Link Came Back
Friday, March 3, 2017 at 3:20PM Vanity Fair's Emma Watson cover story (with a really cool photoshoot by Tim Walker that of course is getting flak due to one semi-topless photo)
Daily News JJ Abrams says Mark Hamill will be up for an Oscar for The Last Jedi next year. Uff, we're going there already? (What is it with blockbuster teams especially that like to make these predictions. Remember when Vin Diesel was sure Fast & Furious was going to be a Best Picture nominee?)
Variety a movie theater in London plays a prank, showing a bit of La La Land before a Moonlight screening
Variety a movie theater in Alabama, one of those states that just can't help being a stereotype of itself, won't show Disney's new Beauty & the Beast due to...
TFE ...the earlier announcement that there'd be a gay character
Playbill Hairspray Live!'s directing duo will reunite for the live version of Bye Bye Birdie -- that's good news as I really think Hairspray Live was by far the best of these productions yet
THR strange cast assembled for what's billed as a romantic drama that has something to do with death. Irreplaceable You will star hotties with star hotties Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman as well as Christopher Walker and Steve Coogan
i09 filmmakers discussing why video game movies always suck
/Film Disney may reboot Tron for... Jared Leto. Hrmmm.
Oscar Crumbs
Jezebel an Oscars story we accidentally didn't cover but for a brief mention on the podcast - Oscar winner Patricia Arquette is understandably upset that Alexis Arquette was left out of the In Memoriam montage
AV Club Sir Ian McKellen's advice to awards show presenters to avoid the Beatty/Dunaway fiasco
Off Screen
The Hairpin "Everyone wants to be this raccoon" Amen
Theater Mania Sondheim and Bernadette Peters attend the opening night of the new Off Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, with the theater transformed into a pie shop. The show has already extended its run all the way through December. Wheeee
Mark Harris's Book Gets a Documentary Version
Yes, I wish we were talking about Pictures at a Revolution (because we can never get enough Oscar lore) but it's his book about Hollywood directors during World War II which is also fascinating. Here's the trailer for Five Came Back which premieres at the end of the month
Reader Comments (23)
Re "Five Came Back" - hooray for Netflix and this doc, 'cuz everything Mark Harris says and does is brilliant.
SweeneyTodd never gets old.
Re Vanity Fair cover - oh please re controversy. Did anyone see the Oscar dresses? She's an adult now and can do whatever she wants, as a woman, as a feminist. That's the point...
Speaking of franchises and Oscar... Just got out of Logan. Let the campaigns for Jackman and Stewart begin! Any other movie and I might be calling a Supporting win already.
Not a big deal for blockbuster cast/crew to say that their movie is going to win or get nominated- you really think they are so sure? they just have a movie to hype up
Every young actor with an ounce of talent and taste who makes tens of millions of dollars on a YA novel franchise should do what Kristen Stewart has done.
Seriously, if you don't need Disney money on top of Harry Potter money, why would you waste your time and creative energy on this retread? These live action remakes are a bad look for everyone.
Emma Watson bores me to death.
I wish there were more books like "Pictures at a Revolution". That's one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time. :-)
Hairspray Live was a lot of fun, even though the sound team could not have screwed up more. Bye Bye Birdie should be fun.
Also, we have a saying in West Virginia: "Thank God for Alabama, or WV would be last at everything," but maybe that was just me. Have fun losing money, theater!
My favourite of the live musicals was The Wiz, by far. I had issues with Hairspray Live and it just made me want to watch the movie (The Wiz doesn't have that problem; its movie version is not good).
Haydn, to be fair, properties like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella feel like they've been getting made for as long as film. And Stewart did have her own Snow White.
It feels like everyone around me is really excited for Beauty and the Beast....and I am not. Am I doing films wrong?
Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain's social media feeds are giving me life at the moment. Paling around with Isabelle Huppert in Paris? SIGN ME UP.
Hayden: There are some animated properties I'd LOVE to see as live-action movies. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy springs to mind most readily. But, well, Mandy would maybe be read as a commercial turn-off and changed into something she isn't (though, Suicide Squad's success might help there) and Billy...you'd need a kid actor with comic chops somewhere around the Peter Sellers level to make an accurate rendering of that character with even a CHANCE of working in live-action. Grim's fairly easy. After all: You could just get Greg Eagles again.
Ez -- i'm not excited either. the singing sounds *really* bad which is a dealbreaker for me with musicals.
Wait. Did Vin Diesel really say that? lol. Like for the first Fast and the Furious?? Or the one where Paul Walker had just died?
Omigosh, can't wait for Five Came Back! I'm a Mark Harris fanboy and so happy that his book is getting this treatment.
Philip H -- the one where Paul Walker had died. And yes he really said that.
Nathaniel, the singing in La La Land was really bad too. 😉
Amanda: Yeah, La La Land would not have held up THAT WELL as a BP winner. I'd rank the seven winners of the 2010s like so:
1. Moonlight (A)
2. 12 Years a Slave (A)
3. Birdman (A-)
4. The Artist (B+)
5. Spotlight (B)
6. Argo (B)
7. The King's Speech (B) (Still very good acting, but the script can't compare to Peter Morgan at his best.)
(La La Land, as a winner, would slot in as a B+, below The Artist but above Spotlight.)
Amanda -- i am an expert on such things and La La Land singing was at least on key and much much much better than Crowe in Les Miz, the star voices in Sweeney Todd and MILES better than Emmas in Beauty & Beast so to me that's not "really bad" when you're much better than so many other recent examples.
They may be ok for current standards which are very low, but judging on itself it was not good, even more so if you compare it to the singing on the old time movies they were referencing/copying.
The fact that they did not present the songs at the oscars themselves says a lot.
Amanda -- hell, even Streep wouldn't sing at the Oscars when a song she sang in her movie was nominated. a lot of big stars won't.
and as someone who absolutely lives for musicals i reserve the right to make up my own mind about these things and i love the la la land soundtrack and those two sound just fine to me (if not as gifted as the old stars of yore... but even some of them that were known as being musical stars only had "just fine" voices (gene kelly, fred astaire, etcetera)
everyone -- p.s. everyone is wrong about la la land and people will still love it years from now. It lost the Oscar, enough with the pile on! ;) you got what you wanted. Be gracious winners!
(Sigh) Why do I even try to expand discussion in these comments sections?
emma and ryan were also better than pierce brosnan in "mamma mia!".
What Nathaniel said.
Volvagia, I like your picture rankings and yeah, I think I agree on where LLL would go if it won.