Blueprints: "Love, Simon"

This week, Jorge takes a look at an early version of two of the most emotional moments of the groundbreaking teen movie.

“You get to exhale now.” This has become the phrase that has encompassed Love, Simon the best. The loving, healing words of a mother that allows her son to finally be himself. This, alongside the other heart-to-heart Simon has with a parent, is the most moving moment of the movie. 

However, as discussed before in this column, the road from page to screen is a long and arduous one. A screenplay goes through many different forms and iterations, gaining and losing things along the way. Let’s take a look at these two sequences, Simon’s conversations with his parents, and see how differently they began and how emotionally similar they remained in their finished form...

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Months of Meryl: A Cry in the Dark (1988)

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

 #15 — Lindy Chamberlain, a New Zealand matriarch wrongfully convicted of her child’s murder.

MATTHEW: One evening in August 1980, Azaria Chamberlain, the two month-old daughter of New Zealander couple Michael and Lindy Chamberlain, was taken while the family was camping near Ayers Rock. She was never found again. Seconds before Azaria disappeared, Lindy claimed to have seen a dingo rummaging through the tent where her daughter lay sleeping, putting forth the soon-to-be-infamous story that a dingo had taken and perhaps eaten her baby. A seedy, sensationalist media frenzy ensued, with the Chamberlains’ faces splashed across the covers of obsessive tabloids and speculative segments of nightly news programs as many, including the Australian high court, viciously questioned the veracity of the family’s explanation.

None of Meryl Streep’s vehicles have entered the cultural lexicon with quite the same measure of gleefully ubiquitous parody that has surrounded and even overshadowed Fred Schepisi’s 1988 docudrama A Cry in the Dark, also titled — and released in Australia and New Zealand as — Evil Angels after the John Bryson true-crime bestseller that first chronicled the Chamberlain family’s legal ordeal. A Cry in the Dark’s devolution into little more than a widely-known (though often misquoted) punchline has proven to be both admittedly hilarious but also fairly odd, especially considering the gruesome events from which this gag originates...

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Contrarian Corner: A Quiet Place

Contrarian Corner is an irregular series in which TFE team members sound off on a film that they just can't join the consensus with. Chris loved the movie (as audiences seem to). But here's Sean Donovan with quite a different reaction...

A Quiet Place is very very quiet, as all of the characters are keen to remind us, frantically throwing up a finger to their lips in a suppressed SHHHHH. The monsters can hear you, a mysterious species blind but intensely sensitive to sound, and capable of swinging in from far off distances to decimate any disturbance in the soundscape. As a result, one survivalist family of this ruined civilization (dad John Krasinski, mom Emily Blunt, children Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) have calibrated their lives perfectly to function without sound.

I, for one, wanted more of a sense of this family’s regular routine in their soundless environment: how do they communicate, how are their lives different, how do they have fun? You can imagine the Swiss Family Robinson or Rube Goldberg machine fun this movie could have had: what are Noah Jupe’s favorite sound-free toys? How does Emily Blunt make toast so the toaster stays PERFECTLY SILENT? 

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Cannes 2018. The First Films Announced!

by Nathaniel R

Best Actress possibility? Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly, Paterson) and French star Emmanuelle Bercot headline the cast of "Girls of the Sun" about a Kurdish female battalion and the journalist embedded in their ranks

The initial Cannes lineups have arrived with films from their semi-typical list of famous international auteurs. Cannes has had problems leaning into super-male lineups (even when hugely acclaimed female directors are available) so it's worth noting that three of the first seventeen films announced in competition are from female filmmakers: Lebanon's Nadine Labaki, Italy's Alice Rohrwacher, and France's Eva Husson.

Which films are you most excited about? We've got the titles as well as a few details we could find about them after the jump...

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Aspirational