Will "Loving" Help June 12th Become a Holiday?

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1916 Disaster epic super producer Irwin Allen is born. (More on him this afternoon)
1919 Stage legend Uta Hagen is born. Though she only ever makes three movies, she originates Tony winning roles on stage that later win Oscars for movie stars (The Country Girl and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Also the co-author of "Respect for Acting" and a reknowned acting teacher with 70s legends Pacino & De Niro as students
1928 Oscar winning composer Richard M Sherman (of Sherman Brothers fame) is born. Jason Schwartzman plays him in Saving Mr Banks (2013) about the making of Mary Poppins (1964)
1942 Anne Frank receives a diary for her 13th birthday. She does not live much longer during the horrific events of The Holocaust but The Diary of Anne Frank becomes a key text of the 20th century. The George Stevens film adaptation (of the Pulitzer winning play of the same name by the screenwriters) released in 1959 receives 8 nominations including Best Picture and takes home three Oscars

1946 Oscar-nominated costume designer Maurizio Millenotti is born in Italy. Credits include: Otello, Hamlet (1990 version), Malèna, The Passion of the Christ and Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On.
1962 Three bank robbers escape from Alcatraz. The story becomes the Clint Eastwood picture Escape From Alcatraz (1979)

← 1967 The Supreme Court strikes down anti-miscenegation laws banning interracial marriage in the Loving v Virginia case. This year's Oscar hopeful Loving (2016), starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton tells the Loving story. There's also a movement to make June 12th, "Loving Day," an official US holiday for celebrating multiracial families. Sadly the movie isn't opening today for this anniversary so we'll have to wait months to see it. Perhaps the 50th anniversary next year, after the story is more widely known with the movie, will help add momentum. 

1985 Dave Franco is born 
1992 Housesitter with Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn and Dana Delany hits theaters 
2010 Slow burning hit "Bulletproof" peaks on the US charts nearly a year after its release. Two years later Beca deploys it to fuck up Aubrey's stale act in Pitch Perfect (2012)

Emmy FYC: Supporting Actress in a Comedy - Donna Lynne Champlin in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

Emmy nomination voting begins Monday. For the next week or two we'll be sharing FYCs of some kind. Here's Dancin Dan...

Let's get one thing out of the way first: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deserves Emmy nominations for pretty much every category in which it's eligible. Golden Globe winner Rachel Bloom gave the most fearless, consistently great performance on TV this year as Rebecca Bunch, an attorney from New York who had a nervous breakdown and moved to West Covina, CA to chase after her ex-boyfriend from summer camp (Vincent Rodriguez III, taking a bland character and shading him just enough to make him more and more worthy of Rebecca's obsession). Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna created the musical comedy that fans of the genre have been waiting for, cleverly challenging expectations at every turn while maintaining a consistent level of quality that has eluded TV's other attempts at the genre (sorry, Glee and Smash).

But if the show can only get one nomination, the one I'm hoping for most - aside from Bloom, who will get and deserve plenty of articles like this until the nominations are announced - is for Donna Lynne Champlin as Best Supporting Actress. Champlin plays Paula, the office manager Rebecca's new law firm. In the pilot episode, Paula becomes as obsessed with Rebecca as Rebecca is with Josh...

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Swing, Tarzan, Swing! Ch.5: Mike Henry gets his 007 on in the "Valley of Gold"

As we approach the release of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) we're ogling past screen incarnations of the Lord of the Apes...

Tarzan aficianados will cry foul that I've skipped ahead to 1966 in this retrospective but the awesomely named actor Jock Mahoney wouldn't mind. He only made two Tarzan films in the mid sixties... and barely finished those. He got deathly ill on the second, lost 40 lbs during the picture, and couldn't get out of the jungle fast enough. The first of those pictures lost money, too.

You see, in the wake of the phenomenal success of Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), James Bond was the new #1 adventure hero and Tarzan was old news. The Tarzan franchise took note and tried to combine the two with Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), introducing the closest thing they could find to Sean Connery's swarthy dimpled masculinity: Mike Henry.

Mike Henry was a professional football player with the Los Angeles Rams but he left sports for the actor's life and donned the Tarzan's loincloth.

...Or, should we say his suit.

In addition to introducing Tarzan as a jet-setting perpetually-endangered looker in a suit, this new 007 style adventure also begins with a kitschy mod score over colorful credits, an opening action sequence that's somewhat disconnected from the movie that follows, and an intelligent international criminal with a taste for booby-trapped gifts. So, you know, we're definitely in Bond territory...

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#ImWithTweet

I know I promised no political talk on the blog until September so I'll let others do the talking as it was such a big political week that it's hard to avoid. That's reflected in our roundup of amusing tweets this week. But first let us begin with this giddy tweet from Patches who claims he had had a few drinks when he wrote it but to us it's the perfectly clear minded truth.

More after the jump of course...

Movies are insane. People pretending to be other people! Depicting reality, yet constructing it! Angles! Mood! Holy hell. Movies.

— Maester Patches (@misterpatches) June 10, 2016

Now that we're all getting behind Hillary Clinton, let's admit that Anne Hathaway has never once been bad in a movie.

— Louis Virtel (@louisvirtel) June 8, 2016

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Emmy FYC: Supporting Actress (Comedy) - Constance Zimmer in UnREAL

Emmy nomination voting begins Monday. For the next week or two we'll be sharing FYCs of some kind. Here's Anne Marie...

If you've watched TV in the last ten years, you've seen Constance Zimmer. She was the snarky hot chick in Entourage, the snarky hot campaign spokesperson in The Newsroom, and the snarky hot secret agent in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Constance Zimmer has made a career using her trademark wit, smoked-three-packs-of-cigarettes voice, and deadpan delivery, but it took a role as a cruel, cold, and possibly murderous TV showrunner on Lifetime's surprise breakout hit UnREAL to show audiences Zimmer's full potential as a character actress.

 If you haven't seen UnREAL yet (in which case you should head to Hulu right now and finish this article later): Constance Zimmer plays Quinn King, the executive producer of a reality dating show called Everlasting a la The Bachelor. While most of the season revolves around the poor life choices of Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby), Zimmer steals scenes with so-awful-they're-fun lines like:

Alright people! You get cash bonuses for 9-1-1 calls, nudity, catfights! Go!

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