56 Days 'til Oscar Nominations. Let's talk 1956

by Nathaniel R

1956 is not, from our vantage point, a particularly lauded year in cinema but it's an Oscar field we tend to think of regularly for various reasons including but not limited to:

-Camp value (Ten Commandments, Bad Seed)
-Musicals (The King and I, High Society)
-Strange snubs (The Searchers received zero nominations despite Oscar's obsession with John Ford)
-Delayed foreign grandeur (La Strada and Seven Samurai, 1954 films both, were up for Oscars)
-not one but two kaiju movies (Godzilla and Rhodan)...and more.

What's your favorite movie of 1956? I don't think I've seen enough to feel comfortable with a full top ten but here are the five I like best currently (with much more to see) after the jump...

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"Gloria" and "Magdalene" First Looks!

Chris here, with first looks for two of our most beloved actresses. The first is far less dramatic than those fabulous smoking set photos, but comes with some dramatic backstory: Mary Magdalene. Here we see Rooney Mara's biblical woman gorgeous and windblown between smoke breaks...

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Last Flag Flying: Sizing Up the Vets

By Spencer Coile 

In recent years, Richard Linklater has perfected the art of meandering. This is not an inherently bad quality to his filmmaking. On the contrary, recent efforts such as Before Midnight and Everybody Wants Some!! work so well because their conversations feel genuine,  real conversations happening to real people. The exchangesfeel improvised, even though they are not. When the dialogue works, Linklater captures all of the nuances of a single conversation: big and small. 

Last Flag Flying, the latest entry into Linklater's filmography, works similarly to many of his past projects. After the death of his son, Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell) turns to his Vietnam veteran buddies from years past, Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) to travel with him to bury his son...

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Beauty vs Beast: Lady (Bird) You Are Doing Just Fine

Jason from MNPP here, fresh off of standing five feet away from Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach just hanging out at MoMA yesterday (Baumbach had actually just done a Q&A for The Meyerowitz Stories, so "hanging out" might be a stretch I suppose) to take us yonder Sacramento way. I think it's time for Lady Bird to get the "Beauty vs Beast" treatment, you guys.

The film has a perfect score at Rotten Tomatoes and it just crossed 10 million bucks at the box office, which is about what it cost to make. So it's all profit from here on out for Greta & Co, and all signs points towards plenty. It's in around 800 theaters and doing terrific - I can see it playing well all holiday-season. Hooray for good things doing good! Now let's pit the film's complicated mother/daughter core (and eventual Oscar nominees) against one another.

PREVIOUSLY You guys surprised me! When I wrote last week beside our Bigger Splash poll that I figured I knew who you'd vote for I really thought you'd go for Ralph Fiennes. I suppose in retrospect it was silly to underestimate the pull of Matthias Schoenaerts in very small shorts, which drew almost 70% of your vote. Explained Dancin' Dan:

"Yes, Harry is more fun and more interesting than Paul (and Fiennes gives by far the better performance), but he's also INFINITELY more exhausting. I don't think I could stand to be around him more than a few hours. So I'm gonna have to vote for Paul, and the less clothes he wears, the better."

The Furniture: Building a Way out of Mudbound

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. 

“I dreamed in brown,” remembers Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan), surveying the near-monochrome dirt of a Mississippi farm. This small pocket of land is owned by her husband, Henry (Jason Clarke), but one doesn’t get much of a sense that she’d call it home. He appears not to like it either, but is motivated by a sour sense of duty. Perhaps this is why his agricultural efforts fail, barely introducing any green into this expanse of brown.

Even more obvious, when it comes to metaphors, is the way Mudbound begins. Dee Rees opens her earthbound epic on Henry in the dirt, digging a grave. The deceased is his Pappy (Jonathan Banks), an acrimonious Klan member who has done his utmost to pass his ideology down to his sons. It’s largely worked on Henry. Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) resists, but still winds up digging in the mud.

At the bottom of this new ditch, Henry finds a skull. It’s a “slave’s grave,” he declares; he can tell by the bullet-hole. It’s a hint at an old story, one that Rees knows she needn’t bother put into words...

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