Links: Car Eyes, Sad Batman, Oscar Guesswork, Inspiring Denzel

General Linkage
i09 Mad Mad Fury Road meets Pixar's Cars
AV Club ignoring that nobody on god's green earth could possibly want to relive the election fiasco of 2016, Megan Ellison and Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty) are developing a miniseries about it right now. Too soon.
Interview Mag there's going to be a biopic of Sammy Davis Jr. They have casting suggestions including Elijah Kelley as Sammy and Delroy Lindo as his father
Cinesnark has an ode to Keanu Reeves, calling him 'the last great movie star.' I personally think the demise of the movie star is a myth (that's been being told my entire lifetime... and yet my lifetime has had plenty of new movie stars in it) but I tend to like pieces like this anyway because worshipping movie stars is fun
The New Yorker looks at the silent film Different From Others, reportedly the first gay romantic drama on film

MNPP Tom Cullen has been at the gym and has a movie coming out co-starring his love Tatiana Maslany
Screen Crush Ben Affleck rumored to want out of the Batman game. I mean... he does look miserable doing it, so why not? Batman is the star not the actor playing him anyway. Notice how many faces he's already worn since 1989 and he's still just as popular
Tracking Board Mahershala Ali is joining Channing Tatum and Tom Hardy for a new crime drama called Triple Frontier

Oscar Stuff
Feinberg Forecast Feinberg is predicting 10 Oscars for La La Land, losing only 3 categories
Variety on the backlash to La La Land and why "exuberance" matters. I co-sign this post. I hate when films are deemed "not important enough" as that leads to comedies and family films and adventures and romances and all sorts of genres that produce classics being regularly overlooked at the Oscars
Write Out of LA is, on the other side, all in for the La La Land backlash 
Variety Netflix sharing Ava DuVernay's with classrooms, community groups, and book clubs
Variety Moonlight took the USC Scripter prize for adapted screenplay
Indie Wire Anne Thompson says Moonlight is "guaranteed" one Oscar win. Guaranteed feels like too strong a word for me when both of its potential wins (Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor) have to face off against a surging Lion which took both of those categories at the BAFTAs
... oh and BAFTA wins and gowns in case you missed those posts here! 

In Case You Missed It
Denzel Washington gave an inspiring speech at the NAACP Image Awards. I'm still torn as to whether he'll pull off a third Oscar win for Fences but I'm rooting for it, since it can't be Viggo!

Pfandom: Troubled Boys & Spurned Girls

P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 6 
by Nathaniel R 

Pfeiffer is a hormonally charged pflapper in the remake of Splendor in the Grass

[Editor's Note: Due to a scheduling issue with DVDs and a two day internet outage at your host's home last week we're a bit out of sequence & behind. Apologies]

Last week we got an early glimpse of Michelle Pfeiffer's bad girl side with the campy plodding Texas melodrama Callie & Son (1981). It was one of three telefilms the young actress co-starred in the year before her first leading movie role (Grease 2). Her last two TV movies before stardom make a fascinating double feature for their good girl/bad girl dichotomy and their foreshadowing of more famous roles...

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Valentine's - An Elephant Love Medley to Moulin Rouge!

We've been celebrating Valentine's with lovers from Eternal Sunshine, Gone Girl, and Weekend. Here's Jorge Molina on a film that's practically our mascot at TFE.

There are many angles I could take on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! for Valentine’s Day. Its unapologetic pastiche of classic tragedy and romance. Its embrace of melodrama and sentimentality. Its larger-than-life lens on life and characters. The way Nicole Kidman fake orgasms.

I decided I could take on all of them in 300 words the same way the movie did in 3 minutes and 50 seconds.

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12 Days Until Oscar - Colleen Atwood, Anyone?

With 12 days until Oscar let's focus on 12 time Oscar nominee & 3 time winner Colleen Atwood for today's trivia post. As first reported on this site, and since echoed everywhere on other sites for years now, one of the most delightful if idiosyncratic Oscar facts is that Ms Atwood does not win the Oscar unless she is competing against Oscar's other 12 time nominee & 3 time winner, Sandy Powell, and vice versa. We thought this endearing stat would be dismantled last season via either Carol or Cinderella for Sandy Powell but she lost both bids with her peer Atwood out of the race. This season Powell is sitting one out (she had no films released in 2016) while Atwood returns to the short list with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Curiously the situations are reversed next year when Sandy Powell returns with two likely sartorial showcases...

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Doc Corner: Ranking the Documentary Short Nominees from Least to Most Depressing

The annual joke is that the Best Documentary Short category is routinely the most depressing, miserable, down-right soul-crushing category of any given list of Oscar nominees. Often it is for very good reason: last year’s subjects included the Ebola plague, capital punishment, honor killings and the Holocaust. This years’ nominees are perhaps a little bit lighter if just for the slim offerings of a happy ending offered up by a few. Nevertheless, we’re going to rank them from least to most depressing because I just watched the movie about end-of-life termination and I need some levity.

With four of the nominees widely available online as well as through the Oscar Nominated Shorts packages currently in limited release and on iTunes, there’s no reason to not have seen them before Oscar night!

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