Thumbnails 9/3/14 – Ft McMurray's Homepage

1.

“Why Whit Stillman’s Work Endures After All These Similar Movies: On ‘The Cosmopolitans'”: Indiewire‘s Press Play editor Max Winter discusses the pilot of Stillman’s new Amazon series.

“Even-keeled as the dramatic topography may be in this pilot, Stillman manages to insert some literary characters, figures with some breadth and potential. Chloe Sevigny, in what might be her best performance since ‘Kids,’ plays a fashion journalist who radiates a mood of anger, bitterness and possible sexual frustration from her first appearance; she says everything through clenched teeth and what would seem to be too much caffeine, speaking truth but without caring about its damage when spoken, criticizing the three single fellows for not having ‘figured things out’ yet. Freddy Asblom plays Fritz, a shifty, bottomlessly wealthy young snot whose life revolves around cocktail parties, philandering, romantic entanglements; he quite memorably loses his poise as he throws Sandro out of a party at his home for bringing drug dealers there, all of his previous oily delivery reduced to some barked monosyllables. And Carrie MacLemore brings us Aubrey, a young woman on her own from Alabama, living with a passive-aggressive boyfriend, or perhaps not living with him, or maybe both; she’s played openly and with memorable plainness here by MacLemore, though she is a type who has appeared in Stillman’s films before, moneyed, intelligent, not quite sure of herself, and yet challenging enough to hold her own against Stillman’s young, hyper-articulate bucks.”

5.

“Patton Oswalt: Why I Quit Twitter—And Will Again“: The actor reveals to Time Magazine his reasons for taking a break from social media.

“Sometimes I’d catch the gaze of a holdout like me. A freak without a phone. Adrift in this gallery of bowed heads. A teenager, whose phone had probably died. Or a slightly older ‘millennial,’ probably waiting for a video to load. But they were unique and far between. It was, mostly, people my age, and older—stooped, staring statues, peeping at windows in their palms. Once I’d gotten past the first month, though, I noticed an interesting pattern. By this point I rarely looked at my phone. The only times I’d use Twitter was to re-Tweet a link to a project I was involved in, or help promote a friend’s documentary, or fundraising effort, or album release. My phone only came out of my pocket if I needed to call someone or, more often, text someone. More and more, my eyes met the world. At eye level. Those holdout freaks I talked about? The teen whose phone battery I assumed had died? Or the older millennial I assumed was downloading a video? They were the ones not using their phones. They had the strongest immunity to the devices’ pull. It was the older people, the over-40s like me, and those way older, who couldn’t escape the tiny gravity of connection constantly yanking us out of existence.”