but all I know-oh-oh is down inside i'm lii-iiin-king ♫

Empire exciting project alert! Writer/director Destin Cretton of Short Term 12 fame will guide Michael B Jordan in Just Mercy, a memoir adaptation about a young lawyer who fought for the wrongly convicted
Balder & Dash looks back on the exciting sci-fi curveball Attack the Block (2011)
Variety Alan Parker (Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone, Evita) receives BFI Tribute
Kenneth in the (212) is rewatching Woody Allen movies and has time for Diane Keaton singing
Cinematic Corner really loves Ant-Man and since I was kind of hard on it, I figure a more positive review should be shared
NPR talks about getting the ants right with the help of "myrmecologists" on Ant-Man
Pop Culture Crazy on Paper Towns (2015) and "Manic Pixie Dream Girl nonsense"
Comics Alliance Green Lantern Corps (2020) may feature Tyrese Gibson as the John Stewart iteration of Green Lantern and yes I feel dirty that I typed a sentence about a movie that's not due for another 5 years and might never even be made. Apologies. We really are living in a sick movie culture at the moment

LOL
Karen Carpenter Died For Your Sins finds Angie Dickinson in a "white mood" 
/Film Jake Gyllenhaal cried when his parents wouldn't let him star in The Mighty Ducks in 1992. Hee!  

Off Cinema (Sort Of)
The Hairpin on kissing and 'disgusting intimacy'. Interesting article but be warned of really gross photos that may or may not be from an X-Files episode that's name dropped. (I love kissing. I once toyed with starting a series on it with this classic post on Jake Gyllenhaal but good god that was a ton of work.)
i09 need some reading suggestions? Here are nominees for the British Fantasy Awards
Boy Culture 30 minutes (!!!) of unseen outtakes from Madonna's classic "Vogue" video have surfaced. It's so weird to see Madonna at the end of takes all dissatisfied with herself for milliseconds. Don't you miss David Fincher making music videos. He should do that inbetween his films
Playbill casting complete ono the West End production of "Photograph 51" starring Nicole Kidman. Her first time on the UK stage since "The Blue Room." Performances start in just 2 months. me want! me want! donate to the site (see sidebar) so I have funds to go see her. *sniffle* 

Showtune to Go...
Feeling oppressed by superheroes of late, I suddenly remembered one of my very favorite songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I seriously love this song (Yeah, I went through a Rocky Horror phase one year as a teenager) and strangely YouTube has very little use for it. Is it because of its lack of fame since it was axed from the original cut of the movie? I found one good clip from a performance in Jacksonville Florida with Ross Frontz and Jessica Alexander doing Brad and Janet... good voices!

Thoughts I had while staring at that new Bridge of Spies Poster

Manuel here. I had to check but it strikes me that for a film that ranked #8 in TFE’s collective “We Can’t Wait!” list, we haven’t really discussed the upcoming Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg film, Bridge of Spies. I saw this poster displayed at my local multiplex and well, I had to share some of my thoughts on it.

• Floating head? Noooooo!
• It is a bit of an improvement over that floating head/flag one from a few months back.
• Hanks does give good furrowed brow.
• Red and black and white makes for a clean design and the typography clearly alludes to the film’s Cold War themes but this poster really isn’t helping you figure out the plot other than reminding you that Hanks is (yet again) playing an “honest man." To be fair, from the trailer, it looks like a hard one to boil down to a simple plot synopsis.
• Why isn’t Spielberg’s name more prominently displayed? Even those Daniel Day-Lewis-heavy posters for Lincoln had the “A Steven Spielberg” line a tad more visible.
• No “Academy Award Winner”? (but then Hanks has never been one to brag)
• At least the bottom of the film aims to remind you of that other Hanks/Spielberg’s collaboration, Catch Me If You Can, and its amazing opening titles. Still one of the best Spielbergs and just think of its young actressy roster: Amy Adams, Ellen Pompeo, Jennifer Garner, Elizabeth Banks, even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Amy Acker!
• That bottom half is also slightly Hitchcockian (and by that, I mean it’s a Saul Bassian riff on North by Northwest, no?)
• It’s also giving off The International vibes. 
• Are the red I's… bridges? I’m baffled by that design choice but maybe that’s why I’m not in movie poster designing business since I’d have squeezed in Amy Ryan into this poster and somehow made sure to remind you that Mark Rylance and Billy Magnussen are also in it.

Does this poster boost or dim your excitement?

1995 Bonus Podcast !

We're spoiling you with two podcasts this week. We'll talk Ant-Man and Southpaw tomorrow night but here's an extra bonus episode in which Nathaniel, Nick, and Joe each recommend a 1995 film they remember loving that they'd like to revisit or wish that more people would talk about. The conversation wanders, as it does, to the Best Actress race, Scorned 2 ??? "Meryl's third Oscar!" talk (duh), and the films of Michael Mann ???

Contents (45 minutes)
00:01 Mia Kirshner in Atom Egoyan's Exotica 
04:30 Kathy Bates as Stephen King's Delores Claiborne
07:45 Lili Taylor of The Addiction
10:55 Random loved titles: Babe, Nixon, etcetera
14:10 Actresses of 1995 outside the Best Actress nominees: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Toni Collette, Holly Hunter, Parker Posey, Rene Russo, Ashley Judd, and more...
31:11 Get Shorty
34:30 Michael Mann films and Heat

Ashley Judd in "Heat"

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes.  Continue the conversation in the comments...

1995 Bonus Chit Chat

What Did You See This Weekend?

I had a busy movie weekend with Southpaw (better than it should be), Ant-Man (fun but also *shrugs*), a second viewing of Tangerine, and a double-podcast recording session (coming soon). Last night I nearly slipped into a coma of boredom when accidentally catching a half hour of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. (As I type this The Boyfriend is watching The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One but not even Julianne Moore can get me near that. The appeal of that franchise continues to escape me -- not scary, not moving, dull action sequences -- and since it does I'm not sitting through a padded four-hour finale.)

Pixels high concept was so review and quality-proof that it seemed likely to explode just from brand(s) familiarity alone (like, oh, Jurassic World). But nope. Slightly lower on the list Jake Gyllenhaal had his best opening where he was the main draw since Jarhead in 2005. (I'm not  counting Prince of Persia since the video game was the main draw and no one seems to remember that movie just 5 years later, including Jake Gyllenhaal). 

What did you see this weekend?

BOX OFFICE
Early Estimates. July 24th-26th Weekend
01 Ant-Man $24.7 (cum. $106) 
02 Pixels $24 NEW 
03 Minions $22 (cum. $261.5) Tim on the Minions phenom
04 Trainwreck $17.2 (cum. $61.5) Podcast
05 Southpaw $16.5 NEW 
06 Paper Towns $12.5 NEW
07 Inside Out $7.3 (cum. $320.3) Podcast
08 Jurassic World $6.8 (cum. $623.7)
09 Mr Holmes $2.8 (cum. $6.4) 
10 Terminator Genisys $2.4 (cum. $85.6) Review

Ask Nathaniel (and Sundance Delayed)

It's time for another Q&A round. Ask some questions in the comments, get some answers. Maybe. I'll choose a handful or two to answer for Tuesday. 

Meanwhile: Sundance Delayed
Last night I took my two besties to Tangerine and they both l-o-v-e-d it. We had such a good time (and I finally figured out what the title refers to though I'm not saying because it's such a good easter egg in the movie). Hopefully some of you have seen it by now. It was just as hot the second time, so funny, so lived-in, so authentically seedy LA, so high energy, so sneakily moving. We discussed it on the podcast last week in case you missed it.

Isn't it weird how randomly festival titles hit movie theaters?  Several films from this year's Sundance have arrived or will arrive by the end of August (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Lila & Eve, Strangerland, Tangerine, Dope, Grandma) but we're still waiting on hard-to-get tickets from January's fest like The Witch (which A24 bought if I recall) and also had several titles from 2014's fest emerge with tiny or VOD releases in 2015. And if Xavier Dolan's Tom at the Farm arrives as currently scheduled in August, we'll even have a title from TIFF 2013. I wish distributors wouldn't be so weird and wishy washy about their pickups and release dates but what can you do?