Saoirse Preps Her Oscar Loss Face

Chris here, finding ways to cope wherever I can with the increasingly likelihood Lady Bird lands no Oscars in two weeks. And it looks like Saoirse Ronan is preparing herself as well, but with much more good humor. Granted she has lost twice before and has to be one of the cheeriest good sports among this year's acting lineup, so we suspect she (and team Lady Bird) will fare just fine. Have a laugh with Saoirse as she shows off her "Oscar Loser Face" and ponder if I might be wrong: does Lady Bird have a shot at winning any of its five Oscar nominations?

Mike Leigh at 75: Happy-Go-Lucky

With Mike Leigh turning 75 tomorrow, we'll be looking at a few of his films. Here's Chris Feil

Of Mike Leigh’s many great films, Happy-Go-Lucky is perhaps the one the has grown most in its potency. Though his films reward multiple viewings, here is one that has grown all the more meaningful as the world around us has become increasingly fraught with depressing news; the benefit of positivity is at once essential and ignored. The film is both a character study of its relentlessly gleeful protagonist Poppy, played to perfection by Sally Hawkins, and about how the world works against her optimistic state of being.

The pull to submit to anger and gloom weighs heavy on our times, and an outlook like Poppy’s can seem so very far away indeed. 

Ten years on now, Happy-Go-Lucky feels prescient to the dire state of the world, as if we are becoming more like those annoyed by her cheeriness. Some of us who once saw ourselves in Poppy might have even succumbed to the numbing anger of the every day in the intervening years...

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Box Office: T'Challa Reigns

by Nathaniel R

Holiday Weekend Box Office (Feb 15th-18th) Estimates
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1.🔺 Black Panther (pictured) $235 NEW PODCAST	1. 🔺 Detective Chinatown 2 (pictured) $862k on 115 screens NEW
2. Peter Rabbit $23.1 (cum. $54)	2.  The Oscar Nominated Short Films  $780k on 272 screens (cum. $1.8)
3. Fifty Shades Freed $19.4 (cum. $78.6) REVIEW	3. La Boda de Valentina $642k on 331 screens (cum. $2.1)
4. Jumanji $10 (cum. $379.6)	4.  Pad Man $435k on 152 screens (cum. $1.4)
5. The 15:17 to Paris $9.1 (cum. $26.8) REVIEW	5. 🔺 Monster Hunt 2  $401k on 69 screens NEW

Black Panther just had a record-smashing holiday weekend. It's the biggest President's Day Weekend haul of all time and the 5th biggest opening ever. And in a single weekend (even if you don't count the holiday) it became 2018's biggest hit. That's thus far of course. Three dependably behemoth franchises that, like Black Panther, will have no trouble whatsoever raking up their first 1/2 billion globally (even if people don't love them) are still to come. We're talking Solo: A Star Wars Story, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and Avengers: Infinity War which could threaten King T'Challa for #1 of the year dominance. 

But at least until the summer movie season begins "Wakanda Forever!" is the rallying cry for moviegoers, so there wasn't much talk of anything else...

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Beauty vs Beast: They Call Him Mr. Poitier

Jason from MNPP here - Sidney Poitier is turning 91 years old tomorrow, and so let's devote this week's episode of "Beauty vs Beast" to Norman Jewison's 1967 classic police drama In the Heat of the Night, which won five Oscars including ones for Best Picture, for Rod Steiger as Best Actor, and for Hal Ashby for Editing. Shockingly Poitier wasn't even nominated for the film, but he did already have his 1963 statue for Lilies in the Field at that point.

ITHOTN is nominally a film about a murder in a small town, but it's the tension between the Mississippian police chief Gillespie (Steiger) and the usurping fancy-man Philadelphian detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) that gives the film its drama, as we watch their animosity give way to something like respect. Still it's very much of its time, up to and including those Oscar nominations - imagine Steiger winning the statue while Poitier's not even nominated today...

polls & surveys

PREVIOUSLY To borrow a turn of phrase from Denzel Washington, last week's Creed contest wasn't close and the winner, by an arm, was Michael B. Jordan as Adonis. He took just under 70%. Said Emma:

"I cried like a baby in the final act of CREED. My crying was so audible that someone in front of me turned around and said to my friend, 'let's hope she never sees SCHINDLER'S LIST!'.   Oh, and Michael B. Jordan's guns, obviously."

Berlinale 2018: Isle of Dogs and more...

Seán McGovern reporting from the 68th Berlin International Film Festival.

There's a friendly kind of brusqueness to Berliners. They're very unbothered. But the barely-contained excitement of my first Berlinale is almost matched by the huge passion the Germans have for film culture. Ten days and dozens of stunning venues. I'm here mainly to see all the films up for the Teddy Award but it wouldn't be a film festival if I wasn't in at least three screenings a day.

Opening Film
Isle of Dogs (dir. Wes Anderson, United Kingdom/Germany)

At first it seems like a basic choice – A famed US director with a star studded cast.

But take a moment to appreciate that Isle of Dogs is a multi-format animation, in dual languages, and about a historic animosity between humans and dogs, set in Japan, in the future. It's is a gorgeous testament to the kind of storytelling animation is capable of...

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