Showbiz History: Band-Aid and "Best Original Song" Behemoths

6 random things that happened on this day (Nov 25th) in showbiz history...

1932 Claudette Colbert infamously bathes in milk in Cecil B DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, new in theaters.

1947 The Hollywood Blacklist begins, denying employment to those with perceived Communist ties or sympathies. This period has haunted ever self-reflecting Hollywood since as witness in Trumbo, The Way We Were, Guilty by Suspicion, Good Night and Good Luck, and numerous other movies.

1984 Bob Geldolf's blockbuster charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" recorded in London...

Click to read more ...

Would you rather? (Thanksgiving Weekend Edition)

Time for our silly aspirational Instagram fantasy game. Would you rather...

• prepare a turkey with Diane Kruger?
• snuggle with Gus Kenworthy and Matt Wilkas in the morning?
• live the high life with Constance Wu & Awkwafina?
• reflect in the dressing room with Laura Benanti?
• reminisce about Goodfellas with Debi Mazar?
• bet on a football game with Sam Trammell?
• visit Stonehenge with Susan Sarandon?
• relaxing with Kate Bosworth?
• fly first class with Jeff Goldblum?
• eat leftovers with Buffy?

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

Click to read more ...

Blueprints: "Little Miss Sunshine"

To celebrate the family awkwardness of Thanksgiving weekend, Jorge takes a look at one of cinema’s most memorable dysfunctional families and how they make their entrances.

Look, no family’s perfect. Far from it. And no holiday brings out the imperfections more than Thanksgiving. Every difference of opinion, tightly-held grudge, annoying personality trait, buried secret and imprinted trauma tend to resurface. And while it may be hell for those going through it, these interactions are usually fertile ground for narrative drama.

But most families tend to be dysfunctional year-round, not just during the holidays. Some don’t need a holiday weekend or a glass of wine to bring out their unpleasant side. All you need to see it is a quick first glimpse. So let’s take a look at the Hoovers in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, who are precisely that kind of family. Let’s see how they are each individually introduced in the script, as fully flawed human beings...

Click to read more ...

Posterized: Michael B Jordan

by Nathaniel R

Photographed by Kayla Reefer for The New York TimesAny list of the newest generation of exciting movie stars would have to include Michael Bakari Jordan (aka Michael B Jordan), and presumably way up top. The Jersey-raised actor, started young on television as a teen actor with acclaimed work on The Wire. With a name so reminiscent of a superstar in another field, it felt like a dare; How could he be that big for the movies? When he hit his mid 20s, though, the movies came calling to make good on the pop culture connotations of that name. It's been a match made in heaven thus far.

All that said he's been strangely absent from our movie screens since proving his film-carrying charisma so thoroughly with the one-two punch of Fruitvale Station and Creed. But then came 2018 to prove to us that he'd been hard at work all along but movies have their own temperamental calendars and sometimes they all get bunched up together. Four movies arrived in quick succession, one of them likely to be the biggest hit he'll ever have. He's already an Emmy nominee for producing the TV movie Fahrenheit 451 earlier this year, but the Oscar nomination has to date eluded him. Will that change with the Black Panther campaign? We don't yet know though we definitely hope so since it's his second, not his first, nomination worthy role; Oscar was sleeping on that whole Creed success back in 2015, a movie that was wildly better than it had any right to be given its provenance.

How many of his Michael B Jordan's key movies and TV shows have you seen? The posters are after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Review: Write When You Get Work

by Murtada Elfadl

For a film that starts with Finn Wittrock taking his shirt off, Write When You Get Work disappoints. He plays a New York City drifter working odd jobs and living off petty crime schemes. His ex (Rachel Keller) has left that life behind after the break-up and is now trying to make it working at a prestigious school in the wealthy Upper East Side. Of course their worlds collide as he tries another get-rich scheme that involves one of the parents of the kids in her school (Emily Mortimer)...

Click to read more ...