Beauty vs. Beast: Evil Julianne & Evil Eddie

Jason is out of town so it falls on me to complete his Beauty vs. Beast duties this week. I cycled through so many possibilities before I succumbed to this fact: I spend at least 15 minutes of every day lately fantasizing that off camera  Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmaybe are reenacting mother/son Savage Grace sequences at all of their awards season campaign stops. In addition to being the frontrunners for Best Actress and Best Actor they also are the primary villains of two of this weekend's big poorly reviewed would be blockbusters that busted no blocks. So a twofer today, Savage Grace's psychotic beauty and murderous beast and Jupiter Ascending and The Seventh Son's Beauties who are also both Beasts.

Two Gingers, Twice. You've Got Two Votes. Go! 

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LAST WEEK
Last time we looked to Groundhog Day and discovered we had more wintriness to endure. The battle of Phil Connor vs. Punxsutawney Phi is apparently doomed to repeat itself forever; you couldn't decide resulting in the second 50/50 split in this series history (the first and only other time was the Black Swan episode) 

Brookesboy summed up your wishywashiness this cycle

I started voting for little Phil because he's got better hair. But it was only a shadow of a doubt. Gotta go with Bill.

Looking Down the Road: So This Is Goodbye

Manuel here, braving a sick day bringing you a short and sweet recap from this week's SanFran shenanigans. Even if this week’s episode of Looking hadn’t ended with one of my favorite college-throwback songs I overplayed during many a heartbreak (that entire EP is to die for!), “Looking Down the Road” would have easily become my favorite season 2 episode so far. I wish I weren't so indisposed otherwise I rattle off an endless valentine to this episode which saw itself resetting (or re-directing) our three main leads lives with Dom and Lynn's relationship seemingly at an end, Kevin and Patrick's affair finally buckling under its own platonic weight and Agustin landing a job alongside Eddie at the trans center.

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Belated Thoughts on This Weekend's Unintentional Selma / Birth of a Nation Confluence

We're Living History Right Now

 I meant to post something this over the weekend but kept freezing from indecision and confusions about what to write. If you were offline this weekend, you might have missed that one of the most important films of all time, Birth of a Nation (1915) hit its Centennial anniversary. As you know we love to celebrate centennials at TFE but how to even deal with that one? Hideously racist though it was and is, D.W. Griffith's blockbuster informed and shaped much of this artform, the movies, that we all love today. I first saw it in an Introduction to Film type class in my freshman year of college and as creepy as it was to see the lovely crucial silent superstar Lillian Gish used as a pawn to trump up its racial hatred as she is saved from a rapist (a white actor in blackface) by the Klu Klux Klan, it was also startling to see what a technical and narrative leap it was in terms of early cinema.

And the exact same weekend that that film, which has long been a (deserved) target of the NAACP was hitting 100*, The NAACP was holding their annual Image Awards. Selma won big at  (but let's pretend that bizarre director snub -- the guy who made The Equalizer beat Ava DuVernay? -- didn't happen. But the NAACP hasn't been the only group cheering Selma on. It's been enjoying a very healthy if unspectacular box office as a Best Picture Oscar nominee, Ava received a historic Folden Globe nomination late last year, and her films Original Song "Glory," also Oscar nominated, was performed at the Grammys yesterday.

At first I was all... this is such a gross coincidence and I'll just send people to fine articles at the New York Post and Vulture.  But then I realized how beautiful the juxtaposition was in terms of progress.

100 years of tumultuous history have passed between those two films and when the smoke clears we see that America has come a long long way. These battles for basic human dignity and equality are never fully won of course (Black History is hardly the only history plagued with civil rights violations and demonization of "the other") and you have to keep fighting them. But for all the nostalgia the past can bring to people, sometimes the now is vastly preferrable.

'Selma' beauties enjoying their big NAACP night

And, wouldn't you know it... Martin Luther King Jr said it best himself.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice

* There are different dates online for when Birth of a Nation premiered. Wikipedia says February 8th, the bulk of internet articles about its Centennial appeared on February 7th, but a lot of articles on the film mention a March 3rd premiere.

Links

The Carpetbagger on the rising red carpet revolt. No more 'who are you wearing?' no more Mani-cams?... 
Lainey Gossip ... but not everyone is okay with this. Here's an angry report on Nicole Kidman at the Grammys
Playbill Anna Kendrick will perform at the Oscars but they're not saying what. My guess is that they're doing a 50th anniversary Sound of Music tribute -- I just hope they make Best Actress Julie Andrews a part of it somehow.
Vimeo "Life Inside Jabba the Hutt"
EW longform goes 'sex lies and fifty shades of grey' 
Film School Rejects allows for the non-story silliness of imagining Ava DuVernay directing a superhero movie
Hubpages how Franklin became the first black Peanuts comic strip character
Pajiba on the relatable marital awkwardness of HBO's Together starring Melanie Lynskey and Mark Duplass
AV Club remembers Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen in Starman (1984). It's a goodie

Wachowski World
Hitfix Motion Captured The Wachowskis interviewed on the insanity of Jupiter Ascending, Wizard of Oz and Brazil as influences and more
Variety thinks that Jupiter Ascending failed because it was too original 
Hollywood Elsewhere ...but Jeff Wells thinks it failed for the opposite reason 

LGBT Interest
Gawker Rich Juzwiak is brilliant as usual - a must read on Lance Bass's "masculine" Reality TV wedding
Women in Hollywood Lionsgate won the bidding war for Julianne Moore and Ellen Page drama Freeheld 
In Contention redemption might be coming for the much maligned 54 (1998) with Mark Christopher's directors cut? I remember loving his Alkali, Iowa short which first won him attention but the version of 54 that hit theaters was weak. The new version which is said to contain 40 minutes (!!!) of unseen footage and excise 30 minutes of studio-forced reshoots premieres at Berlinale tomorrow!

Living For Love & Skimming Through Grammys

Annie takes us to church, then puts a spell on usWith Taylor Swift's cheekily titled "1989" the music world's best-seller of 2014, and a least half of all movie franchises with their roots firmly embedded in the "me" decade is pop culture forever frozen in 80s amber? We hardly needed another reminder that the 1980s are still roaring but what were the chances that the two best performances of the Grammy's would come from Annie Lennox and Madonna?

I don't ask this as someone with significant ties to loving the 1980s (though I am someone like that) but from genuine surprise. It's not that there aren't great performers that are very now but they all seemed conspicuously absent last night or visibly subdued within the long procession of funureal ballads the Grammys showcased. Hell, even Pharell's boppy "Happy" which memorably gave us Streep shimmying and Nyong'o jumping to her feet at the Oscars last year, was performed with 'everything is not awesome' minor key ominousness.

After the jump movie & Oscar related Grammy stuff and big wins. But first a few words on Madonna and the delicious deep red new video from the undeposed Queen of Pop.

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