"Get Out" and "Lady Bird" Lead Gotham Nominations

Awards season has begun! The first of the Oscar precursors, the Gotham Awards, has announced their nominations this morning. The Gothams are dedicated to honor the best of independent film during the last year. Their well-curated committees of film critics and movie insiders that pick the nominees result in refreshing choices that many times miss the bigger awards. Despite that, for the past three years, Gotham winners for Best Feature have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. 

The Gotham Awards will be hosted by John Cameron Mitchell on November 27th. This year's ceremony will also award special tributes to Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled), Nicole Kidman (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Beguiled), Dustin Hoffman (The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)), Jason Blum (Get Out), Ed Lachman (Wonderstruck), and Al Gore (An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power).

Check out the nominees and update your prediction charts accordingly!

Click to read more ...

Blueprints: "Mean Girls"

Hi everyone, Jorge here. Welcome to the first installment of Blueprints, a new weekly series where we'll discuss the relationship between the pages of a script and the finalized cinematic products. To start things off, an audience-favorite and one of the most quotable films of all time.

 

Tina Fey’s cult-classic satire on teenage girlhood, cliques, and cheese fries has quickly become an indispensable presence inside the ranks of Most Quotable Films lists. Behind-the-scenes recognition has fallen more on the writer than on director Mark Waters (brother of Heathers’ helmer Daniel Waters; for those keeping tabs on your clique movies). Almost every single line has become a chant for people to drop on each other, so much that Quote-Along screenings of the film have become widely popular.

But what is it about Mean Girls that made it not only memorable, but practically irresistible to mouth along to?

Click to read more ...

Chile's Oscar Submission: "A Fantastic Woman"

Sean McGovern reporting from the London Film Festival

 

There’s a scene early on in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, when a young man laments the Spanish translation of All About Eve, to Eva al Desnudo. English subtitles tell us it’s “Eve Unveiled”. It also translates to “Eve Naked”. “All About Eve should be “Todo Sobre Eva”,” he says. “But that sounds odd,” replies his mother.

Sometimes a title, or a translation of a title, can make a difference. A Fantastic Woman, in English, basically means an amazing or brilliant woman. The Spanish adjective fantastica has the connotation of something unreal or imaginary, and in this film, writer-director Sebastián Lelio has created a heroine who is indeed fantastical: angelic in the eyes of her man, a threat to his toxic family, and the object of her director's vision... 

Click to read more ...

What's Streaming from 1944?

Not too damn much, that's what! 

Whenever we prep for a Smackdown The Film Experience becomes newly alarmed at how scarce the availability of 20th century film titles actually is online. Streaming culture has somehow convinced people that everything you might ever want to see is easier to access than it's ever been. Alas, the further back in time you go, the less there is for your eyeballs as we move away from analog. Of course streaming is more convenient so we hope Hollywood will magically decide to make all their vaults available. We can dream!

Laura dear, I cannot stand these morons any longer. If you don't come with me this instant, I shall run amok.

But if you want to steep yourself in 1944 beyond the 5 films featured in the next Smackdown, here's what you can stream should you have any of these memberships...

Click to read more ...

NYFF: Joan Didion's Magic Years

by Jason Adams

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

The instant. Not "an" instant, which is how most of us would sort that sentence. When writing of her husband's death in her book The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion said "the" instant, and in Joan Didion's wake nothing else seems right. Because it is not just any instant. It's the one that changed your life. At most, depending on how long we live, we might get a couple. Joan Didion, at 82, has had her own intimate yet earth-quaking share. And Joan Didion, as ever, is here to distill them down into apple crisp sentence form for us.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the new documentary on the author, was directed by Didion's nephew, the actor Griffin Dunne, and he makes similar Didion-esque economy of Joan's handful of instants...

Click to read more ...