The 16 Greatest Music Videos of '16

Every day, different angles on a 2016 wrap up. Tonight Nathaniel with the year's best musical short films...

It's true. They're more commonly referred to as "Music Videos" but since they have their roots in the Movie Musical, we think of them as short film descendants of that greatest of film genres. Music videos, which exploded so spectacularly in the 1980s with the dawn of MTV but experienced something like a midlife death rather than crisis, when MTV dropped the music part of music television, have roared back to life in the past decade with YouTube Vimeo and other saviors. The medium is alive and well and arguably healthier than ever (until the next platform crisis at least).

Though Beyonce's Lemonade dominated the conversation, 2016 actually produced a remarkable number of musical shorts that one might include under the umbrella of "Women Gone Wild," a subgenre equal parts political, erotic, and psychological...

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City of Link

ET First pic of Pixar's Coco though the text is greatly irritating as they seem to be very anti-musical "Don't call it a musical!"
Filmmixtape "if 2016's worst films were drag race competitors"
Playbill George S Irving, the voice of Heat-Miser for the Bankin Rass TV classic "The Year Without a Santa Claus" has died at 94. 
The Guardian why 2016 was a big year for female sexuality in film and on television 

Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds and infinite list-making after the jump...

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Co-Star Chemistry, The "Make or Break" Secret Ingredient

Year in Review. Each day another different angled wrap-up.

Last year during our year in review roundup we did our first list of "best co-star chemistry" and it was such a fun way to pinpoint the intangible and often uncategorizable spark that ignites greatness in movies that we're doing it again. Want to capture lightning in a bottle in your movie? Hire the right casting director who will pair the right actors together. No special effect, setpiece, or plot twist can or will ever rival the amount of movie-long electricity that can be generated when actors are really sparking off each other and nailing whatever the roles their characters play in each other's lives simultaneously.

The list is presented without much commentary... unless we couldn't escape it. Chime in in the comments, won't you?

16 Chris Pine & Ben Foster, Hell or High Water (Brothers)

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Modern musicals and the supporting actresses we give Oscars to

by Jorge Molina

During the 85th Academy Awards, there was a somewhat arbitrary musical tribute to three modern musicals in between Seth MacFarlane's sexist monologue and Jennifer Lawrence's fall: Chicago, Dreamgirls, and Les Misérables. Besides being the soundtrack of my college experience, I noticed that all three had one thing in common: they had all won Oscars for their Supporting Actresses.

This threw me into a rabbit hole of IMDb pages, Wikipedia charts, and showtune playlists to look into the historic relation between movie musicals, supporting actresses, and the Academy Awards. If I’d put this much effort into my thesis, I might have graduated in time...

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Beauty Break: Jude Law

Jude Law is 44 years old today and what better way to shake off the blues than to appreciate extremely vivid talent that's still very much with us and has always comes in such delicious wrapping? Next up for Jude Law is the intriguing but-who-knows HBO series The Young Pope.

But until then we gawk at the beauty for with Jude Law the beauty never ends, no matter what phase of life he's hit or what character he's lurking within. He began as callow twinks, moved into suave young guns, aced the sexually promiscuous twenty-something swingers and wounded thirtysomething romantic. And now he charms whether purposefully going to seed or cleaning up real nice in middle age.

We've loved him since his film breakthrough in 1997 (Wilde, Gattaca, Bent). Twenty years later after offering up many great performances and generous eye candy to his fans, he has yet to give us a reason to stop. Much beauty to gawk at after the jump...

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