The Projector #71: Quarantainment, Year 2 (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

The signpost marking the end of our year away from movie theaters just got pushed back, again. Yesterday saw the announcement that the already-twice-deleayed No Time to Die, the new James Bond film, will debut in October. Ghostbusters: Afterlife will appear in November and Uncharted won’t be coming out until 2022. But wait. There’s more: Cinderella, set for February 5th, has been pushed to July. And the James Bond movie has kicked Morbius until 2022. (Well, okay. That last bit might not be so upsetting.)

The tea leaves all say this: Must of us are going to have to wait a while to see highly anticipated movies in theaters. There are new movies out there in places where theaters remain open. One sign of normality is that Liam Neeson released an action movie in January. But moviegoing as we know it has been postponed again. (Don’t be surprised if more films move their dates in the next few days.)

It, in a word, stinks. And, to be clear, I realize it’s far from the biggest problem created by the coronavirus, but I also know I’m not the only who misses going to the movies, badly. Regardless, we’re going to press on and keep the focus on movies you can watch at home until the theaters open again. It’s encouraging that we’ve never really struggled to find a movie worth talking about under these conditions, though it would be better still if we could watch and talk about them together. I miss that.

Also, we might not run into some of the technical difficulties we’ve run into working remotely. We hope it’s been smooth (or as close to smooth as it ever was) from your side of the speaker, but we’ve had some issues this week, one ultimately minor (I had to re-record some of my contributions to the last episode) and one major: we lost the Best TV of 2020 bonus episode. It was good, too. Maybe next week we can at least publish our lists.

For now, we hope you’re enjoying this week's (mostly glitch-free) episode about Sideways. And we do have some exciting bonus episodes in the work. Just not the Best TV episode. That one’s lost to the ages.

In the meantime, here’s some pieces you might enjoy:

• At The Ringer, Alan Siegel delivers an extensive oral history of Donnie Darko.

• For Vulture, former and hopefully future podcast guest Angelica Jade Bastién talked to Emerald Fennell about Promising Young Woman and why it’s causing such a strong reaction (it’s another one to read after you’ve seen the movie but, if you follow this podcast you might, hint hint, want to watch that one).

• At Polygon, Petrana Radulovic dug into Pixar’s new Disney Plus shorts, and considered how they might change the studio.

• Also worth reading, Mark Harris has a long-in-the-works biography of Mike Nichols out soon and Vulture has an excerpt dealing with his time making Heartburn.

• Another must-read writer, Matt Zoller Seitz, wrote about Scorsese’s quietly brutal The Age of Innocence (also for Vulture).