Ask Nathaniel

Questions for the next Q&A column please. You know what to do...

Podcast/Smackdown Pt 2: Richard Dreyfuss Double Feature of '77 and Films Oscar Ignored

As a companion piece to yesterday's Smackdown, a two-part podcast. If you missed Part One it's right here. Now we conclude our '77 festivities (did you enjoy or did we go to overboard?) with our panel, which includes Mark Harris, Guy Lodge, Nick Davis, Sara Black McCulloch, and Nathaniel R, discussing Tuesday Weld, Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Keaton, Looking for Mr Goodbar, The Turning Point and a few '77 extras.

Part Two Finale. Index (40 minutes)
00:01 One more anecdote on The Goodbye Girl 
04:45 Richard Dreyfuss' big year and Steven Spielberg's interest/disinterest in actors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
15:30 Tuesday Weld's career and the divisive Looking for Mr Goodbar
24:00 The Turning Point and a female-heavy Best Picture lineup
32:15 Performances that weren't nominated from: Saturday Night Fever, Opening Night, Handle With Care, Roseland, and Three Women
39:00 Thank yous! 

You can listen to the podcast here or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?  

Smackdown 77. Part Two. Close Encounters

Beauty vs Beast: Send in the You-Know-Whats

Howdy folks it's Jason from MNPP here wishing everybody a candy-colored start to a candy-colored week - that's right, today marks the first day of International Clown Week, held every year right at the start of August, aka the best time to make that make-up run right off your face and give you the time honored "Creepy Clown Effect." But while (in a weird but total coincidence) I may have just started re-reading Stephen King's It this week I'm not going to make you think about Scary Clowns today - oh I know for some of you there is no other kind, but I'm going to try to temper that with Auterism because...

... hey remember that scene in Robert Altman's 1993 masterpiece Short Cuts where Claire (Anne Archer), a professional clown, and her husband Stuart (Fred Ward) get blasted at dinner with new friends Marion (Julianne Moore) and Ralph (Matthew Modine), and instead of the partner-swapping you expect to happen they all just put on clown make-up and dance around instead? I sure do. It's one of the many right turns the film takes when you've braced yourself for a left. So let's face off these two couples for "Beauty vs Beast" this week...

If you need a refresher both couples are in the middle of personal crises -- Marion & Ralph (Moore & Modine) are the couple who have the long fight about her cheating whilst Juli proves she's a natural redhead, while Stuart has just told Claire (Ward & Archer) that he and his fishing buddies fished around a corpse all weekend long. In the grand tradition of Altman-esque character studies, they're all a bit beastly.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we ventured to Mortville with John Waters and his muses for a look at one of his most underappreciated efforts, Desperate Living (and the poll showed just how underappreciated the film remains, with one of our tiniest voting totals ever) - it was Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) who was carried by her loyal litter of man-servants to the victory, taking 55% of the vote. Said Ken S:

"I'll teach you to arouse royalty! - Team Carlotta all the way!"

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (S1.E9-10)

Dancin' Dan back with the next installment of our Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season one recap. This time out, Rebecca and Darryl experience the acute anguish of trying to make friends as an adult. Let's rank the crazy of the next two episodes.

S1:E9 "I'm Going to the Beach with Josh and His Friends!"

Hoping to expose Rebecca once and for all, Valencia invites her to a "classic crew" beach outing. In classic bottle episode fashion, long-simmering tensions among the crew begin to boil over...

Click to read more ...

Box Office Bourne Again

Off blog my weekend was rough so I didn't make it to the movies. But here's to hoping you did. Nostalgia for Matt Damon's return to the Bourne franchise was greeted with enthusiam by moviegoers and what suffered as a result was nostalgia for another return over at Star Trek Beyond which took a big tumble in its second weekend. Meanwhile yet another nostalgia play (it's all about revivals these days) Ghostbusters became yet another $100 million domestic hit for Melissa McCarthy (she has six of them now) though the problem with this one is that it cost far more than her other films to make.

In other box office news: Cafe Society is about to outgross Woody Allen's last feature (Irrational Man) and it's only been out for a week; The Legend of Tarzan is now the 11th most popular film of the year (but with its hefty price tag will it get a sequel?); and if you want to see Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic (which you really should because it's quite good) get to it in the next couple of days because it's per screen average didn't fare too well with this weekend's significant expansion so it's unlikely to stick around much longer; and we can maybe finally say goodbye to the Ice Age franchise on their fifth outing. Their international box office is what's been keeping the series afloat but the fifth film is significantly underperforming so cross your fingers if you're screaming "enough already" every time that once funny squirrel bounces across your movie theater screens chasing a nut in a trailer. 

TOP TWENTY
🔺01 Jason Bourne $60 NEW Review 
▫️ 02 Star Trek Beyond $24 (cum. $105.7) Review
🔺03 Bad Moms $23.4 NEW
🔻04 Secret Life of Pets $18.2 (cum. $296.1) 
🔺05 Lights Out $10.8 (cum. $42.8) 
🔺06 Ice Age Collison Course $10.5 (cum. $42.1)
🔻07 Ghostbusters $9.8 (cum. $106.1) Review
🔺08 Nerve $9 NEW 
🔻09 Finding Dory $4.2 (cum. $469)  Review
🔻10 Legend of Tarzan $2.4 (cum. $121.8) Review
🔻11 Hillary's America $2.3 (cum. $8.6)
🔺12 Cafe Society $2.2 ($3.9) LIMITED RELEASE Review
🔻13 Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates $1.4 (cum. $43.9) Review
🔺14 Captain Fantastic $1 (cum. $2.4) LIMITED RELEASE Review
🔻15 Central Intelligence $910K (cum. $125.3)
🔻16 The Infiltrator $817K (cum. $14.3)  Review
🔺17 Absolutely Fabulous $800K (cum. $3.3) LIMITED RELEASE Review, Production Design
🔻18 Purge: Election Year $703K (cum. $78.3)
🔻19 BFG $416K ($52.1) Review
🔻20 Hunt for the Wilderpeople $350K (cum. $2.9) LIMITED RELEASE Review 

What movies did you catch this past weekend?

Next weekend Suicide Squad opens and will surely dominate the conversation and may well feel like the end of summer movie season though there are a few weeks left of that. The really interesting contest is the following week when Florence Foster Jenkins battles both Pete's Dragon and those anthropomorphic R rated food items from Sausage Party.  Tough to say which film might survive that brawl.