Best Casablanca Quotes

Tomorrow is your last day to vote on the Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1943. Casablanca wasn't nominated in that category but it took the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. In addition to being economically constructed -- those 102 minutes fly by every time (in fact, it's the 8th shortest Best Picture winner ever) -- it's got generous helpings of contenders for 'best line ever'. So I asked this month's panel to share their favorite line or exchange from that immortal classic.

Here's what we all chose...

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"I love trees."

A message today from Juliette Binoche's instagram.

Showbiz History: Actress Stamps, Beyoncé's Debut, and Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"

10 random things that happened on this day in showbiz history

1775 The US Postal System is created. Are there any great movies about mailmen? I'm drawing a blank. Do not say The Postman.

The first movie actress to get a postage stamp would be Ethel Barrymore but she had to share it with her brothers Lionel and John! Grace Kelly was (I believe) the first movie star to get a solo postage stamp. Since that time (in 1993) we've had: Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Zasu Pitts, Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Hattie McDaniel, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, and Shirley Temple. Who is next? Any guesses?

More after the jump including Mr Julie Andrews, Pee Wee Herman, and Cate Blanchett...

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Months of Meryl: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

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

 

#30 —Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, manipulative mother of a Vice Presidential candidate brainwashed by an international cabal. 

JOHN: The one regrettable casualty of this feature-film series is, of course, Streep’s Emmy winning performance(s) in Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Perhaps we’ll have time to dig into that series in the future, but suffice it to say we rank her work in it quite highly. In 2004, Streep signed on to her first-ever remake, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, playing a role made famous by Angela Lansbury in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film. Demme’s version updates Frankenheimer’s film and Richard Condon’s 1959 source novel to contemporary times, made amid the the Bush/Kerry election and thematically enmeshed in the U.S.’s “War on Terror.” Denzel Washington stars as Ben Marco, a Gulf War veteran whose puzzling memories and twisted dreams of serving in Kuwait drive him to uncover the sinister forces driving fellow soldier and newly-selected, left-leaning Vice Presidential nominee Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) into national prominence. Shaw’s blandly robotic demeanor is operated by his manipulative mother, Virginia Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, heir to an American political dynasty but now working covertly for the ominous international private equity fund Manchurian Global...

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Still shook about "Cats" becoming a movie

by Nathaniel R

Betty Buckley in her Tony-winning role as "Grizabella, the glamour cat"By now you've heard the comic news (oh no wait, they're serious!) that "Cats" is being turned into a movie. The news took me so off guard that I was silent for five days. Cats got my tongue. (I'm sorry). The Andrew Lloyd Webber megahit from the 1980s was based on T.S. Elliott poems and as such it has no real story to speak of. It's basically a very successful song cycle (albeit with only one famous song "Memory") elevated by utter nonrealism in the form of humans pretending to be cats in campy makeup, tights, and acrobatic dancing. It's so hard to imagine as a movie that they made the potential of the making of one into a running joke in the play turned movie Six Degrees of Separation (1993). 

Grizabella the glamour cat is the marquee role but, in fact, it's a "featured" role since it's truly an ensemble show...

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