Tweetweek: Dull Iron Fist, Immortal Keanu Reeves, Gay LeFou

MARVEL NETFLIX SHOWS RANKED:
1. JESSICA JONES
2. Eh I guess the others are sort of watchable?.
3. Fireplace For Your Home
4. Iron Fist

— Chris Evangelista (@cevangelista413) March 17, 2017

 So, people weren't kidding about Iron Fist. It is T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E. The pilot never would have been picked up in a normal TV world. More amusing tweets of the week after the jump covering a multitude of topics including but not limited to: Big Little Lies, Tom Lenk's hawt red carpet recreations (I can't believe we haven't yet featured these) and The Matrix Rebooting...

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Stage Door: Sally Field in The Glass Menagerie

by Dancin' Dan

This is not your parents' Glass Menagerie.

It's not uncommon for theatrical "reinventions" to take place nowadays. Ivo van Howe has made it into a cottage industry of sorts, creating an intimate, visceral A View From the Bridge and a raw, elemental The Crucible in recent years. Sam Gold is of the same cloth. He made his name with an audacious revival of Look Back in Anger at the Roudabout in 2012, won the Tony in 2015 for his sensitive in-the-round staging of the musical Fun Home, and most recently directed a searing Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop.

But all those pieces benefit from a stripped back, in-some-cases radical rethinking. Tennessee Williams's memory play is a much more delicate thing, announcing as narrator Tom Wingfield does right at the start that this is a subjective work of art, a piece of memory that may or may not represent what actually happened. Productions of it generally take after the play's quietest character, the "crippled" Laura - they are generally fragile, gossamer things, as light and airy as a thought or memory hanging in the air in front of us...

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Have you heard of the Platino Awards?

Though The Film Experience likes to track key foreign awards (examples include the Césars, Goyas, and the Golden Horse, in addition to the massive Oscars circus, those groups proliferate just like American precursors do. I've lost track of how many awards that Asian cinema, for example, has. But how about South America? The Platino awards are relatively new. They're now in their fourth year honoring films from the Ibero-America region, which is to say primarily Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, i.e. former territories of Spain and Portugal, plus those countries for good measure.

Here's why we should start paying attention to them: in their short existence they've given Best Film to a truly outstanding picture every single time:  Chile's Gloria (2014) an amazing study of a divorcee rebuilding her romantic life with an Oscar worthy performance by Paulina García (we nominated her here); Argentina's rowdy, funny, Oscar nominated and deeply pleasurable anthology Wild Tales (2015); and Colombia's mystical wonder Embrace of the Serpent (2015) which you already know we're wild about.

Penelope Cruz is one of 37 women vying for a Best Actress nomination (for her new film Queen of Spain)

We don't have the nominee list yet as the ceremony isn't until July. Like the Oscars, they only allow a certain number of contenders from each country (2 or 3 in their case as opposed to Oscar's 1 film per country rule) but their long list includes a lot of Oscar submissions from the past season. Some highlights include Chile's playful fictionalized biopic Neruda, Brazil's critical sensation Aquarius, Almodovar's Julieta, the fantasy A Monster Calls, Paraguay’s father daughter road trip movie called Guaraní, and at least three LGBT titles: Chile's Rara which is an LGBT family drama, the Venezuelan Oscar submission From Afar, and the Cuban political drama Santa & Andres. You can see the complete longlist for Best Film here which will be narrowed down to 5 nominees soon. There are 37 women vying for the Best Actress nomination but we'd be shocked if both Emma Suarez from Julieta and Sonia Braga from Aquarius didn't make it.

Three Questions in the News

by Murtada 

As Carrie Bradshaw would say, some of today's movie news got us thinking. The news offered more perplexion than usual. We'll present you with the questions and maybe you can help with the answers. Or just join in the bewilderment:

How many franchises can one actor be in?
You’d think being Superman would be enough. But no Henry cavill is joining Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 6. No details about who he’s playing. Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson are expected to be back for the new adventure.  Jeremy Renner is not.

Who is starring in Jennifer Kent’s follow up to The Babadook? We know who Sam Claflin is, as we’ve seen him in a few films including The Hunger Games. But he’s not the lead, the new film titled The Nightingale is set in Tasmania in the 1820s, and follows a young Irish female convict whose family is murdered by a British soldier. With the help of an Aboriginal tracker, she heads for the wilderness in hope of exacting revenge. Have you heard of Aisling Franciosi? Well she nabbed the coveted lead role. Digging into her IMDB we found out that she played Lyanna Stark in Game of Thrones, you know in that famous flashback scene. She was also in Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall (2014). Can’t say we remember either performance, but we are very excited to see whatever Kent chooses to show us.

And finally buried in a news item announcing Andrew Dominick's new film; War Party which is billed as an action-adventure movie about Navy SEALs that will star Tom Hardy, is this nugget about his long gestating Marilyn Monroe project, Blonde:

he has been trying to get his Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde off the ground [], but has struggled to find a leading lady everyone can agree on

Hmmm. The names that have been publicly shared so far were Naomi Watts in the first iteration and then a few years later Jessica Chastain. We wonder who else was up for playing Marilyn and was deemed not appropriate?

On this day: False Maria, Party Monster, and the French New Wave

On this day in history as it relates to showbiz... 

Stephen Boyd, Sophia Loren, and Alec Guinness in THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (1964)

190 BC Marucs Arelius, the Emperor of Rome, dies. Was he assassinated? That's the suspicion in most Hollywood accounts. He's been played by Alec Guiness (The Fall of the Roman Empire) and Richard Harris (Gladiator)
1906 Character actor of big and small screen Michael O'Shea, who later married Virginia Mayo, is born...

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