Ashley Judd, Pulp Queen

Wishing Ashley Judd a happy 50th birthday this week. Here's Chris Feil.

Ashley Judd deserves some credit that’s mostly only afforded to television actresses: she’s a pulp queen. It’s like a horror movie scream queen, except for midrange crime thrillers that your dad loves. But when the movie gods dealt her a standard genre exercise she could elevate it to something incredibly watchable, like a femme fatale without all the trappings of a leacherous male gaze.

Judd would eventually riff on the dingiest of pulp for her greatest performance in Bug, but mainstream audiences are more likely to remember her for her cinematic entanglements with the courtroom, espionage, and serial killers...

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April Foolish Predictions: 4 Questions About Best Animated Feature

Last year's Best Animated Feature field was remarkably empty and 2018, at first glance, also doesn't look that promising. You can probably take it to the bank that Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs will be squaring off against the sequels to Wreck it Ralph and The Incredibles. And it shouldn't be THAT easy to know what's going to happen a full year in advance, should it?

Of course we don't know everything yet. It's tough to foresee which foreign entries will qualify, for example. 2018 seems bereft of an obvious non-American competitor (last year it was easy to see The Breadwinner coming, which is why we predicted it a year in advance). [Four questions and ways to improve the category after the jump...]

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The April Foolish Oscar Predictions Begin...

Ah... April. It's that time of year when we inevitably make fools of ourselves looooong in advance by predicting the Oscar nominations nearly a full year ahead of time. The 91st Oscars won't be held for another 314 days (February 24th, 2019 if you must know) but it's time we started building the Oscar charts.

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William Holden in "S.O.B."

Mini William Holden Centennial celebration. We're beginning, oddly enough, with his final film. Here's Tim Brayton...

The 1981 film S.O.B. wasn't meant to be William Holden's final film: the star died in a household accident a few months after the film premiered, at a mere 63 years old. But it offers a pleasing symmetry to his career to end this way: Holden's big breakthrough, in 1950, was the acid-laced Hollywood satire Sunset Blvd., and there's a comforting rightness that it was with an acid-laced Hollywood satire that his career would end.

Not that S.O.B. has anything on Sunset Blvd., though it's a compelling oddity, and it's one of the few films made by writer-director-producer Blake Edwards after his 1960s heyday that offers all that much to chew on. The film is a deeply caustic fable of how superproducer Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) churned out the biggest money-loser in Hollywood history one day, went insane from the stress of it, and decided to turn his family-friendly musical into a pornographic extravaganza...

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Beauty vs Beast: Defriended

Jason from MNPP here wishing the great Rooney Mara a happy 33rd birthday (it's tomorrow) - do you think she will have birthday pie? I like to think that once she got a taste of pie filming A Ghost Story she hasn't been able to stop. Eat all the pie, Rooney! You've earned it. Anyway I've had Rooney on the brain over the past few weeks (more than usual anyway, which is always some) thanks to the presence of Mark Zuckerberg in our lives - who can look at his face and not want to re-visit all of her take-downs in The Social Network? You're a stronger person than me if you don't find yourself muttering "Good luck with your video-game" to yourself a couple times a day. In that spirit then this week's "Beauty vs Beast"...

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PREVIOUSLY I really though y'all would have to give it to Jake Gyllenhaal for his performance in Stronger but every time I doubt your commitment to actresses I get proven hella incorrect - you picked Tatiana Maslany (and I mean no knock on her, she's terrific) with 60% of your vote. Said Bushwick:

"Team Tatiana for her patience - Jake’s reluctance and sassiness and Miranda’s indoor smoking seemed much more unbearable than losing my legs!"