"Carousel" and "Spongebob" lead the Drama Desk Nominations

by Nathaniel R

Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry in Rodges & Hammerstein's revived "CAROUSEL" which led the nominations

As discussed in a previous recent post, most theatrical awards don't have as direct a correlation to the Tony Awards as film awards do to the Oscars. At the Drama Desk Awards, which have been around almost as long as the Tonys, Off Broadway is also considered so their nominations naturally differ quite a lot. Expected Tony frontrunner The Band's Visit received zero nominations due to its previous Off Broadway run (i.e. eligible last season instead with the Drama Desk)

The nominations are after the jump...

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Tribeca: "Nigerian Prince" is a thrilling debut

by Jason Adams

Sitting inside my email spam folder right now there is a letter from "Mrs.Celine Peters from United State Of America" who is dying of cancer and wants to "donate my funds to you, so you can disburse to charities, widows, orphans and less privileged." There is also a notification that I have won the Swiss Lotto, which is quite a bit of mad luck since I have never played the Swiss Lotto. Oh and there is a warning from "FBI Cyber Security" that I have been dealing with African cyber scammers and if I will just stop doing that I will somehow be given 29 million dollars! I'm not sure how to follow the logic on the last one.

Have you ever stopped to think about who's writing these spam messages? Writer/director Faraday Okoro clearly wondered the same thing, and he used that question as the gateway into his thrilling debut feature-film Nigerian Prince. Who would do such a thing? This is who, and this is why...

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Toni Collette meets superfan John Early

Chris here, tiptoeing out of the bubble I've placed myself in to avoid Hereditary plot details. The horror film is coming this summer and, per Sundance audiences, is best entered completely in the blind about its scares - including a raved-to-the-heavens performance from Toni Collette. To get the promotional ball rolling on the film, distrib A24 had Collette sit down for their podcast with none other than genius comedian and noted Collette superfan John Early. To those unawares, one of Early's signature bits is recalling his teenage years when he created a fansite for the actress on GeoCities. Stars, they're just like us!

While A24 seems to be stoking the potential for an Oscar campaign for Collette that some reviews have begged, we'll do our best to keep hopes at bay. (She already pulled off the uncommon feat of an acting nomination for a horror film once, so twice is all the more uncommon.) But I suspect the performance will be one we'll be talking a lot about once the film arrives on June 8. Listen to Toni and John talk fandom and Hereditary here.

New episode of The A24 Podcast tomorrow! @bejohnce tells Toni Collette all about the Geocities fansite he ran for her as a not-yet-openly-gay 13 year-old. Tears are shed, gifts are exchanged, @HereditaryMovie is hyped pic.twitter.com/X9ahUYiMIb

— A24 (@A24) April 25, 2018

Months of Meryl: Postcards from the Edge (1990)

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

 

 #17 —Suzanne Vale, a recovering drug addict and B-list actress of royal Hollywood pedigree.

MATTHEW: It has always been impossible to escape the metatextual associations of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge, which really means it has always been impossible to escape the shared history of two artists: Fisher and her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds, a relationship that is the very bedrock of Fisher’s 1987 novel and Mike Nichols’ subsequent screen adaptation. To watch the latter now, in a world without Fisher or Reynolds, is an experience of unavoidable and indescribable bittersweetness. It helps, however, that Fisher confronted even the most harrowing episodes of her lifelong addiction with a sly, battle-ready smirk and a tart tongue, which always ensured that she — and she alone — would get the last word. On the screen, Postcards from the Edge remains a salty, joyous, yet tough-minded immersion within the rocky recovery of its Fisher-like heroine, Suzanne Vale, and a prickly heartwarmer that continually confuses our inclinations towards laughter or tears.

This is largely because of Fisher, whose hysterical one-liners are an art form unto themselves. Consider, for a moment, that such gems as “Do you always talk in bumper stickers?” and “Instant gratification takes too long” and “What am I supposed to do, go to a halfway house for wayward SAG actors?” are all spoken within the first 20 minutes of the movie, and there are plenty more where those came from...

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Tribeca: Trine Dyrholm makes a great "Nico 1988"

by Jason Adams

Although I might have been hallucinating by the time, given the sheer length and purposeful boredom of the experience, I'm pretty sure there's a portion of Andy Warhol's four-hour double-projector experimental film Chelsea Girls where the Velvet Underground singer Nico just sits and cuts her bangs for twenty straight minutes on camera. It felt like twenty straight minutes, anyway. And that was my introduction to her. Catherine Deneuve heroin chic - too cool for anybody, herself included.

That's the baggage one drags into a bio-pic about the singer, and that's what Susanna Nicchiarelli's film called Nico, 1988 insists on clipping away like those bangs. It's right there in the title - this is 1988, twenty-two years after Underground, after Andy, and this is a fully fifty-year-old woman with dark brown hair and a debilitating drug habit who does not give a shit...

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