I Heart Rosie

by Jason Adams

Nathaniel mentioned this in this morning's Showbiz History post but I wanted to take a longer moment to give longer love to Rosie Perez, who's turning 54 today. While Rosie still pops up in things every so often (hey look she's in Dee Rees' next movie!) I do wish it was more often than that - having come of age in the late 80s / early 90s I've got a deep affection for what she was serving after boxing herself right outta the gate with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing in 1989.

Who amongst us can hear the word "quince" without remembering her Jeopardy contestant in White Men Can't Jump? All due apologies to Anna Paquin but Rosie was robbed at the 1994 Oscars if you ask me - her performance in Fearless (a film I consider a flat-out masterpiece, one that seems criminally under-valued) is one for the ages. Who would you have given the statue to that year?

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Queer TIFF: "Touch Me Not"

TIFF kicks off today!! In addition to our regular coverage, Chris Feil will be covering a sampling of the festival's LGBTQ global cinema...

Adina Pintilie’s Golden Bear-winning piece of experimentation and sexual reflection Touch Me Not opens on a landscape of the naked male body, anonymous and alien, shot with a deliberate distance that doesn’t deceive the film’s tension between curiosity, impulse, and terror. While this quickly establishes the psyche of Pintilie’s piece, it is about to become far more personal, with its players all playing themselves or versions thereof. Its fourth wall is never broken because it was never built in the first place.

The film centers largely on two emotionally stunted characters (or “characters”), struggling to experience both physical and emotional connection...

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Willem Dafoe meets Julian Schnabel 'At Eternity's Gate'

by Murtada Elfadl

Willem Dafoe went 14 years between his first and second Oscar nominations, and 17 years between his second and third. But the star of Platoon (1986), Shadow of a Vampire (2000) and The Florida Project (2017) could immediately follow up that last nomination just a year later with his lead role as Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate...

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Months of Meryl: Evening (2007)

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

#36 —Lila Ross, an old friend of a dying woman.

JOHN: While Meryl Streep is fiercely protective of her and her family’s privacy, she made no secret about what she got her daughter Mamie Gummer for her 24th birthday: Lajos Koltai’s Evening. Adapted from Susan Minot’s 1998 novel by the author herself, along with writer Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Evening follows Vanessa Redgrave’s Ann, an elderly woman drifting in and out of consciousnesses on her deathbed as she recalls a distant memory from her long-ago youth. That memory stars Claire Danes as a twentysomething Ann on the day of her best friend Lila’s (Mamie Gummer) wedding to a man she does not love. Ann, Lila, and the latter’s brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) are instead infatuated with Harris (Patrick Wilson), a strapping doctor that each will either screw or regret not screwing...

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Showbiz History: La Strada, It Chapter Two, The King's Speech

7 random things that happened on this day, september 6th, in showbiz history...

←   1879 Max Schreck born in Berlin. He is immortalized by playing undead Orlok in Nosferatu. Later Willem Dafoe will be Oscar-nominated for playing him in all his creepy eccentric possibly actually vampiric glory in Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

1928 How's this for a weird bit of history? Warner Bros second talkie was released on this day (well, some accounts say August 15th... dates are so iffy the further back you go) and it was a horror film called The Terror. In '28 many theaters had yet to convert to sound so a silent version of the same picture was released the following month. The film is one of many lost films from the era. 

1954 Federico Fellini's La Strada premieres at the tail end of the 15th annual Venice Film Festival...

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