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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Which actresses are we underestimating in the nomination hunt?

by Nathaniel R

Are we underestimating them: Winslet, Bening, Chastain, Haddish, Vega, Dench, Williams, Stone, Chau, Blige, Scott Thomas, Gadot

If you look around the web you'd suspect we are closer to Oscar nominations than we actually are. Two months remain before we have our Oscar nominations (57 days to be exact) so there's a month of campaigning left before the Academy even starts filling out their nomination ballots! Despite the plentiful time remaining and few precursors yet announcing (NBR is first tomorrow), the internet seems convinced that we're narrowed down to about 6 or 7 players for 5 slots in virtually all the acting categories. But is it this cut and dry?

It's likely not.

We know the general field at this point but there's still a lot of wiggle room, some films/people are always underestimated and the reverse at this point. But even if none of the 12 women we've including in the image above end up with a difficult to snag Oscar nomination, I'm curious if any of them will be cited anywhere this season from precursors to the Globes to SAG to regional critics groups. What do you suspect?

RELATED: Updated charts for Best Actress and Supporting Actress. Thoughts?

FYC: Young Performer Award 2017

by Nathaniel R

Remember when the Beguiled girls did that charity lipsynch to "Schuyler Sisters" from HAMILTON?

Each year one of our awards traditions here at The Film Experience is to help fellow BFCA members choose more wisely when it comes to the "Young Performer" category at the Critics Choice Movie Awards by sharing an eligibility list. Ballots don't come with lists of eligible choices so it's up to each member to think up a list and since the category is "under 21" it takes a bit of research for the teen/young adult performances; as is Hollywood tradition almost everyone playing high schoolers in Lady Bird or Spider-Man Homecoming are in their early-to-mid 20s. It's just a guess but I'm betting some members even leave that category blank on their ballots. If true that's a pity because there are always enough strong options to fill out a ballot. This year, in fact, has several high profile movies with options to choose from like the blockbuster horror film It, the controversial remake of The Beguiled, the Todd Haynes puzzle Wonderstruck, and Wonder is a star vehicle for Jacob Tremblay, a previous winner in this very category for Room (2015). 

Ballots go out to the BFCA today so here's a cheat sheet to help them vote after the jump. The actors are listed alphabetically (asterisks by their name indicate a previous nomination in this category). So which of these performances would make your ballot? Let us know in the comments...

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