Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 3:00PM 
Are you excited for the latest live TV musical offering or are you already exhausted by this trend? I'm personally excited about this one since the casting is so good. I saw Harvey Fierstein do this onstage during original previews and it's still one of my all time favorite Broadway memories. Plus the score is great fun.
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 12:31PM Boo! It's a bonus episode of "Oscar Horrors". We're looking back on horror-connected Oscar nominations until Halloween. Here's Daniel Crooke on a Best Picture nominee's brilliant rhythms
Fatal Attraction wants you to keep your doors locked; it gets off on invasion. On lulling you into a false sense of security, sneaking in through the back gate, and shredding the nerves of you and everyone inside while it wreaks increasingly deranged havoc with maniacal glee. Such manipulation is not only the mark of a great psychopath but of a great editor, as well. In Fatal Attraction, you’ve got both; Glenn Close’s rhapsodic performance as jilted stalker Alex Forrest slashes at unexpected intervals but she meets her match in the finely screw-tuned cuts of Michael Kahn and Peter E. Berger. Adrian Lyne’s classic cautionary tale of infidelity gone wrong and what happens when you turn down someone’s invitation to the opera goes for the jugular (and the groin and the brain) but it’s up to Kahn and Berger to keep your guard down, raise the hairs on your neck, and provide a clear path for Close to sneak up behind you with the knife.
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 10:30AM 
We're just 90 days away from our Christmas (Oscar Nomination Morning) and 123 days away from Hollywood's High Holy Night now (our New Year's Eve, the Oscar Ceremony) and we can definitely see the excitement building. All charts have been updated to reflect current buzz mixed with crystal ball hunches.
The biggest mover on the chart is Lion moving up in multiple categories for 6 predicted nominations. It won the Audience Award at Middleburg Film Festival this weekend (beating La La Land which beat it for the same prize in Toronto). With each festival outing it proves itself a true crowd pleaser and with its smartly positioned November release (away from one of the biggest Christmas gluts we've ever seen) it will have built up considerable momentum by the time precursors are hitting.
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | ACTRESS | ACTOR
SUPPORTING ACTRESS | SUPPORTING ACTOR | SCREENPLAYS
VISUALS | SOUND | ANIMATION & DOCS
FOREIGN FILMS
Lion, Oscars (16) Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 8:30AM Anne Marie has been chronicling Judy Garland's career chronologically through musical numbers...
On September 29th, 1963, The Judy Garland Show finally premiered. With a backlog of several episodes already in the can, CBS chose to start the show with the seventh filmed episode, which guest-starred Donald O'Connor. Reviews of Judy were favorable, though reviewers were less enamored of Jerry Van Dyke and the variety show format. But unfortunately the network's fears about Bonanza were realized: The Judy Garland Show garnered a miserable (for the time) 18 rating, compared to Bonanza's juggernaut 35 rating. As always, the network and the production team was left scrambling to make new changes.
The Show: The Judy Garland Show Episode 7
The Songwriters: Various, arranged by Mel Torme
The Cast: Judy Garland, Jerry Van Dyke, Donald O'Connor, directed by Bill Hobin
The Story: Despite some dismal Nielson ratings, the Donald O'Connor episode would prove to be a sweet walk down memory lane for Judy Garland. Though they had never starred in a movie together, O'Connor and Garland knew each other from their days on Vaudeville, when O'Connor was a child dancer and Garland was still one of the Gumm Sisters. Garland and O'Connor reminisce, sing, and dance together, inadvertantly proving something Norman Jewison hadn't quite figured out yet: Judy Garland's power on television came from her long history on stage and screen. While Jewison would continue to make segments poking fun at Garland's legend, fans were tuning in precisely for that legend, and they were very protective of how their star was shown. As Saturday Evening Post reviewer Richard Sherman Lewis lamented,
"The absurd notion of debasing Judy's reputation as a legendary figure and molding her show into an imitation of other prosaic variety shows has been a disaster where it hurts most, in the audience polls."
Despite these protestations, Judy Garland - and by extension her show - would garner a devoted television fanbase that tuned in every Sunday night at 6pm.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 at 10:09PM Netflix has a paltry offering of new movies coming in November but they're losing a lot of titles (which is their MO of late) so you have just a week to watch the following titles. Amazon Prime is also losing a lot (though they have very strange and sometimes very short streaming schedules and the following titles may be back again before you know it).
It's your last week to watch these titles. You know how we do -- we'll freeze frame a handful of titles and random places just for fun and share what we found. Share your memories of these movies, too.
