 28, 2016 9:00 AM
“San Junipero” is not your typical Black Mirror episode. The sunny installment in Charlie Brooker’s typically gray, murky dystopia has no sense of foreboding. There’s no dubious technical advance threatening to destroy anyone’s life as she knows it. There’s just a beautiful love story, heartwarmingly portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis. The episode has been lauded not only as one of Black Mirror’s most accomplished yet, but also as a rare find among TV offerings in general: a story starring a same-sex couple that doesn’t end in pure tragedy.
Brooker said that in writing “San Junipero” he aimed “to upend the notion of what a Black Mirror episode was.” The show started out with the goal of telling a wide variety of stories, after all.
“I’d read some people going, ‘Oh, it’s going to Netflix; it’s all going to be American now. It’s all going to be little kids playing baseball.’ And I thought, Ah, fuck you, then, O.K. California. Haha!,” Brooker said with a laugh.
Brooker and Mbatha-Raw sat down with Vanity Fair to discuss the episode, Brooker’s choice to focus on two women, and what it was like to bring the story to life. But before you read on, make sure you’ve seen the episode. Spoilers a-plenty ahead.
The story of San Junipero: why Charlie Brooker's Emmy-winning vision of Heaven will live forever
Helen O´Hara
18 SEPTEMBER 2017 • 7:40AM
In January 2015 the humourist Mallory Ortberg summed up Charlie Brooker’s tech-anthology series Black Mirror as “What if phones, but more so?”. The science fiction show focuses on how high technology and low entertainment can magnify our flaws and destroy our relationships.
Netflix's sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror took two awards at last night's Primetime Emmys, with show creator Charlie Brooker winning both Outstanding Television Movie and an Outstanding Writing award for the episode San Junipero, a futuristic love story.
Black Mirror, season 3, San Junipero, review: 'Charlie Brooker's dark sci-fi has never felt bigger'
Robbie Collin, film critic
21 OCTOBER 2016 • 7:19PM
With its move to Netflix from Channel 4, its ad breaks duly shed, and its season length doubled to an invitingly bingeable six-pack, Black Mirror has never felt bigger. Though conceptually speaking, Charlie Brooker’s dark science-fiction anthology series has always been a heavyweight.
