Why does everyone want to talk about Chris Pine's penis?

Guest article from Anna from Defiant Success

Following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, film critics who had seen David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King were all abuzz on Twitter. The one scene they were very vocal about: star Chris Pine going full frontal. Following the social media explosion, Pine expressed his discomfort not at filming the scene but rather at how it was receiving more attention than the rest of the movie. (“There’s so much beheading in this. And yet people wanna talk about my penis.”) Subsequent interviews had Pine talking about how there’s a double standard in Hollywood towards performers going full frontal for their work; men receive a lot of press for whipping it out but when women bare it all for the camera, it’s barely noteworthy. In all honestly, Pine isn’t wrong in the slightest.

Mind you, there have been male frontal nudity scenes for decades -- at least for as long as the MPAA rating system has been in existence...

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Doc Corner: DOC NYC - Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9'

DOC NYC is currently underway in New York and one of the great things is that alongside all the world, American, and New York premieres, the festival includes significant documentary titles from throughout the year. We’re using this opportunity to catch up with the latest from Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, which screened at the fest and is still in limited release across America.

Love him or loathe him – or probably more likely, sit somewhere in the middle of the two emotions – it’s hard to overstate Michael Moore’s importance to American documentary filmmaking. It’s not often that documentaries become pop culture touchstones and he has several that have become just that. The film that this new title is theoretically a sequel to will likely remain the highest grossing documentary of all time for the foreseeable future of cinema. It is interesting to note, however, that the two biggest zeitgeist-hitting political documentaries of the new century – that would be Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth – have floundered at the box office with much-belated sequels. Are audiences simply too bombarded by news that the thought of going to see a two-hour movie about the horrors of modern politics is just too much to bear?

Moore's decision to make a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 makes a lot of sense in theory, although watching the final product is a curious experience.

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EFA Nominations: Poland's "Cold War" Leads

by Nathaniel R

Joanna Kulig in "Cold War"

It was a big morning for Oscar hopefuls in the foreign language film category as a handful of them have been nominated for multiple European Film Awards. Pawel Pawlikowski, whose nun drama Ida won the Oscar a handful of years back, is leading the EFA field with his new music-filled drama Cold War, about a musician and singer in a long tragic love affair across Europe. It's nominated in 5 categories. The nearest rivals with 4 nominations each are Italy's Dogman, Sweden's Border, and Italy's Happy as Lazzaro (the only one not submitted for the Oscars). Two other Oscar submissions also had cause to celebrate: Denmark's police thriller The Guilty and Belgium's trans ballerina drama Girl were also nominated for a few awards. 

The complete list of nominations and a few more comments are after the jump...

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Would you rather?

Time for another round of our Instagram-blessed silly celebrity gawking game. For some reason it's a mostly manly lineup this morning. We'll get back to the actresses soon enough. They are never far from our hearts and minds and eyeballs.

Would you rather
... do morning beauty treatments with Laura Linney and Tony-nominee Ashley Park?
...accompany Tom Holland and pup to the vet?
...gamble it away with Bianca del Rio?
... reminisce about Elektra with Jason Isaacs?
... visit Thailand with Dan Stevens?
...seek career advice from Karl Urban?
...feel the hope with Patrick Stewart?
...convalesce with Nico Tortorella? (poor baby!)
... chill with Orlando Bloom and lots of teddy bears?
... or read with Nicole Kidman and Liane Moriarty?

Photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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Posterized: Dr. Seuss and "The Grinch"

by Nathaniel R

The children's book author Dr. Seuss (also known as Theodore S. Geisel) is such an icon part of popular culture that he's even had his own postage stamp. But did you know he was also a screenwriter? In addition to the screenplay of the fantasy family film The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953) he wrote the script for the Oscar winning documentary Design for Death (1947) which was a documentary about Japanese and what led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Far outside the wheelhouse that was! But mostly when it comes to the screen when we think of Dr Seuss we think of the once-perennial TV airings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

 The bulk of screen adaptations of Dr Seuss's work have been in the short film format which makes sense, given the short visual books he wrote. Of the many shorts based on his work the following were all nominated for Oscars: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943), And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1944), Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950 - OSCAR WIN), and Gerald McBoing! Boing! on Planet Moo (1956). One short based on his work,  Daisy Head Mayzie (1995), was Emmy nominated.

But with the release of The Grinch (2018) today, let's look back on all the feature films (and the three most prominent TV specials) that are Dr Seuss related. How many have you seen and will you be seeing The Grinch? The posters are after the jump...

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