Yes No Maybe So: "The Greatest Showman"

by Nathaniel R

A big moment in Trailerville has arrived! We have the first taste of the second annual Pasek & Paul musical / Christmas Oscar hopeful. Yes, we're pretending it's a franchise now post-La La Land. After the jump let's obsessively break down the first trailer for the Hugh Jackman party known as The Greatest Showman. We'll do it the way we sometimes do it when we're really excited about something since I maybe just watched this 7 times in a row but who's counting?

Curtains up. Hit the lights... 

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Soundtracking: "Drive"

It's Chris Feil's weekly column on music in the movies! This week is the techno mythmaking of Drive:

So there’s a new musically-infused motorist crime tale on the block? While Baby Driver tries to take space on your headphones, it may still have to take a backseat to something even more moodily effective (if less uplifting): Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

Refn is no stranger to using music (mostly in original scores from frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez) to help build his films’ elusive auras, but he has never been so successful as using this tool as he is here. This film’s musical identity is inextricably linked to the protagonist in ways that inform the audience of his psychosis as much as the subtlety of Ryan Gosling’s performance. Just as Gosling pulls us into the mind of a lovable psychopath, the song choices help make this grim pulp landscape something beautiful.

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Review: "Baby Driver"

by Chris Feil

Edgar Wright is back in action movie mode for Baby Driver, a crime caper just slightly enough on the offbeat side enough to stand out among the summer franchise entries. Ansel Elgort stars as Baby (no, seriously), a iPod-attached getaway driver wrapping up an undefined debt to his somewhat paternal boss Doc (Kevin Spacey). There is Wright-ian wit to spare in the set pieces and characterizations as Baby wraps up his final mission and falls for waitress Debora (Lily James), but Driver is also his messiest. With a solid supporting ensemble that features a delightfully unhinged Jamie Foxx and Spacey on his more understated side of hammy, the film is nevertheless a great launching pad for Ansel Elgort as a multitalented leading man.

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Susan Hayward in "I'll Cry Tomorrow"

SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK

"this story was filmed on location... inside a woman's soul!"
-I'll Cry Tomorrow's tagline.

by Eric Blume

I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a biopic of singer Lillian Roth, won Susan Hayward the fourth of her five Oscar nominations, in 1955.  The film starts with a young Lillian and her stage mother, played by Jo Van Fleet. Ten minutes in, though, Hayward gets a true star entrance belting out “Sing You Sinners” in a lengthy number with only four cuts.

It’s a fun introduction, partially because you try to place yourself in 1955, when part of the excitement (one guesses) was hearing Hayward sing for the first time, and it’s quite a boisterous number. Then Hayward was known mostly as a tragedienne (Hollywood star variety), it must have been a blast for audiences to see Hayward let loose (Hollywood star style) in a big production number where she gets to snarl and dance (Hollywood star style, as the musicality doesn’t come easily to her)... 

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Charlize Lands Her Punches

by Nathaniel R

W Magazine is going all out with Charlize Theron at the moment. She's on the cover with a new interview, a gorgeous (what else) photoshoot, and there's also a retrospective of her other most compelling photos for the magazine in years pas -- who can forget that photoshoot with Michael Fassbender for Prometheus (*melts from the heat*).

Her new action flick Atomic Blonde has the unenviable task of following Mad Max Fury Road into theaters but thus far word is that it is a bonafide thrill machine as action flicks go. It opens on July 28th so expect Charlize to be everywhere for the next month including right here where we'll be sure to celebrate her career... albeit a little closer to the release. 

For now let's revel in this catfighty, rather than catty, anecdote about that time she punched Teri Hatcher in the face in a fight scene in her debut 2 Days in the Valley (1996) when she was just 20 years old:

I hit her really bad....

And because it was Teri Hatcher, who was a star, and I was this bleached-blonde-Amazonian, catsuit-wearing nobody who was punching her in the face, I was like a wild animal. Back then I didn’t know how to hone in my energy and I was knocking over lights. I had no concept of a set. I connected right with Teri Hatcher’s face. I felt terrible about it. I had no money and sent her some cheap beer the next day. Sorry, Teri.