'Moonlight' Rising

by Chris Feil

We've been excited at The Film Experience for Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, the follow-up to his 2008 tiny but magnificent debut Medicine for Melancholy (which is available on Netflix - you're welcome).You're going to want to catch up to that film if you haven't because if the buzz is to be believed on Moonlight, the writer/director has something special coming our way.

This week the film was announced as part of the lineups of both New York Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival. In Toronto, it will compete in the Platform section meant to launch auteurs to the next stage of their career. If the just released trailer is any indication, Moonlight has the goods to do just that - take a look at this stunner:

Consider our breath offically taken. Not only does the trailer make good on the buzz we've been hearing for Naomie Harris's performance, but the images are full throttle gut-punchers running the spectrum from sexy to devastating. If the film itself is as visually arresting and emotionally investing as these short two minutes, then we are in for something special indeed. A24 also has Mike Mills's 20th Century Women coming this Oscar season, but their success with Room last year shows what they can do with a modest emotional powerhouse like this.

Moonlight opens on October 21. Which moment from the trailer took your breath away?

The Method Is No Longer Worth the Madness

If you haven't yet caught the latest essay from Angelica Jade Bastién (who has written here a few times) check it out at the Atlantic. It's called "Hollywood Ruined Method Acting" and it goes at the increasingly torturous PR campaigns that surround modern "accomplishments" of screen acting. As as usual Angelica is quite insightful about acting and sexism. Bless her for citing Montgomery Clift's contribution to acting, non-method styles that are just as valuable (see Brad Pitt) and the various incredible female actors (like Gena Rowlands) who are pushed aside due to the obsession with masculinity. Marlon Brando gets all the credit and don't think it's not because of the machismo and swagger.

I'd quote the article but instead I'll quote Jason's reaction which made me giggle:

I was nodding my head in agreement so furiously I was spitting out vertebrae by its end

Same. Same.

Movie News in 4 Questions and a Video

by Murtada

Today's movie news offered questions and head scratchers more than usual. So I’ll present you with the questions and maybe you can help me with the answers. Or just join in the bewilderment:

• Why would David Fincher want to direct the sequel to World War Z? Obviously Pitt is a favorite of his but a sequel, really? Is this related to the fact that HBO passed on the two series he was developing for the past couple of years?

• How will Margot Robbie play 4 foot 9 trapeze artist  Lillian Leitzel in Queen of the Air? Will they employ the inverse of whatever they did to make Meryl Streep taller in Julie and Julia (2009)?

• Do we care about the feud between The Rock and Vin Diesel? And doesn’t “candy ass” sound like a euphemism for something?

• What was the extent of Tony Kushner’s involvement in the script for Fences? It was always known that they were working from an August Wilson penned screenplay that both Kushner and Denzel Washington worked on polishing.

• And finally, if you've googled "Who is Awkwafina?" after the news broke out about the cast for Ocean's 8, here's a clue:

 Take it away, dear readers!

HFPA Donates Half a Million Dollars to Renovate Historic Egyptian Theater, Site of First Movie Premiere

by Daniel Crooke

While known most casually as the Cool Mom of awards ceremonies – here, you and your friends can drink as much champagne as you want but make sure you do it under my roof, in front of my cameras – the Hollywood Foreign Press Association accomplishes much more every year than pulling off Oscar season’s liveliest, sloppiest party. At their annual Grants Banquet last week, the HFPA awarded over two million dollars worth of grants to non-profit arts organizations, higher education fellowships, professional trainings, and other film-centric or adjacent projects and spaces.

To Angelino cinephiles, film history buffs, and fans of landmark cultural sites, one additional grant announcement might spark some interest: a $500,000 grant to renovate and restore the legendary movie palace, the Egyptian Theater. Home to reams of Golden Age Hollywood lore and, contemporarily, the encyclopedic repertory organization American Cinematheque – the recipients of the grant, and masterminds of the theater’s first major renovation in 1996 – the Egyptian has held a special place in the past, present, and future of Hollywood film culture since its construction in 1922 by film exhibition (and cultural appropriation) impresario Sid Grauman. While Grauman’s Chinese Theater would go on to secure higher iconography in the pantheon of movie palaces and cemented handprints, the Egyptian arguably influenced the practices of the Hollywood hype machine more integrally and with more longevity; after all, it hosted the first ever movie premiere in history, for Allan Dwan's Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks.

Which is all to say, where we see movies matters. Whether it’s a packed AMC with the comfiest seats and strongest air conditioning, a local independent theater with roots in the community, or a trusted repertory house with a taste-expanding slate, the environment in which we watch has the capacity to add a special new flavor to your filmgoing experience.

Do you have a favorite theater around where you live that makes you feel warm and fuzzy when the lights dim? Personally, The Neon in Dayton, Ohio makes me as bubbly inside as one of their homemade Italian sodas.

Best Shot/Best Costume: "Les Girls"

For this week's episode of our cinematography series Hit Me With Your Best Shot we wanted a slight curveball as a way to celebrate the release of the Costume Design documentary Women He's Undressed. It's now available to rent on iTunes or purchase on other digital platforms. (Jose's interview with the director here). The film is about the legendary Orry-Kelly, who designed a truckload of classic Hollywood features and stars, and won three Oscars in the 1950s for An American in Paris, Les Girls  and Some Like It Hot.  So those playing "Best Shot" this week could choose any of those three. I watched Les Girls since it gets the least attention and they even use its image for the documentary's poster (left).

Les Girls  (George Cukor, 1957) is not well remembered today but curiously it reminds us yet again that mainstream Hollywood in the 50s and 60s paid a lot of attention to foreign auteurs and absorbed (or ripped off - you be the judge) their styles and conceits. The semi-musical (a few dance numbers mainly) concerns a libel lawsuit involving a former showbiz act "Barry Nichols and Les Girls" and in the courtroom we hear three different versions of the group's break up in Paris. In each of the stories Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly) gets mixed up romantically with a different girl (America's Mitzi Gaynor, Britain's Kay Kendall, and Finland's Taina Elg) and their musical act eventually implodes. It's clearly modelled on Akira Kurosawa's Rashômon (1950) which had taken an Honorary Oscar from the Academy earlier that decade.

Taina Elg quits dancing in Les Girls (1957)

So let's choose a best shot and a best costume after the jump. Happily my three favorite shots come from each of the film's three acts...

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