120 days til Oscar. "Best Dance Direction," anyone?

by Nathaniel R

It's your useless morning trivia! Guess what the 120th Oscar handed out was? If my calculations are correct -- I carefully counted through "Inside Oscar"'s brilliant year-by-year history to determine the order -- it was Best Dance Direction 1936 which went to Seymour Felix for "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" from The Great Ziegfeld. The famous number led up to the film's intermission. The film also won Best Picture. 

"Best Dance Direction" only lasted three years at the Oscars from 1935 through 1937.

Rather hilariously, the genius Busby Berkeley never won it though he was nominated all three years running and is the only man among the 11 nominated for that award that has any name recognition in the 21st century. Remember when Ryan Gosling was going to star as him in a biopic ? Too bad that never materialized! 

Here's Felix's winning number:

European Film Nominations: "The Square" and "On Body and Soul" lead

by Nathaniel R

Hungary's weird and wonderful ON BODY AND SOUL keeps collecting kudosOne of our favorite undersung awards bodies is back. The European Film Awards, a hodgepodge of vastly different cinemas that sometimes has surprising results, have released their nominations for 2017. As per usual they're the awards body with the most in common with Oscar's Foreign Language Film race with many of their nominees being submissions this year from their respective countries. As such it's worth noting that Hungary's dreamscape slaughterhouse romantic oddity On Body and Soul and the Palme D'or winning Swedish satire The Square are both looking strong heading into the Oscar race; they lead the field here, each with four nominations. Russia's Loveless and the latest Yorgos Lanthimos provocation The Killing of a Sacred Deer are just behind them with three nominations, though the latter was a miss in the top category for Best European Film where France's masterful ACT UP drama BPM (Beats Per Minute --  currently in release in the US -- why is noone seeing it? It's brilliant! --  struck instead. 

The ceremony moves each year and this time it will be hosted in Berlin, Germany on December 9th. Full set of nominees (links go to our reviews) including a France heavy Best Actress list are after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Tweet Things 2

It's our weekly curated collection of a dozen or so showbiz-related tweets we think you might enjoy. Some are true and some are funny like these two.

Watch movies from before you were born. It's good for you.

— Diablo Hellalgo (@pablohidalgo) October 28, 2017

Guy at work orientation today: What was the most pirated movie last year? Hint. Blockbuster. Main character dressed in red?

Me: JACKIE.

— Cici Cooper (@danblackroyd) October 30, 2017

And others just make us smile.

There's more after the jump involving Richard Burton's diaries, Meet Me in St Louis, The Snowman, Winona Ryder, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and more. But first how's this for an FYC plug? I mean is Sarah Paulson's asking us, we're considering...

Click to read more ...

Talking About Passion and the Films of Stephen Cone

by Glenn Dunks

In some ways, Stephen Cone is an unlikely name to warrant a retrospective. And yet in other ways, he’s a perfect choice. Those who already know this writer-director likely typify him, not incorrectly, by the way he infuses queer-leaning narratives with themes of religion and faith. But considering Cone’s films – of which he is likely best known for Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party from 2015 – have rarely ventured out of the queer film festival circuit and his earlier works remain virtually unseen, Talk About the Passion: Stephen Cone’s First Act is actually a well-timed way to learn about a filmmaker who is clearly doing enough right to stick around for a little while yet.

His debut as a feature direct after several short and medium-length titles was In Memoriam, a film that sits rather out of place among Cone’s filmography. Following a man who becomes curiously obsessed with the story of a couple who fell from their roof while drunk and who decides to make his own movie about their love, it plays very much like a low-budget stereotypical first film full of artistic flourishes and awkward narrative beats. It’s not a bad film, but it is also hard to decipher exactly what it was that Cone was attempting to say beyond a very basic reading that everybody’s story deserves to be taken seriously.

He followed that one quite quickly with The Wise Kids, released in the same year. This was the first time his own life as the son of a Baptist minister came into play on a feature (many of his shorts dealt with religious themes) and mixed with what I assume is his experiences of growing up gay (correct me if I am wrong). While it is certainly not averse to some of the same directorial greenness that he showed in In Memoriam, The Wise Kids proves a significant step up...

Click to read more ...

Honorary Oscars: Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep"

We will be revisiting work from this year's Honorary Oscar winners. Here's Tim on Charles Burnett...

For most of its existence, the 1977 Killer of Sheep existed more in the realm of legend than concrete film history. It was made for a paltry $10,000 by director-producer (-writer-cinemtographer-editor) Charles Burnett as his master's thesis project in UCLA, taking five years to complete. Owing to the substantial expense of securing rights to the music Burnett wished to use, the film was never able to acquire distribution, and for nearly thirty years remained more talked about than seen, though it was fiercely admired by those lucky ones who had attended a screening. It was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990, but still could only be found mostly by accident, as it flitted around the film underground on increasingly degraded 16mm prints.

In 2007, 30 years after the film was completed, the UCLA Film & Television archive finally took steps to secure the future of the film, creating a new 35mm print from the 16mm negative. Milestone Films secured the music rights for $150,000, and the film finally had its first commercial release, to enormous critical acclaim. Burnett had never stopped working, but the restoration of Killer of Sheep unquestionably brought his reputation to new heights. It's hard to imagine him receiving his honorary Oscar this year without Killer of Sheep having so triumphantly risen from the ashes.

Click to read more ...