Did you enjoy 'Mermay'? A few words on "Splash" and "Siren"

by Nathaniel

You guys. I only just recently learned about "Mermay" in which you celebrate mermaids during the month of May. How did I not know about this? We could have been celebrating mermaids in film and television all month long! The least we could have done is pay tribute to Tully's mermaid dream imagery. Because that film did NOT get enough attention. Jason Reitman + Diablo Cody + Charlize Theron = dream team (see also: Young Adult)...

I thought I could whirlpool up a top ten list of movie mermaids but realized I hadn't seen some key texts like Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), Night Tide (1961), the silent film The Mermaid (1904) and a few others. Sadly merman films seem all but nonexistent... 

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Months of Meryl: The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

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

#22 — Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride-turned-American housewife who falls in love with a visiting photographer.

JOHN: Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) is sipping a beer in a bathtub while a charming stranger waits for her to eat dinner downstairs. Francesca’s husband and two children have left for a trip to the Iowa state fair, but her few days of solitude have been quickly interrupted by the welcome arrival of Clint Eastwood’s Robert Kincaid, a travelling National Geographic photographer on assignment to shoot Madison’s quaint covered bridges. With her brunette bangs and stray wisps of hair dangling out from her updo, Streep lounges in the bath, watching the water from the shower head above drip down into her hands. Robert has just showered, and, in voiceover, Francesca relates the eroticism of the moment, their sharing the bathtub only minutes apart. Streep’s face has never looked more assured and aroused, even as she’s unsettled by the seismic consequences of this romance. The simultaneous thrill and troubling implications of the moment flicker on Streep’s face as she loses herself in thought, already foreseeing the end of this brief encounter while testing the boundaries between her desires and responsibilities.

In this scene, the magnificence of Streep’s performance elevates this admittedly soapy and conventional tale into the pantheon, a brilliant fusion of Francesca’s subjectivity given weight by a generous filmmaker and imbued with soul-shaking truth by a master performer...

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The Link Visits

• Lit Hub interesting essay on the popularity of world-building in genre fiction
• Coming Soon Wreck It Ralph 2 has a scene with all the Disney princesses
• Cartoon Brew trailer for something called Another Day of Life which combines documentary footage with CG animation for a different kind of movie
• The Guaridan a five star review of the great silent film Pandora's Box, which y'all know I love. It's maybe my favorite silent

• The New Yorker the emptiness of the new Star Wars universe. I liked Solo more than most and disagree with a few key points here (Emilia Clarke had plenty of screen time to develop that character for example. She's just not an inspired actor is all) but it's still an interesting good read about the problem of prequels and self-consciously mythic work.
• Tom Cruise... speaking of self-conciously mythic. Top Gun 2 began filming
• Boy Culture Madonna gives her blessing to a book/movie deal that uses her music as backdrop for a boy's coming out story. It was a project mainstream publishers rejected. Bet they're sorry now that it has a six figure movie deal.
• Variety Angelina Jolie in David Oyelowo may be starring in a new fantasy drama called Come Away about the parents of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Say what? It's from Brave director Brenda Chapman
• Variety a report on the trouble of ultra cheap or ultra expensive movies in Japan. It's not just Hollywood that has a no mid-budget films problem
• Awards Daily the summer of Donald Glover
• Towleroad deleted scene from Love Simon featuring Colton Haynes

Theater People
• Stage is a new streaming service for theater fans launching this August. Taye Diggs is going to host the first three episodes of their debut talk show called "Crossovers" with Leslie Uggams, Billy Magnussen, and Tamara Tunie as initial guests
• Playbill Tony-bound musical adaptation The Band's Visit will launch a national tour in one year's time.
• TFE ← I just wanted to point you back to this interview we did with two cast members from the musical comedy Desperate Measures last year. The show was so successful it's reopening today at New World Stages for an open run with most of the original cast (including these two) rejoining. It is SO worth seeing so I hope some of you in NYC or visiting will make it!

"Wildlife" Teaser and The Best Actress Race

by Nathaniel R

I think most of expected to be seeing a lot more of Carey Mulligan in Oscar races after her stunning debut in An Education nine years ago. Yes. nine. years. ago. Crazy how time flies at the cinema. Contrary to those star-is-born expectations she has not been back in the mix yet, despite numerous films since, many of them "prestige" titles: Inside Llewyn Davis, Shame, Suffragette, Mudbound, The Great Gatsby, Far From the Madding Crowd.

But from the looks of the Wildlife teaser plus early critical raves she finally has a bonafide star showcase again...

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Celebrating 10 Years of "Sex and the City: The Movie"

By Spencer Coile 

I remember being 15-years-old, sitting in an empty theater on the opening night of Sex and the City -- precisely 10 years ago. I had just finished watching the series for the first time, and was ready to continue on with the stories of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. The tagline for the film was “Get Carried Away,” and I absolutely did. It was so easy to slip back into this dream-like, romanticized version of Manhattan – where money is endless, where relationships come and go, but friendship (and shoes) are forever. 

Was the movie adaptation perfect? Absolutely not. Was the sequel unnecessary and borderline insensitive? Completely. Still, that first film left me beaming from ear-to-ear. It’d be easy to pick out all the problems with the plot, the length, the way it treats Jennifer Hudson’s character (there’s no way her email password was seriously “love”). But even watching it today, I go back to when I was 15; feeling hopeful, giddy, and gay. Those are the movies that stick with you.  

Happy Birthday, Sex and the City! But most importantly: do you identify as a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha, or a Charlotte?