The Furniture: Saloon Kitsch in "How the West Was Won"

New Series. Daniel Walber talks production design in "The Furniture". Previously we looked at The Exorcist, Carol and Brooklyn and Batman. 

Gregory Peck, whose centennial we’ll all be celebrating tomorrow, was in a grand total of six films that were nominated for Best Production Design. Two of the best, To Kill a Mockingbird (the only winner) and Roman Holiday, will be featured in this week’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot. And so, in the interest of spreading the love, I’ll talk about a very different: 1962’s Cinerama epic, How the West Was Won.

The film, though it tells the story of a single American family, is broken up into five distinct sections. Peck is only in one of them, “The Plains.” This is actually good for our purposes, because it’s one of the three directed by Henry Hathaway. The John Ford and George Marshall chapters are much more about landscapes than sets, perhaps because they found the task of filling up the wide Cinerama frame with furniture to be too tedious.

Hathaway embraced the madness, however, and it makes all the difference. How the West Was Won is a cinematic victory lap for Manifest Destiny, an alternately uncomplicated and incoherent paean to the white conquest of the West. This can easily make it fall flat to 21st century eyes, particularly in its more earnest moments of breathtaking scenery and triumphalist narration (from Spencer Tracy).

But in Hathaway’s segments, with their exaggerated and falsified versions of Western style, suddenly it becomes kitsch...

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Adams Heads to TV With 'Sharp Objects'

Manuel here with some actressexual news to get your week started. Jean-Marc Vallée, who’s been busy lately helping Reese Witherspoon nab her second Oscar nomination, filming the HBO TFE dream-cast miniseries Big Little Lies with his Wild star, Nicole Kidman, and Laura Dern, and letting loose with Jake Gyllenhaal (in the soon to be seen Demolition) is teaming up with Amy Adams for another HBO show: the adaptation to Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. The project, which has been in talks for a while, finally landed at the cable network after a heated bidding war (we almost got a chance to binge it with Netflix narrowly missing this acquisition!)

Per Deadline’s description:

Sharp Objects centers on reporter Camille Preaker (Adams) who, fresh from a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital, must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. Trying to put together a psychological puzzle from her past, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims a bit too closely.

Amy, with a sharp object

I’m most intrigued because it sounds like a welcome departure for Adams. Not only does it mark her return to television (let us not forget she was Jim’s girlfriend on The Office), but she hasn’t really yet played within the psychological thriller genre. I have an inkling it might give us a chance to see the actress anew, a nice welcome change from her recent work. Also, we know Vallée is great with actors so I'm curious to see what he brings out in Adams.

The project, ordered to straight-to-series (we're getting 8 episodes), will be executive produced and co-written by Flynn and Marti Noxon, who’s been on a roll lately what with UnReal and Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce. Speaking of Noxon, she’s readying her directorial debut, To The Bone, a film based on her own experiences with anorexia. Lily Collins has signed on to play the leading role of Ellen, while Keanu Reeves will be playing Dr. William Beckham who’s intent on getting the young woman to get better. As someone who’s loved Noxon’s work for close to two decades—this is the woman, after all, who gave us Buffy’s “The Wish” and Mad Men’s “The Gypsy and the Hobo”—I’m excited to see what she does with this very personal story.

Pre Summer Malaise @ the Multiplex

With DC's Big Three both overperforming and underperforming (if you know what I mean) in Zach Snyder's ugly hit, and all the box office stories being old (like Zootopia, showing incredible legs in its 5th weekend) or depressing (two terrible biopics on screens with Don Cheadle's Miles Davis and Tom Hiddleston's Hank Williams). We've definitely entered the doldrums before the summer explosion of would be all-sequel giants (like Captain America 3, X-Men 6, Finding Nemo 2, Neighbors 2, Ghostbusters 3.0, etcetera), box office charts are too dull and repetitive.

Zootopia is a smash. Holding as well as Frozen did.

So let's just check in with films whose success or lack thereof we're interested in today...

RANDOM BOX OFFICE CHECK-IN
01 Batman v Superman $52.3 off 68% in its second weekend. Ouch. Review
02 Zootopia $20 astonishing hold, off just 16% in 5th week Reviewish
11 Hello My Name is Doris $2.3 going wide in its 4th week Review 
13 I Saw The Light $.7 nearly wide in 2nd week Review
15 Midnight Special $.5 still in very limited release but doing well Positive / Negative
18 The VVitch $.4 in 666 theaters again, Haha, after new trailer 

Platform Releases
19 Everybody Wants Some $.3 NEW Review
28 Miles Ahead $.1 NEW Review
33 Embrace of the Serpent $.07 hit $1 million finally! Interview
41 Knight of Cups $.02 losing screens, flopped as badly as To the Wonder did. Reviewish
42 Krisha $.03 adding screens, crossed $100,000! Review

WHAT DID YOU SEE THIS WEEKEND?

Do tell in the comments.

Olivier Awards Live Stream. And Other Miscellania

Keyframe an interview with Oscar winner Dorothy Malone (OMG) who is now 92. Mambo!
Pajiba adorable family Force Awakens cosplay from Utah
ENO Glenn Close is starring in the revival of Sunset Blvd through May 7th. If you're in London, please go and tell us how it is! 
The Movie Scene Criterion's blindspot for female filmmakers. (I know it's uncool to be critical of Criterion excpet in these rare cases of agreed upon issues -- but they have other blindspots too, like the musical genre)
DListed Ginger Feud: Susan Sarandon and Debra Messing having words over Sanders/Clinton. (Everyone is fired up of late.)

Comics Alliance argues that the bland costumes in X-Men: Apocalypse are a key problem with that franchise -- it's true you could mistake it for a Hunger Games poster.
BuzzFeed "The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck" a good long read by Anne Helen Petersen who also did that recent history of Jennifer Garner

Everything is Gay
Vulture Why Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some is inadvertently gay
New York Post Smithers finally comes out tonight on The Simpsons in its 28th season (yeesh. it's already the longest running sitcom and scripted prime time series of all time on US television)
MNPP [nsfw] Jason remembers Exit to Eden (1994) -- Dana Delany wasn't the only one obsessed with Paul Mercurio's butt

Signs of the Apocalypse
Vulture an engineer built a life-size replica of Scarlett Johansson. Don't look directly into its dead eyes!
Tom & Lorenzo Jessica Chastain posing with a terrifying baby kangaroo. RIP Jess 
i-d interviews the gender neutral artist illma gore who broke the internet with a painting of nude Donald Trump. Unfortunately this means they extended the conversation about his junk. (sigh. this world)

TODAY'S WATCH
The Olivier Awards (essentially the Tony Awards of the UK) stream at 12 PM EST. Familiar Oscar nominated darlings who are up for West End acting awards this year include Nicole Kidman (in Photograph 51, which she hopes to bring to the screen), Mark Rylance, Benedict Cumberbatch, Imelda Staunton (she'll perform and Gypsy, which we reviewed, has a ton of nominations), Judi Dench and Janet McTeer. Cyndi Lauper will also perform since Kinky Boots is up for New Musical. Because the timetables are different with UK and US theater, Kinky Boots (Tony Winner 2013) is up against Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights (Tony Winner Best Musical 2008) at the Olivier Awards 2016. Strange that Kinky Boots hit the US first since it's adapted from a British film.

TODAY'S WATCH #2
Speaking of Theater. Benjamin Walker -- who is great on stage but has yet to successfully make his mark on the big screen despite a few tries -- is doing Patrick Bateman on stage. Who knows if he'll be Tony Nominated but here he is performing "Selling Out" on the Colbert Show

We really need to see some current Broadway shows before the Tony nominations hit!

Review: Everybody Wants Some!!

Eric here, with unhappy thoughts on the new Richard Linklater film. Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!  promises a two-exclamation-point experience, but it unfortunately delivers as more of an ellipsis, in the true Greek meaning of “falling short”.

Now would be the moment in a review where one encapsulates the plot, but hands up on that, because Everybody is plot-free (self-consciously so).  Let’s say it’s structured around a freshman (Blake Jenner) arriving at college three days before classes start in short-shorts (happy 1980!). We follow him through those three days with his baseball-team-cum-frat-brothers in the pursuit of the game and the girls... 

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