"I dont know. You erased me."

Coming Very Soon: Oscar Submissions "Burning" and "Border"

NYFF/TIFF screenings from Nathaniel R

"My what lovely posters!" he said, as he struggled to decide how to review two pictures that are best seen cold, knowing as little as possible. "But people don't buy tickets / get excited about movies without knowing something," he reasoned with himself about reviewing both South Korea and Sweden's Oscar submissions which are opening in US theaters very soon.

"Okay, okay," the purist in him, responded. "I'll say a little something about each but only if I can limit my discussion to the posters! People absolutely shouldn't watch the trailers." "Deal" his practical self muttered rolling his eyes, having been through this existential crisis of movie blogging numerous times. "Proceed..."

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"The Savages", Also Revisited

Chris Feil continues his look at the films of Tamara Jenkins...

The Savages came nearly a decade after Tamara Jenkins arrived in 1998 with Slums of Beverly Hills, and the wait found the writer/director’s onscreen family dynamics develop to something tougher. Turns out time brings a whole host of concerns both harder to reconcile and compromise with, both in fiction and real life. Though it deals with timeless issues like family and aging, The Savages is also quite of its time, though in subtle ways it has maybe taken over another decade to see. What’s always been clear is that the film is miraculous.

Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman star as adult siblings and unfulfilled creatives Wendy and Jon Savage, forced to care for their estranged and formerly abusive father as he succumbs to dementia. Jenkins again is fascinated with our unfortunate bodies and social pretenses, this time with the film’s humor taking a more refined, unflinching swing at our very human shortcomings.

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Links

• IndieWire a brief interview with Steven Yeun about life after The Walking Dead -- strangely there are no questions about his new Korean movie Burning despite the fact that he's amazing in it
• THR Bradley Cooper getting an award from PETA for casting his own dog Charlie in A Star is Born. I mean.... the dog is perfection, so why not?
• Vanity Fair Fan Bingbing has broken her silence after disappearing. She is said to owe more than $100 million in backtaxes to the Chinese government

• /Film Trailer for The Conners series, essentially Roseanne without Roseanne
• The Guardian a wonderful interview with Samantha Morton about choices she made in her career, her new part on The Walking Dead, and why she was dubbed "difficult" in her early years of stardom.
• Playbill Emmy & Oscar winner Christine Lahti now starring in a play Off-Broadway about Gloria Steinem called Gloria: A Life. Steinem is quite the hot topic at the moment since there's also a biopic in the works
• Pajiba on the Bullseye rumors around Daredevil season 3
• Decider a Jeopardy moment that will go viral involving drag superstar Alyssa Edwards
• /Film Netflix will be releasing Paul Greengrass 22 July in 100 theaters (they're also rumored to be trying to buy movie theaters, which is odd considering how much they've worked to diminish the moviegoing habit)
• MNPP Luke Benward nine times
• Daily Beast and director Catherine Hardwicke reflect back on Twilight's success and the sexist aftermath

This Week's Must Read (s)
Wesley Morris has an amazing challenging essay about the new ways we discuss art and how they've come to center more on the artist and that person's perceived moral or representational correctness then the quality of the art.  I loved reading this because so much of what he's saying I've seen happening and whenever I tried to put my finger on why it was frustrating me, I couldn't quite locate the target. 

The essay also prompted this interesting discussion at Vulture among a panel of mostly female critics. I love the point raised that there's a way to discuss art in this new way while also balancing aesthetic discussion but a lot of younger critics haven't been trained in that way or encouraged to learn that skill in the charged political time we're living in.

Months of Meryl: Doubt (2008)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#40 —Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun and Catholic school principal who wages battles with a suspicious new priest.

JOHN: Arriving at John Patrick Shanley’s 2008 film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt felt like stumbling upon a waterfall in the desert. After a fallow period marked by smallish, adequate performances in dull-to-dreadful films, Meryl Streep finally inherited a meaty, challenging role in a tony adaptation well worth her time and talent, and alongside fellow acting titans at that.

In Doubt, it is 1964, and Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep) is the harsh and unforgiving principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx. Feared by most students and routinely respected by her fellow nuns, especially the younger, guileless Sister James (Amy Adams), Sister Aloysius comes to believe that a heinous crime has been perpetrated under her roof...

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