BY KELLY CONABOY |
Kelly's Curated Internet: Memorial Day Movies, Cannes, Tom Cruise & Pulp Fiction
All the Memorial Day weekend links you could ever want!
It's almost Memorial Day weekend, and you know what that means: you have extra time for reading articles online! (Also, I guess, it marks the unofficial start of summer.) (Also it means the actual meaning of Memorial Day.) We have a lot to keep you busy: Cannes coverage, the 20th anniversary of Pulp Fiction, a Memorial Day movie list, and more! Let's get started.
- The 67th annual Cannes Film Festival comes to an end on May 25th. A number of film writers have been documenting the experience for those of us left at home, so I'll point you in the direction of a few: The Dissolve's "Postcards from Cannes" series, Richard Lawson's review for Vanity Fair of 25-year-old Québécois director Xavier Dolan's Mommy, all of Variety's coverage, Oliver Lyttelton's review of Ryan Gosling's directorial debut Lost River for The Playlist (which says the film "Has seemingly already passed into Croisette legend as a ‘Southland Tales'-style disaster"), and -- for those of you who might just want to listen -- here is Xan Brooks on All Things Considered talking about his favorite movies and festival bombs.
At Cannes no one is referring to Lost River as Lost River. It's all "Have you seen the Gosling?"
— Richard Lawson (@rilaws) May 21, 2014
- "In 2001, his worst-case scenario materialized. A competitor supplied the Tampa police with a face-recognition system; officers covertly deployed it on fans attending Super Bowl XXXV. The police scanned tens of thousands of fans without their awareness, identifying a handful of petty criminals, but no one was detained." Dr. Joseph Atick, a pioneer of facial-recognition systems, now cautions against the exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens.
- Spike TV recently put together an all-star comedy tribute to Don Rickles, which will air on the channel on May 28. CAN'T WAIT? Watch a sneak peek, featuring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Tracy Morgan!
- "How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star"
- Did you wonder about what the deal was with the softcore sex movie Don and Megan went to see during last week's Mad Men? Wonder no more! Bilge Ebiri wrote about the film, I Am Curious (Yellow), for Vulture.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day gave a commencement speech at his alma mater, Merrimack College, last weekend. In it, he promoted doing the uncomfortable and scary over the safe and boring in order to achieve the life you want, and the Internet went NUTS over it. Rightly! Watch it here in case you missed it.
*Every young member of the media, ever worries about their job & career, rushes to aggregate Charlie Day's speech about not giving a shit*
— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) May 21, 2014
- In honor of Pulp Fiction's 20th anniversary, Dazed looked at the top theories concerning what was really in the briefcase. (Diamonds? Elvis's gold suit?)
- Bill Hader signed a deal with HBO this week to develop a new comedy series for the network. Ooh!
- "Every time I make a movie, it's usually three or four years between. I write most of what I do and create most of what I do. I have four or five creations in my head right now, in fact." GQ spoke with Mike Meyers recently about his baby, playing floor hockey, and his comeback.
- "The $11 Billion Year and how the film industry is imploding."
- Norm Macdonald threw together an audition to host the Late Late Show on a recent episode of Conan. I say give him the job!
- Ahead of Memorial Day, The Dissolve put together a list of movies that are currently available for streaming for memorializing (almost) every major American war.
- "This debate is not and should not be about forgetting or disappearing in the traditional sense. Instead, let’s recognize that the talk about forgetting and disappearing is really concern about the concept of obscurity in the protection of our personal information." News spread this week that the European Court of Justice now requires search engines to allow people "the right to be forgotten" after a certain time by erasing links to web pages. Here is Wired on why enhancing obscurity might be a better way.
- Gemma Creagh's "50 Bestest TV Shows of All Time" for Medium.
- I'll leave you today with Vulture's look into how MTV's Internet liar-busting show Catfish actually works. (Disillusioning hint: it starts with the liar.)