In the Links

• The New Yorker Kathleen Turner is singing... yes, singing, at Cafe Carlyle for a week or so. OMG I'd love to cover that for y'all but that place is pricey.
• Film School Rejects the troubled history of the film adaptation of Lin-manuel Miranda's In the Heights may finally be ending with Warner Bros snatching up the rights
• MNPP on the trailer for the art slasher flick Knife + Heart premiering at Cannes

 

• The Guardian thoughtful piece by Xan Brooks about provocative cinema, Cannes, and Lars von Trier in our new age of moralizing
• Playbill California readers take note. At the upcoming Hollywood Bowl production of Annie, Megan Hilty, Ana Gasteyer, and Lea Salonga star. Fun casting! And those voices!!
• Boy Culture Trinity Taylor makes over Nico Tortorella who now identifies as gender fluid, or as he says 'sort of cisgendered but not so... CISSY
• AV Club Jordan Peele producing a series set in the '70s about Nazi-hunting in NYC. What now?
• DListed obsesses over a strange Cannes moment with John Travolta and 50 Cent
• MovieMaker profiles Geena Davis's Bentonville Film Festival 
• W Magazine interviews Brie Vinaite on her busy post-Florida Project life
• Film School Rejects "How Marvel Broke Storytelling" a good piece on exactly what the problem is with how they've trained audiences and deferred endings
• Playbill This is so heartbreaking. Just a few months ago Tony-winning actress Ruthie Ann Miles (The King and I) lost her daughter (to a driver who hit five pedestrians including Miles) and now due to complications from that tragic event she's lost her unborn child
• ExtraTV silly bro clip of Josh Brolin talking about his naked ad for Fish Love

Exit Video
Here's the trailer for the series finale movie of Sense8. Sad that this singular series from the Wachowski sisters and J Michael Straczynski is ending but glad we'll have closure.

Cannes Carpet #3: Thandie, Ava, Jane, and lots of Kristen Stewart

by Nathaniel R

Kristen, Laura, Jane, Thandie

We've already gawked at Cannes beauty thrice (Jury Arrival, Red Carpet Collection 1, Red Carpet Lineup 2) and now the final group of 16 delicious gowns before closing night. (And yes we'll eventually get to Cate Blanchett!). Let's start with these four: Kristen Stewart, Laura Harrier, Jane Fonda, and Thandie Newton...

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Review: "Book Club"

by Chris Feil

2018 summer superhero movie season has peaked, now with the arrival of its definitive chapter: Book Club, where Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen read Fifty Shades of Grey and reclaim the romance in their lives. Think they can’t handle not one but a slew of Thanoses? Well, consider that they are also teaming up with four Oscars, six Emmys, twelve Golden Globes, and several cases of pinot grigio.

Steenburgen is the entrepreneurial straight shooter Carol, the one most in tuned to her own needs but perhaps not to others’. As Sharon, Candice Bergen battles her timid seriousness against the need for a new beginning. Fonda’s Vivian is the group individualist, drinking rosé when the rest prefer white, hating everyone else’s favorite book selections. And Diane Keaton as... Diane (it’s really something to see Diane Keaton do Diane Keaton drag) is the guarded one, initially seeming to be the least distinct character but ultimately reveals a woman burying much of what she thinks and feels.

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Months of Meryl: The House of the Spirits (1993)

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

#20 —Clara del Valle Trueba, paranormal matriarch of a prosperous South American family.

JOHN: Yes, paranormal. But please, take your expectations about Meryl Streep as psychic (and Glenn Close as her scorned, sexually repressed sister-in-law) that may be levitating midair and place them firmly on the ground. Actually, go ahead and place them below the Earth’s surface, and then you might be ready to endure one of the absolute worst films Streep has ever been caught in. The House of the Spirits, an adaptation of Isabel Allende’s titular novel, chronicles the tumultuous history of the Trueba family, a prosperous South American dynasty headed by Esteban Trueba (Jeremy Irons), a peasant turned plantation owner turned conservative senator, who marries Clara del Valle (Streep), the youngest daughter of a wealthy, liberal family, and did I mention that she can move things with her mind and predict the future?

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Blueprints: "American Beauty"

Last month we dove into one of the most iconic shower scenes in cinema for April Showers. For May Flowers, Jorge takes a look into one of the most famous thematic uses of a flower in film.

American Beauty was at one point supposed to be titled American Rose. This is neither a coincidence nor an appropriate alternative. The film, a satire about American suburbia and the layers of darkness that society hides underneath their pretty but rotting exteriors, heavily uses the recurring image of rose throughout. Not just in the now iconic nude sequence with Mena Suvari. 

Roses appear through the script in many key parts, usually in places where a character is putting up a façade for the world, or when they are completely submitting to their darkest impulses. Or when those two collide. Let’s take a look at where the flowers ominously represent both the attachment and the repulsion against society’s “pretty” standards...

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