Meryl Says Yes to TV but Shailene is a Definite No

by Murtada

Meryl Streep is not a TV neophyte. She has appeared in two of what is now called a limited series, the first time at the beginning of her career in Holocaust (1978) and then in Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (2003), she won an Emmy each time. So it’s no surprise that she’s making another limited series, particularly in this era when they are so in vogue with movie stars. The surprise here is who she’s collaborating with; J J Abrams.

Sadly however it's not Felicity:The Later Years. The project is The Nix, an adaptation of the bestselling first novel by Nathan Hill about a woman who gets national press exposure for throwing rocks at a conservative governor on the presidential campaign trail. Sounds like it would be right in Meryl’s wheelhouse.

Meanwhile that proposed conversion of the last book of the Divergent series from film to TV hit a bump in the road...

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What Does Tom Hanks Have to Do to Receive Another Oscar Nomination?

by abstew

The world was a very different place in January 2001. George W. Bush was being sworn into office for the first of his two terms as President, people used disposable cameras and brought the film to be developed at...drug stores, and the main places to watch new films was in the actual movie theater (where the average ticket price was $5.39) and then later going to the nearest Blockbuster to rent it. It also happened to be the last time that Tom Hanks was nominated for an acting Oscar.

With a total of 5 Best Actor nominations for Big (1988), Philadelphia (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Cast Away (2000) and back-to-back wins (only the second Best Actor to accomplish the feat after Spencer Tracy almost 60 years before and only one of five actors (the others are Luise Rainer, Katharine Hepburn, and Jason Robards) to have achieved the distinction in the Academy's 88 year history) it's not like Hanks is hurting for accolades. And if that weren't enough, he's even taken gold for television, winning 7 Emmys so far as a producer and director on multiple miniseries.

The Academy often has brief but passionate affairs when it comes to actors...

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A Brief Note on Moonlight's Oscar Buzz

Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto Film Festival

I'll need more time to process Moonlight, a stunning triptych about a black gay man named Chiron at three stages in his life (played by Alex R Hibbet as a child, Ashton Sanders as a teenager, and Trevante Rhodes as an adult). A full review then is yet to come. Barry Jenkins' film inspired by the play "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue" is beautifully calibrated to explore its central theme of finding your identity. It provides no easy answers as to how to do that and no simple catharsis which could make it a difficult sell. If anyone is up to the task it's the distributor A24 who will platform release the film beginning on October 21st. 

As to the reductive topic of all the Oscar buzz, I am uncertain. Yes, it's going to be a huge critical success and some people's favorite of the year. Barry Jenkins has most definitely announced himself as a exciting formidable writer/director. Yes the cast is performing the material gorgeously particularly Mahershala Ali as a complex father figure to Chiron in the first act, and Trevante Rhodes who pulls all the Chiron's together with heartbreaking interiority in the last act. (Of note: Naomie Harris as Chiron's drug-addicted mother is the only actor to appear in all three chapters but she's impactful each time). But, how to put this... it's definitely an art film that's going to work best for audience members for whom identity politics resonate (*raises hand*). It's also a double minority story about being black and gay.

Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Chiron (Alex R Hibbet) to swim in Moonlight's first chapter "Little"

Oscar is, rather infamously, a majority instution if you get me. They normally need some "in" for LGBT or black stories, in the form of an already renowned director for the former or a famous historical event or famous actor in celebrity bio or some such for the latter. We'll see.

I repeat: If anyone is up to the task it's the distributor A24! 

"Nocturnal Animals" Posters

by Chris Feil

Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals is one of our most anticipated (even if our opinions of Ford's A Single Man are all over the map), and the positive reviews have amplified our enthusiasm. What originally sounded like a sexy thriller now promises to be a surprisingly funny and metafictional feat of storytelling, with performances from Laura Linney and Michael Shannon being the delectable standouts. We've had so few glimpses of the film thus far, but now we have an intriguing set of character posters!

So the overall ripped aesthetic of these character posters recall the fantastic ones from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - but if those posters were sexysad and wanted to kill you. 

Amy Adams may have more heat forArrival, but if Nocturnal shows her to be the low-key femme fatale of this poster, consider me excited. Those eyes!

Gyllenhaal and more after the jump...

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Welcome to "Atlanta"

by Kieran Scarlett

The city of Atlanta, for as richly vibrant and complicated as it is, for how many different television shows and movies are shot there has surprisingly never been rendered on screen in a wholly honest way.  It could be the zombie apocalypse laden landscape of “The Walking Dead,” where the embellishments are forgiven given the subject matter. Then there’s the curiously all-white fantasy in Mother’s Day, a movie that hardly needed to take place in Atlanta making it all the more galling. And of course there’s the glossy, sitcom nightmare-scape version of Atlanta as told by Tyler Perry, where the villains are dark-skinned businessmen and the heroes are light-skinned blue collars with rippling muscles and bad lace-front cornrow wigs.

It’s a much more complicated city, a blue dot in a red state. It's also one of the blackest cities in America (RIP Garry Marshall but you knew you were wrong for that) replete with its own internal conflicts of race, class art and culture. It’s viewed as a sort of Southern Mecca for young black artists—a burdensome reputation for a city to carry where dreams and aspirations can fizzle just as easily, if not more so than they can flourish. In just two half-hour episodes, Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” which premiered on FX earlier this week actually comes the closest to capturing a recognizably authentic Atlanta, clearly birthed by his own experience living in the city...

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