Jenny Slate on Chris Evans.

Film On Monday, The Guardian's G2 published an astonishingly invasive interview with Jake Gyllenhaal in which the interviewer asked the actor about his relationship with Taylor Swift and then proceeded to essentially force an argument by persisting then wondering why the whole process went south. The interviewer clearly hoped to get a scoop and the actor didn't want to give him one, knowing that anything he said would enter the feedback loop on celebrity "news" websites.

For what it's worth, I think that in that kind of situation, if the actor wants to talk about their relationship they will, but there's no point pressing them on it, especially if they've otherwise given an indication of being a private person. Plus, frankly, it's probably none of our business. I'd rather hear an actor talk about the work and process and how they do their job, which is also in the interview to some extent but with less depth once Gyllenhaal is on the defensive.

If, however, they actually want to talk about their private life then that's fine, especially if it's as fascinating as this piece about Jenny Slate who recently got out of a relationship with Chris "Captain America" Evans. On the one hand, I'm slightly concerned about the extent to which his privacy is being broken here, the details of his life which are now in the public domain. But on the other she still clearly adores him and more importantly, there's nothing in here which contradicts his public image:
"Evans and Slate met at her chemistry read — the audition in which it’s determined whether two romantic leads play well together — and they instantly got along. “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re going to be one of my closest friends.’ I was just like, ‘Man, I fucking hope this isn’t a lie, because I’m going to be devastated if this guy isn’t my friend.’ ” The first time they went out to dinner, as co-workers getting to know each other, she remembers insisting they split the bill over Evans’s strenuous objections. “If you take away my preferences, you take away my freedom,” she says she told him. “Then I was like, Oh, man, is this dude going to be like, ‘Ugh, this bra-burner.’ Instead, he was like, ‘Tell me more.’"
Of course, now he's probably going to be asked about the contents of this interview and so the feedback loop begins again.

Hadley Freeman on Love Actually.

Film After a slightly confused (slightly?) column about trans identity at the weekend (see this Twitter thread for key objections), Hadley Freeman's back re-iterating many of the same points from my old Love Actually post (which is here in case you haven't read it):
"My best friend and I went to see it on the day it opened, excited as babes on Christmas Day. We loved Notting Hill, and we adored Four Weddings and a Funeral, and sure, they were basically odes to the Oxbridge-educated, but they had charm and clever scripts. And those movies only had one plot line – this new one had nine! That meant it would be nine times as awesome, right? Wrong. We emerged from the cinema with faces frozen like Munch’s Scream, and silently went our separate ways. We called each other later to check in on one another, like victims of a terrible disaster."
Unlike Hadley I actually liked Love Actually at first. Saw it twice at the cinema, asked for the dvd at Christmas (etc etc) and it wasn't until I studied it for the dissertation I noticed how disdainful it is. Let's see if the Comic Relief sequel acts as a corrective.

My Favourite Film of 1907.



Film It’s 1907 and here’s singer Jean Noté performing the French national anthem with synchronous sound. The Jazz Singer’s generally thought of as being the first sound film, and although it’s true that it was the first to utilise a technique which was commercial repeatable, the director Georges Mendel achieving a similar effect over a decade earlier. One can well imagine if this was shown in cinemas, the audience taking to their feet and singing along. Just remarkable.



But this still isn't the earliest. William Dickson was experimenting with sound in the mid-late 1890s.