A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
The hack attack at Sony and the studio’s controversial film, “The Interview,” dominated headlines in December, but plenty more happened this year in the movie world. The Frame's John Horn spoke with Kyle Buchanan — senior editor with our partner, Vulture.com — on how females and minorities were represented in Hollywood, and what films will be a must-watch in 2015:
HORN: With "12 Years a Slave" winning the Best Picture Oscar earlier this year and the recent Martin Luther King, Jr. film, "Selma," receiving critical acclaim, how is the racial equation played out in Hollywood right now?
It remains one of the most complicated things Hollywood has to tackle. For every success like "12 Years a Slave," there is the issue that Lupita Nyong'o [who won the Best Supporting Oscar for that film] has not booked a sizable live-action role that we know of that we're going to see in the next year. And I think if it would have been a beautiful white actress who'd done that, she would have been offered every project under the sun.
So you've got to admire a filmmaker like J.J. Abrams, who really stuck to his guns to cast the actor John Boyega, who's black, as the lead of his new "Star Wars" movie. We need more progress like that, we need more people who are willing to take risks and we need talented and smart people who are willing to put their necks out and say, Sorry, this is the way it's going to be. That's the only real way we can affect change.
HORN: With the success of female-starring films like, "Maleficent" and "Lucy," are things changing for the better for women in Hollywood?
I think things are getting better on the blockbuster front, but you look at films like "The Hunger Games," "Divergent," "Twilight" — all blockbuster successes with female leads, but movies that were based on books originally. Hollywood needed to be forced into making these movies that had female heroines to realize that maybe they should actually start adding major, significant, awesome female characters to most of their movies.
HORN: What are you most excited about in 2015?
One of the films I'm looking forward to is "Inside Out," that's Pixar's new movie. Pixar has lately been a sequel generating company, but this seems like a return to form. It's the story of a young girl whose emotions inside her head are voiced by people like Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Bill Hader — all sort of jockeying for control as she goes through adolescence. It's the sort of creative concept that, I think, made us all fall in love with Pixar.
I would be lying if I said — for all the sort of franchise-bashing that I've just been doing — that I wasn't looking forward to "Mad Max: Fury Road." This is a reboot of the "Mad Max" franchise with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. The trailer is bananas! It's amazing-looking action, very practical looking, too. So even though it is a franchise, it sort of stands apart from a lot of the other cash grabs that we've got going on right now.