The Furniture: Canadian Brutalism Comes to L.A. in Blade Runner 2049

Daniel Walber's weekly series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

While planning the look of Blade Runner 2049, director Denis Villeneuve asked production designer Dennis Gassner for something very specific: brutality. As Canadians, Villeneuve and Gassner know a whole lot about that, at least architecturally. Canada’s big cities are inflected by brutalist buildings, stark and intimidating structures that have made their mark on cinema. Enemy is a good example, along with a lot of David Cronenberg’s early work.

Of course, Blade Runner 2049 takes place mostly in Los Angeles and was shot in Hungary. But its use of brutalist design transcends the specificity of place, resembling a vaguely Canadian nightmare as much as any waking version of California...

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WGA Goes For "Get Out" and "CMBYN"

Chris here. One of the final major set of prizes before the Oscar ceremony was handed out over the weekend, the Writers' Guild of America awards. The WGA awarded their screenplay honors to Get Out in original and Call Me By Your Name in adapted. Even though the latter's Oscar competition is now even further in the dust, its safest-bet-of-the-night odds to win the big prize will still be an exciting victory lap for its never-awarded legend screenwriter James Ivory.

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Beauty vs Beast: Boxing Buddies

Jason from MNPP here - while we're all sitting patiently on our hands waiting for Black Panther to hit theaters this weekend let us use the occasion of today's "Beauty vs Beast" to gaze backwards in Ryan Cooglar's filmography to the flick that no doubt gauranteed him this Marvel gig, 2015's great big crowdpleaser Creed. Coming nine years after Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone's original "goodbye" to the character that gave him his career, Cooglar's Creed opened the franchise up and breathed new life into the Philadelphian boxing saga via Michael B Jordan's Adonis, son of Rocky's deceased opponant and friend Apollo, and with Adonis' attempt to find selfhood in the shadow of his legendary father. The relationship between Rocky & Adonis formed the core of the film, it was one fraught with tension, which brings us to...

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PREVIOUSLY Nobody was going to beat The Lovely Laura Linney on her birthday, not even Mark Ruffalo's probable finest performance opposite her in You Can Count On Me - she scored a sizeable 70% of your vote in the end, proving you can indeed count on her. Said RV:

"One of the all time great screen pairs -- both so flawed, both so connected to each other. Lonergan's uncomfortable (for me, maybe not for him) commitment to Casey Affleck aside, he deserves enormous credit for providing such rich writing and understated directing to two amazingly talented performers. "

Doc Corner: 'The Price of Gold' Brings Clarity to 'I, Tonya'

By Glenn Dunks

The defining trait of I, Tonya that has separated it from a glut of biopics is that darkly comedic tone achieved significantly through fake direct-to-camera interviews by an assortment of ghoulish villains and anti-heroes. One could argue that with its cast of monstrous characters and flamboyant yet true-to-life costumes and wig-work, the film’s mock documentary device was entirely unnecessary at achieving its desired laughs.

Yet while I saw the value of its method as a sort of short-hand directorial device used to wrangle the story’s many real life contradictions and he-said-she-said-he-said-she-said-he-said narrative, having watched Nanette Burstein’s sublime The Price of Gold, it comes off as actually just lazy...

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Link Trip

• Boy Culture took on a massive and fascinating project: A "brief" (haha) history of LGBTQ moments on television starting from TV's beginnings! (I Love Lucy might contain the first actual gay joke on TV... but things really pick up in the 1970s). It's a must-read if you care about these things
• The Grio Get Out takes four prizes at the AAFCAS while Girls Trip and Detroit both take home two
• Deadline reports on the Sci-Tech award where there was a an impassioned speech and a transgender winner
• IndieWire MoviePass is driving its subscriber base to Oscar-nominated movies

Lots more after the jump including Oscar news, Sarah Jessica Parker making headlines, Quentin Tarantino's response to Uma Thurman's story, and three memorable actors passing away...

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