Showbiz History: Monsters Inc, American Gangster, and Burt Lancaster

7 random things that happened on this day (November 2nd) in showbiz history

1755  Marie Antoinette is born. She'll become infamous in life and a household name all around the world after her death at 37 by guillotine. She's been played in the movies by Diane Kruger, Kirsten Dunst, Michèle Morgan, Norma Shearer, Jane Seymour, and more. 

1921 Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie" premieres on Broadway. The classic play will become a movie 9 years later starring Greta Garbo...

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Review: "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"

by Chris Feil

Yes, Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is another attempt to monetize a familiar property into CGI fantasy excess. This time it is the Tchaikovsky ballet (itself an adaptation of an adaptation) getting the family film treatment, often owing more narratively to its cinematic genre predecessors like Alice in Wonderland and the Narnia movies than its actual source material. While it does fall into the garish trappings of those films, the film gets a good bit more mileage out of not taking itself so straightfaced. Within that familiar framework, the film fascinates by letting itself get a little cuckoo.

Mackenzie Foy is Clara, a young girl mourning the death of her mother, bestowed a mysterious egg-shaped lockbox as a Christmastime dowry. Spiritually guided by her godfather, played by Morgan Freeman In An Eyepatch, she ventures into the fantasy land formerly visited by her mother. But now that wintery world is at war with itself, three of its more upbeat realms against a foggy, mouse-infested one lorded over by Helen Mirren’s Mother Ginger.

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The Very Best of Toni Collette

by Nathaniel R

A very happy birthday to Toni Collette today. We discussed this once on the blog a year or two ago but let's update our list of favorite Collette performances on her birthday since she was absolutely slaying the multiplex this past summer in the demonic horror flick Hereditary. She's currently up for a Gotham award for Best Actress for that role.

She's also starring in the new Netflix series Wanderlust about a married couple trying an open marriage though I haven't yet watched it (it's on the queue). My list of Toni's best work goes like so. Yours?

12 LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (BAFTA nomination, SAG ensemble nomination)
Warm, worried, winning.

11 IN HER SHOES 
Not everything about this works but she's wonderful in it...

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Netflix in November: Doctor Strange, 16 Candles, Children of Men, etc...

Time to play Streaming Roulette. Each month, to survey new streaming titles we freeze frame the films at random places with the scroll bar and whatever comes up first, that's what we share!

Here's what's new on Netflix...

When you leave, you should forget me.

The English Patient (1996) won 9 Oscars. Nine! As much as that's a wonderful movie -- and my god it hurts to look at these two (Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas in they're prime) they're so superhumanly gorgeous -- 9 is a lot. I'm glad Oscar has recently moved away from giving all the statues to one movie. It's been 10 years since we've had that kind of overkill (Slumdog Millionaire with 8)... and lately things have been winning closer to 3-5 which is more than enough for most movies, even the great ones...

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Months of Meryl: Hope Springs (2012)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#44 — Kay Soames, a lonesome woman trying to revitalize her stagnant marriage

JOHN: Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep have screen personas as disparate as the parts of a taijitu. While Streep actively courts her audience with vital charisma or some captivating form of transformation, Jones seems just as satisfied to pretend that the audience isn’t there, rarely soliciting our sympathy or even our attention. What a surprise, then, to see each actor force the other to explore previously untapped potentials in this later stage of his/her career and deliver a performance as nuanced and exciting as the very best work in their respective filmographies.

In David Frankel’s Hope Springs, Streep and Jones are Kay and Arnold Soames, a couple married for 31 years who now regard each other like estranged roommates. They rarely speak to one another aside from the occasional “good morning” and “good night.” A hug a day is the extent of their intimacy; they haven’t had sex in almost four years...

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