• IndieWire offers up a guide to explaining various characters and events in Mank
• FilmSchoolRejects 20 movies to watch if you loved Mank
• Instagram Elliot Page (Juno, The Umbrella Academy, Inception) has come out as trans
• HuffPost Ariana DeBose is making her (movie) name with the musical resurgence: Hamilton Live, The Prom, and West Side Story
More after the jump including ranking the films of David Fincher, EW's Entertainers of the Year, an imaginary Ratatouille musical, new Emmy rulings, and more...
• The Guardian names their 50 best films of 2020
• Slant ranks the films of David Fincher from Alien³ to Mank.
• Cartoon Brew various artists on tiktok are writing their own Ratatouille musical including The Prom's Kevin Chamberlin doing a Gusteau number called "Anyone Can Cook"
• EW offers up multiple covers for their "Entertainers of the Year" issue (Pedro Pascal, Dan & Eugene Levy, Chadwick Boseman, Kerry Washington, Sacha Baron Cohen)
• Screen Daily Nomadland, Finland's Helene, and Italy's Pinnocchio won the gold, silver, and bronze prizes at a recent festival for cinematography in Poland
• IndieWire new rulings for the Emmys - Oscar nominated docs are no longer eligible for Emmys and anthology series are getting pulled out of the regular series categories and more...
• Deadline Black Panther star Letitia Wright cancelled her social media accounts after basically coming out as an anti-vaxxer. Oops. I fear we're going to get more of this as the COVID vaccines arrive.
RIP
• AV Club David L Lander, Laverne & Shirley's "Squiggy", dies at 73
• Deadline Actress Pamela Tiffin (One Two Three, Summer and Smoke) dies at 78
• BBC News Dave Prowse, the man inside the Darth Vader suit, dies at age 85
Belated Links: Discussion prompts we shoulda discussed earlier...
• Slate co-sign this incisive take on what's happening to moviegoing in the current streaming culture without the differentiation of theatrical runs
• Indica Medium "I Lived Through a Stupid Coup" Funny, astute,worrying.
• New York Times chooses the "25 best actors of the 21st century". A truly bizarre list. Some great choices and others that are mystifying. Listen, I loooove and nominated Alfre Woodard for both of those performances they cite at my own awards but one leading role plus a cameo shouldn't put you on a list of the 25 greatest of a 20 year time span from 100s of countries! Same goes for the brilliant Sonia Braga and Catherine Deneuve (like Alfre, indisputably great screen talents). It seems they were judging entire careers rather than the time frame that they stated they were judging. Which, that's fine, but then don't say you're basing it on work after the year 2000 ! But anyway, these lists never please anyone all the way through which is fine and kind of the clickable point and the write-ups are beautiful. From the time frame cited I was especially happy to see Gael García Bernal, Tilda Swinton, Viola Davis, and Nicole Kidman listed who have all been slaying it with abandon for precisely the stretch of time that the list purports to be about. This list also reminded me that one of the most rewarding writing projects for me personally ever at TFE was "100 Favorite Actors of the Aughts" so we should do that again for the 2010s.