"Tilda Swinton" by Christopher Doyle

How have we not seen this short film from legendary cinematography Christopher Doyle before? It plays like a music video but the title and subject is Tilda Swinton. Well Tilda AND Shanghai AND Chanel.

"TILDA SWINTON" BY CHRISTOPHER DOYLE from Diane Pernet's ASVOFF on Vimeo.

Tilda Swinton, the goddess extrordinaire, descended in Shanghai on the day of the Solstice. In this film by Christopher Doyle, colors, textures and physiques merge into landscape. Swinton transforms her body into striking brushes and shapes against the backdrop of Pudong's skyscrapers and the dark alleys behind.

Hat tip to The Film Stage for pointing us to this unseen curio. 

More drama please, Crimson Peak

Here's Murtada to review of the new wide release Crimson Peak.

Visually Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a big sumptuous meal. So visually full at all times that it masquerades a thin plot and uninteresting lead character and almosts gets away with fooling us into thinking it a great film. The compelling visuals keep it enticing throughout: Huge frilly sleeves on the dresses; red smoke flaring up from creeks on the floor; a creepy black skeleton hand moving ominously. It never stops.

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Links: Jennifer's World, Screenplay Competition, Gena's Glory

Illustration by Jennifer WilliamsActresses Actresses Actresses
<-- If you haven't yet read Jennifer Lawrence's short essay "Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars" you should.

Salon on the many stars who are coming out in support of JLaw on Twitter
Teen Vogue Jennifer Lawrence and other stars before they were famous posing for Abercrombie & Fitch
THR Actress Joan Leslie (Yankee Doodle Dandy, Sergeant York) has died at 90 
Tracking Board Yorgos Lanthimos' (The Lobster) next project is about Queen Anne and it's called The Favorite. The female driven film will star Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Olivia Colman  
David Poland "20 Weeks To Oscar" he thinks only four movies are locked up in Best Picture: The Martian, Spotlight, Steve Jobs and Room but here's what I found most interesting. He argues that only Brie Larson & Kate Winslet can rest easy in their respective actress fields and I can see that The rest of the fields are fluid.
AV Club Because Ryan Murphy isn't spread thin enough he's pitching an anthology series called "One Hit Wonders" to star Goop herself, Gwyneth Paltrow  

Oscar Chatter
Awards Daily on the Screenplay races. Celebrity writers + Best Picture heat 
In Contention Kris Tapley on the makeup race. Can box office bombs factor in?

General Linkage
Interview talks to Emma Donaghue the novelist who adapted her own work for the screen in Room
Criterion has an amazing conversation with the French director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings & Queen, My Golden Days). They talk Oscars, Lars von Trier (?), male versus female actors, nudity, everything. I like this bit on his relationship to Mathieu Amalric who is in most of his films:

Mathieu is hard with me. He’s really hard. You don’t know all his French films, but I saw all his French films. He always plays the same part in all the films. They’re quite good, but I remember when I proposed Kings & Queen to him, he told me: “Arnaud, the script is great, but I don’t want to play the same character as in My Sex Life. You have to prove to me that this is another character.” I have to prove to you? Come on, you play the same character in five films, why am I obliged to prove that to you? He said, “Because it’s love, so you have to prove it.”

Birth. Movies. Death Thor: Ragnarok will be Marvel's darkest. But will it introduce Valkyrie? (People will be completely be over superheroes by the time the females arrive. sigh) 
Empire NOooo. Now they want to make a Die Hard "origin story". Boo
Playbill two underused fine actors Aaron Tveit & Mary Elizabeth Winstead headlining a new CBS comic thriller BrainDead with a truly bizarre premise
AV Club broke down 22 references in the Hail, Caesar! trailer
MNPP Jason has some thoughts on a possible tv version of Y: The Last Man

Finally...

"I had seen her when I was a teenager in Lonely Are the Brave with Kirk Douglas. I'd never seen anyone that beautiful with a certain gravitas. It was particularly unique in that time, when many women were trying to be girlish, affecting a superficial, 'I'm a pretty girl' attitude. It seemed to be the best way to succeed, but Gena did none of that. There was a directness—not that she wasn't fun and didn't smolder—but it came from a place that was both genuine and deep.

-Mia Farrow on Gena Rowlands"

Elle Magazine's "Women in Hollywood" issue is available digitally now and comes out next week featuring Gena Rowlands, Alicia Vikander, Salma Hayek, Kate Winslet, Carey Mulligan, Ava DuVernay, Amy Schumer, and Dakota Johnson.

Belated Thoughts on "Freeheld"

Freeheld, the civil rights drama based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, hasn't made an impact at the box office or with critics but it really should've been featured on The Film Experience of all places. We apologize for the delay but better late than never... especially when it involves dying wishes!

First a wee bit of background: Autospell keeps trying to change the title to "Freehold". For what it's worth the Freeholders, a local county governing board, are the antagonists of the picture. They're a group of men who deny local hero cop Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) her dying wish that her pension go to her domestic partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page) when she dies. The only thing that keeps the Freeholders in the human realm and away from cartoon moustache-twirling is Bryan Kelder (Josh Charles), the most conflicted of them who doesn't see what the big deal is about granting her wish but also isn't conflicted enough to put his career on the line and he's running for a bigger office soon. The boards refusal stirs up a firestorm of activism in her home county in New Jersey

Here are a handful of thoughts on the movie...

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Women's Pictures - Mary Harron's American Psycho

Anne Marie continues a special horror month on "Women's Pictures"

Fun fact: American Psycho was the single most voted for film for the horror edition of Women's Pictures. Despite that, I almost didn't include it. This isn't because of some sudden onset of squeamishness on my part, or dislike of the film. American Psycho simply isn't a horror movie, at least not by conventional standards. American Psycho is director Mary Harron's dark Juvenalian satire of American consumerism, materialism, and the crisis of masculinity in the turn of the 21st century.

Though set in the 1980s, American Psycho is one of a handful of films from the late 1990s and early 2000s that violently pokes at the concept of modern masculinity. Like American Beauty and especially Fight Club, American Psycho confronts the idea of modern man chained to a desk, unfulfilled and overburdened by contemporary consumerist definitions of success. The titular Psycho is Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a music-obsessed Wall Street broker in the decade where everything, from hair to shoulder pads to paychecks, was bigger. Bateman has all of the plastic markers of success: trendy apartment, good haircut, designer cloths, WASP fiance, the right friends, and a killer business card. But under his flashy, fake veneer, Patrick is all id. He wants to kill. He wants to fuck. He wants to possess. [More...]

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