The Furniture: Fame Flattens Your Dreamgirls, Boys

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

 This probably goes without saying, but movie musicals tend not to take place in the real world. Gene Kelly doesn’t just serenade French children in An American in Paris, he leads the cast through a dream ballet of wild abstraction. The oddness of public singing is often just the door to an even more fantastical world. Even those about actual musicians, who need no special excuse to croon, often break free from realism.

In this context, Dreamgirls is a bit of an odd duck. Director Bill Condon tries to split the difference. Some of the songs are entirely within the context of a real performance, while others incorporate non-musician characters and non-realistic settings. The back and forth can be a bit confounding...

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Female Performance Heaven Across Mediums

Our Year in Review is doubling up now, two "best of" lists a daily to wrap up. This afternoon Matthew Eng exercizes his actressexuality.

Here are 25 scenes, songs, shots, reactions, line-readings, gestures, and whatnot that have stuck with me the longest from some — but not all — of my favorite female performances across film, television, music, and theater this year. Remember these? They are... in alphabetical order:

01 Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny’s bravura comic badinage is the main engine driving Love & Friendship, which only ever threatens to turn softhearted when these two catty soulmates are finally forced to part. Beckinsale and Sevigny carefully modulate their straight-faced hauteur during this fond farewell, but refuse to let even an ounce of sentimentality disrupt their regal self-possession. It’s one final, triumphant occasion for game to recognize game.

02 “Value,” the sixth episode of Donald Glover’s extraordinary first season of Atlanta, opens with an extended showcase scene of friendly rivalry between the luminous Zazie Beetz (as long-suffering public school teacher Van) and one-episode wonder Aubin Wise (as her childhood pal, now an “Instagram escort”). Both actresses tear into the scene with a comical trenchancy that scores its necessary laughs but also establishes a layered and fleetingly poignant background of affectionately-waged one-upmanship.

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George Michael (RIP)

As a general rule of thumb, we love list-making and recapping of the year's significant moments and events but the exception is the work of the grim reaper. Death has claimed so many icons recently, particularly from the music world, that 2016 is starting to feel like a parody of its apocalyptic self as we reach its conclusion.

On Christmas day, of all days considering that one of his most enduring hits is "Last Christmas," George Michael was taken from us. Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (better known as George Michael) was born in East Finchley London in 1963. By the age of 19 he'd charted his first hit with his friend Andrew Ridgeley (the other half of Wham!) called "Young Guns (Go for It!)". Two years later he was world famous by way of the global smash "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." Which is when little Nathaniel first fell in love. But that initial fame wasn't the half of it. In fact the early hits I loved so much only hinted at the artist he'd become. He proved himself one of the great pop singers and composers over and over again. "Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I," released in 1990 is surely his masterpiece (and one of the greatest pop albums ever recorded) but he continued to be brilliant even when record contract troubles and personal problems overshadowed his talent with the public. His career had been quiet for some time but it's worth noting that he made one last significant contribution to pop culture that people don't regularly attribute to him -- he was the first star to sing with James Corden whilst driving around in a car back in 2011 which eventually became the ubiquitous "Carpool Karaoke" series of the here and now. 

Given his death this weekend, the lyrics and defiance of one of his very last records "White Light" (recorded in 2012 and inspired by his near death in 2011) are suddenly so much sadder.

There is no white light
and I'm not through
I'm alive I'm alive
and I've got so much more that I want to do.

Was it music or science that saved me? 

After the jump 16 favorite songs from his career...

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10th Anniversary: Children of Men

David here on the tenth anniversary of a modern masterpiece...

Watching Children of Men at the end of this particular year is an almost surreal experience, because P.D. James’s dystopian vision of the world seems even more feasible than ever. It’s hard to not feel like the new president elect is leading us to a world like the one we glimpse on the video screens, where all cities the world over have been devastated by riot and ruin. It’s hard to not see the xenophobia of the Brexit referendum result in the end of the same video, which declares ‘Only Britain Soldiers On’, as if there’s some value to be had in a country that cages immigrants on train platforms and allows the privileged white man to shut himself off in glacial towers. “You know what it is, Theo?” says Danny Huston’s government minister of his cousin (Clive Owen), when asked how he lives contentedly shut off from the devolution outside. “I just don’t think about it."

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336 Films Eligible for the Oscar Race

Oopsie. In the Holiday rush we forgot to share one of the most important lists, the list of which films can be nominated for Oscars (in regular categories -- speciality categories like "best foreign language film" having their own rules). Every year the list is a wee bit odd if you really take a deep dive at it because it's filled with movies you haven't heard of as well as missing a few movies you have. Why is that? Because the list is made up of films which met two requirements.

1) Each film played for a week long engagement in Los Angeles that you could buy tickets to like you would any movie (i.e. not a festival engagement alone) and...
2) Films which did that and then ALSO submitted paperwork to the Academy to be eligible.

The most important film that is missing this year (apparently due to requirement #2) is acclaimed Aquarius starring Sonia Braga. Of films I personally saw in movie theaters or noted when they came out in movie theaters that weren't submitted the list is mostly foreign and indie though there are strange cases where wide releases didn't submit either. Another section of films that's often missing from these lists are films which were submitted for Oscar's foreign race the year prior but were not nominated and then released in the current calendar year when they theoretically would be eligible for any category BUT foreign film according to Oscar rules. ANYWAY. Of those missing films that could have been eligible there's no: Bang Gang: A Love Story, Best Worst Thing That Ever Happened, El Clan, El Club , The Family Fang, Glassland, Gods of Egypt, Lazy Eye, Morris From America (which got a Spirit nomination for Craig Robinson), Transpecos, and Under the Shadow and so on. The full eligible list is after the jump...

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