Soundtracking: "Burlesque"

by Chris Feil

Much as we love it, isn’t Burlesque one of our least distinct recent original musicals? The genre is no stranger to borrowing tropes that have worked in the past and Burlesque is no exception - dreams of stardom, vague romance, putting on a show to save the barn. The real culprit here the film’s mishmash assemblage of tunes, populated with high peaks and easily ignored plains.

But I should shut up because really: who cares? It’s Cher, bitch!

And oft repeated quotables aside, the presence of a singing and dancing Cher on screen is a now rare delight that shouldn’t be taken for granted (soak up those Mamma Mia! 2 rays of sunshine this July, kids). Some are quick to forget that Cher is always in on the joke, or that her lack of pretension makes opulence where more self-serious performers would be trapped in chintziness...

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Q&A: Actors Who Should Be More Famous, Broadway Crossovers, and Animal Horror

Hello everyone!

Nathaniel, eternally cat-sittingWe haven't done a Q & A in so long so let's jump right in. In order to actually do these more often I'll answer just five or six questions at once. Hopefully this will stir up more focused comment parties, too!

PAR: Julianne Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Annette Bening enter the thunderdome. Only one leaves. Who? - par

A: LOL! I hope you aren't being cruel and just making me sacrifice two of my all time favorites at the altar of, well, my Pfavorite. But if we're talking about cage matches in post-apocalypse desert landscapes my answer is The Bening. Moore would break down into crying jags in no time, becoming too vulnerable. Pfeiffer would seem like easy prey put up a very spirited and scary pfight but you know that The Bening is all wile and steel and surprise maneuvers. How else did she conquer Hollywood and Warren Beatty and continue to become even more incredible as an actress the older she got despite being brilliant right out of the gate?

STEVE G: What film out of Cannes 2018, that wasn't previously on your radar, are you most excited to see?

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Doc Corner: 'In the Intense Now'

By Glenn Dunks

With the recent conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival, it’s perhaps easy to forget that 50 years ago the Festival de Cannes was shut down. The event, which had curiously opened with a restoration of Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind, last barely a few days with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouche spearheading a mission to close the festival down in solidarity with the student protests and union strikes that were sweeping across the country.

It perhaps says a lot about the scope of global upheaval in 1968 that this famous and dramatic moment in cinematic history isn’t even mentioned in João Moreira Salles’ No Intenso Agora (or, less elegantly, In the Intense Now). Despite its rich dive through film history, Salles (his brother is Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries and On the Road) instead chooses to focus his attention on celluloid of an altogether different kind; assembling a quietly stunning collection of family home-movies, documentary, and observation archival footage into a visual collage that bounces between France, Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil to observe the wildly escalating political shifts and doing so with an unromanticized sense of anti-nostalgia.

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Why did no one tell us about "Harlots"?

There's so much TV these days and so many streaming channel options that it's easy to miss all sorts of juicy series. Case in point: Hulu's "Harlots" which pits Oscar-nominated geniuses Lesley Manville and Samantha Morton against each other as brothel madames at war in late 18th century London. 

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Foreign Film Oscar Submission Speculation Begins

by Nathaniel R

Lebanon's Capernam might be our earliest and most solid bet for submission/nomination

Just an FYI that the charts are now under construction for the Foreign Film Oscar submissions. We won't have the avalanche of "official" submission news until September but we can definitely begin to speculate over the summer, post-Cannes as to which films each country will submit. 

Predictions - Stats / Blindfolded Early Predictions
Chart One - Afghanistan to Ethiopia
Chart Two - Finland to Mozambique
Chart Three - The Netherlands to Vietnam 

Though it's tempting to assume that hits from Berlinale, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto will automatically be their country's submission, that isn't always the case...

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