"Carol" Now Filming

First pics of Cate Blanchett filming Carol based on Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt" (which is sometimes called "Carol" or vice versa). I know everyone thinks I'm this huge Cate Blanchett nerd now that I fell so hard for her in Blue Jasmine but truth: I'm in this for director Todd Haynes. Thank the gods he's returning to the cinema. It's been a long time.

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His last feature film was 7 long years ago, the experimental Bob Dylan picture I'm Not There... which was something of a comedown from his successful mainstream (though not really) breakthrough with Far From Heaven (by far his biggest hit). I'm Not There netted Cate Blanchett an Oscar nomination and her second Golden Globe. Will Carol do the same? The film co-stars Sarah Paulson and Rooney Mara.

This will be Cate Blanchett's second sapphic-lust drama after Notes on a Scandal.

HERE I AM!"

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Yes, No, Maybe So: "Get On Up"

You is kind. You is smart. You is important."

I love The Help (2011). I don't care who knows it. So I'm immediately curious about Get On Up, Tate Taylor's follow up which reunites Minny & Aibileen though they both take a back seat since this time it's the story of rock legend James Brown (Chadwick Boseman). This trailer also starts with an affirmative.

You special. And your momma's a no account fool. But you ain't gonna be. One day everybody gonna know your name"

JAMES BROWN [*makes applause sound*]

Okay so that's not as universal an affirmation but... wait. oh. That makes Viola Davis the 'no account fool'? Do over! Not sure I'm okay with this. Time for a Yes No Maybe So™ 

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Women's History Month: On the master animator Lotte Reiniger

Tim here, contributing to our ongoing celebration of Women’s History Month with a look at one of the truly pioneering artists in the history of animation. And Lotte Reiniger isn’t important simply because she was a woman in a medium that has done such a good job over the years at remaining a boys club. The work she did, silhouette animation based on the shadow puppet theater of East Asia, remains as unique in the 2010s as when she created it over 40-year career beginning in Germany in the 20s, and she created, largely by herself, the first entirely animated feature that still exists (at least two Argentinean films from the 1910s are now lost), eleven years before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Puts a little bit of added context to that company’s half-proud attempt to declare themselves progressive because, in 2013, they finally hired a female co-director for one of their projects with Frozen.

That film was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which remains one of the easiest of Reiniger’s projects to see, thanks to a full restoration in the late 1990s. It’s a basic riff on themes from the Arabian Nights – a wicked magician, a brave prince with a flying horse, a couple of helpless women to be rescued – almost hopelessly square and hokey in its embrace of every fantasy adventure cliché you could dream up. But then, the point was never really about the story. The point was things like this:

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Rooney Mara pans out

In case you missed the rather glum-making news: it's been newly announced that Rooney Mara has been cast as Tiger Lily, the classic problematic representation of Native Americans as written down by an Edwardian Brit, in Joe Wright's new movie Pan. Details are still fuzzy, but the impression one gets is that it's an attempt to bring the dark-and-gritty approach to the Peter Pan story (an it's an origin story, too!), which isn't the first place I'd have expected the director of Atonement and Anna Karenina to go.

But let's not lose sight of the main thrust, which is that Rooney Mara is playing a Native American princess. Whitewashing in the casting process isn't a new problem, but I can't remember the last time it happened this vividly (it even makes thing worse, on a number of levels, to find that Mara apparently beat Lupita Nyong'o for the part). The filmmakers have indicated that they're creating a deliberately "multi-racial/international" take one the material, but with Mara joining Hugh Jackman and Garrett Hedlund as the confirmed cast members so far, one wonders if the PR flack who put that sound-bite out there is still living, what with his pants having erupted into flames and all.

The internet, including the Film Experience, has been busily discussing the issue of casting able-bodied persons as disabled characters these past few days; it's a conversation that needs to happen, but it's galling to step back and realise that we haven't even finished fighting the easy representational battles yet.

New "Under The Skin" Posters in the Order That They Freak Me Out

From a floating iris that seems to have an infinite sclera (aiiiyeeee) to the foggy beauty of Scarlett Johansson. Here they are...  

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