Nathaniel Gives Thanks

by Nathaniel R

Living through a difficult year gives you more reasons than ever to take every excuse to count your blessings. No matter how bad life is the magic of moving pictures, or storytelling and the craft of acting, are always reliable mood-boosters. They're not just a blessed escape but a companion, through which we can learn about ourselves. But let's not get too fancy about it because we mostly just want to squeal "WHEEEEEE!" when we think of the joy of movies.

I'd like to give thanks for the following in particular this year:

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Happy 50th Mark Ruffalo !

by Eric Blume

Today marks the 50th birthday of one of our very best actors, three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo burst onto the scene in 2000 with a remarkable lead performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me.  His complex, layered work had critics fairly sprouting comparisons to Brando, and his gorgeous duet with Laura Linney still feels like the standard-bearer for on-screen sibling chemistry.  It’s astonishing to think Ruffalo missed out on an Oscar nomination that year, considering his performance is unquestionably better than several of the eventual nominees -- was it category confusion or lack of name-recognition? Oscar has remained historically slow to coronate good looking young actors, and that recognition remained on hold for him for over another decade...  

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Jose Gives Thanks ♥︎

by Jose Solis

 

Jose here. Perhaps more than any other year, I'm grateful for the fact that we made it. We survived! Despite of the government, natural disasters, the news, and especially the white patriarchy, we are still around. So this year I won't take the turkey and trimmings for granted. Every bite of pumpkin pie will feel like a blessing.

So this year I'd like to give thanks for the following:

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21st Century Fox Hunt

By Salim Garami

What's good?

Earlier this month on the 6th of November, there had been rumblings of a potential deal between The Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox with the former acquiring the latter. Not wholesale, though. Allegedly off the table were certain television networks such as Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News, Fox Television Stations, and Fox Sports. But the majority of the media and entertainment spin-off from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation - including and especially the movie studio 20th Century Fox - were close to purchase by the biggest mass media conglomerate in the world save for Comcast, one that's already in middle of its notorious expansions and seizings of the likes of Marvel, ESPN, and LucasFilm...

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Soundtracking: "Lady Bird"

Chris talks the nostalgia and nuance of Lady Bird's soundtrack...

“I mean, what can I say? You’re Justin Timberlake.” Have you seen Greta Gerwig’s personal letters asking for song rights for Lady Bird? As if we needed these requests to Timberlake and Dave Matthews to prove that even Lady Bird’s music comes straight from the heart.

The film presents an incredibly specific pre-adulthood existence: Catholic high school in “the midwest of California”, and economic depression in the immediate psychological fallout of 9/11. Gerwig’s music choices are just as layered, presenting a nostalgia familiar especially to those who grew up during the era. Musically, Lady Bird lives in a time when school dances played childhood hits like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” and even your dad had Alanis Morissette references. Every horned up party was backed by Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” the kind of song built to instigate sexy revenge-plot daydreams with the person you are currently making out with.

If their inclusion in the film don’t spark you as razor sharp, you probably didn’t grow up in that time. But I’d like to think this is just one of the ways that Gerwig makes Lady Bird’s experience come alive.

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