You Are My Link

• E News First look at Tom Hanks as Mr Rogers in You Are My Friend
• Variety Hugh Jackman getting the celebratory treatment at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, which has become such an Oscar stop to promote contenders, especially in the lead acting categories
• Film Comment Nick Davis, brilliant as ever, looking at some artful highlights from TIFF including Claire Denis High Life, Julianne Moore as Gloria Bell, and Rithy Panh's Graves Without A Name, a follow up to his earlier Oscar nominated doc

after the jump White Boy Rick, A Simple Favor, Alita Battle Angel, Sixteen Candles, Michelle Williams in Venom and Lee Pace as thirst trap...

Click to read more ...

Beauty vs Beast: She's Got the Brainnnsssssss

Jason from MNPP here for another round of "Beauty vs Beast" and on a very special day at that - not only is today the first day of October, marking my favorite season of the year (the spookey season) but today is also the 50th anniversary of George A Romero's masterpiece Night of the Living Dead! There were "zombies" of a sort before NotLD came out - mostly folks put under "voodoo curses" or the like - but Romero refined the monster to its modern form and created billions upon billions of dollars for entertainment executives in the process. But nothing's gonna top the stark simplicity of that original 1968 nightmare.

Facing down the horde I was torn between choosing our hero Ben (the magnificent Duane Jones) or his leading (comatose) lady Barbra (Judith O'Dea) - I went with the latter because Barbra gets a bad rap if you ask me. Ben is the hero we'd like to be - Barbra is the we we're probably gonna be. People don't like to want to think we'd go into total shock in an apocalyptic situation but you know what? Watch your sibling get eaten by a strange man in a cemetery and get back to me.

web survey

PREVIOUSLY And speaking of siblings (and now I'm picturing a zombie rampage at the March house) last week's Little Women off brought the expected results, because Amy's awful, that little book burning witch, we hate her. Jo with 80-plus percent, huzzah! Said chasm301:

"Evil finds a human form in Amy March. Only Kiki stans are voting for her. But wow I love everything about this movie. I watch it multiple times a year. Winona is perfection and the score is one of my faves."

Prime in October: Pushing Daisies, Gods and Monsters, The Cell

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. No cheating.  What does Amazon Prime offer us for free viewing this month? Let's survey...

Wasn't your old dog named Digby?

Pushing Daisies (Seasons 1 and 2)
In case you wanted something actually worth binge-watching. This series is so perfect, from its macabre plots, to its quirky romance, to its colorful design, through its curiously moving musical numbers. I miss it so much. Maybe we should watch the entire series again?

Click to read more ...

"Shadow" leads the Golden Horse nominations

Good news for fans of Zhang Yimou. His latest film Shadow, which we quite liked at TIFF, leads the 55th annual Golden Horse nominations which focus on Chinese language cinema. The higher Shadow's profile gets the more eyeballs it will theoretically find once Well Go, releases it in US theaters. It's definitely worth seeing in a movie theater since it's a visual spectacle. China still hasn't named their Oscar submission so we hope it's going to be Shadow which was released at home yesterday, the last day of eligibility for Oscar's Foreign Language Film submission requirements.

Interestingly enough, Hong Kong's Oscar submission Operation Red Sea received NO nominations whatsoever. 

A full list of Golden Horse nominations is after the jump with links to reviews for the few films we've seen...

Click to read more ...

Showbiz History: New Streisand and Old Horror Classics

Boo! October is here. Are you excited for this month (it's myfavorite for a variety of reasons). Since it's the spooky month (among other things) I've personally started it off with a night of insomnia after a nightmare -- ON TREND! 

Here are 9 random things that happened on this day, October 1st, in showbiz history...

1962 Barbra Streisand signs her first recording contract with Columbia. Offers had started to come in after she brought down the house on Broadway in I Can Get It For You Wholesale that spring. It was a one year contract (with an option for five) giving her 5% of royalties on albums sold. Streisand has never left Columbia and her 37th studio album Walls drops a month from now. People are already meme-ing the album cover left and right since it's accidentally in keeping with the horror theme of October...  

Click to read more ...