Curio: Jason D'Aquino's Matchbook Miniatures

Alexa here with your weekly film craftiness. Jason D'Aquino is an artist with a gothic sensibility who works in miniature.  With the help of magnification goggles and architectural drafting tools, Jason draws pop-culture-inspired pieces on found ephemera, usually no larger than an inch square.

His matchbook series is perfect for this time of year: creepy graphite portraits tucked inside front-strike matchbooks, with many taken from classic horror movies.  (I particularly enjoy his use of vintage bone screw packaging for Frankenstein.) Here is a selection...  

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Does Eddie Redmayne in "Theory of Everything" = Daniel Day Lewis in "My Left Foot"?

A consistent yet elusive golden thrill: that moment in each year's Oscar race wherein everyone disagrees on who and what is the frontrunner in this or that category.

There are a few different schools of thought out there about who might win Best Actor. I have always believed and probably will continue to believe that the race for Oscar nominations is a very different and altogether more interesting contest than who will eventually win them. Because of this I like to focus on that before I get to "who will win" but I'll make an exception today for fun. Most experts (see this handy Gurus of Gold chart) currently name Michael Keaton (Birdman), Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) and Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) as the leading threats to win the statue. I agree wholeheartedly with this and actually believe that they're the only three who could pull off a win in this particular year (unless American Sniper is some sort of late breaking Oscar stampeding Million Dollar Baby for Bradley Cooper... but I personally doubt it). Who will fill the other two 'not-in-it-for-the-win' slots is anyone's guess. I've returned again to the unpopular notion that Channing Tatum and Steve Carell will both win Best Actor nominations for Foxcatcher but I've mostly done so under the file labeled "Why Not? Who knows?" The competition for those two final slots is where the action is right now and there are about twelve guys who, with the right combo of precursor support, smart campaign moves, media approval, film heat coattails, and/or old fashioned luck could still pull it off. Any of the 12 who aren't out there fighting for it are, frankly, crazy.

Eddie at an AMPAS screening of THEORY OF EVERYTHINGBut, jumping ahead... who will win? 

On twitter today I was briefly discussing this with Kris & Jenelle and found them both sympathetic to my notion that Redmayne has a rather underdiscussed but considerable advantage in that he is enormously charming in person. When races are tight, charm counts for a lot. I've seen him in public thrice, met him once, and this charm is highly visible. What's more his charm never tilts toward cockiness but toward genuine-feeling humility. That's quite a trick if you stop to think about how actors build successful careers...

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Beauty vs Beast: The Babysitter's Club

JA from MNPP here with our final Final Girl match-up "Beauty vs Beast" style before All Hallows hits us on Friday! Over the course of October we've paired off A Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy vs Freddy, Scream's Sidney vs the boys Billy & Stu, last week the Torrances came out to play, and now... well there were Final Girls who came before and there were Final Girls who came after, but to my mind the clearest cut definition, the Platonic Ideal of Final Girlism, every box is checked with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), heroine and survivor of John Carpenter's sleek nightmare Halloween.

Jamie Lee Curtis isn't the preeminant Scream Queen in many a fan's mind for nothing, but before I tilt the scales too far in her favor right here before the match-up let me make it clear that Laurie wouldn't work if she wasn't the immovable object meeting a truly irresistible force...

If the dance she danced was with a weaker partner (can you name JLC's character or the villain in Terror Train, for example?), and let it be said that the only movie character that's ever made its way into one of my nightmares is Michael Myers. That white mask haunting every corner of every frame, night and day-time, outside a window, behind some sheets flapping in the breeze, in every tan station wagon sitting outside your kid's school... the boogeyman is real, you guys.

poll by twiigs.com

You have seven days to carve your jack-o-lanterns, cut eye-holes into your sheets, and choose between the boogeyman and the babysitter -- have at it.

PREVIOUSLY Last week I asked you to pick between The Shining's Jack and Wendy Torrance - well we've found our way out of the hedge maze and just like in the movie it's Wendy that's our survivor, poor Jack left a popsicle in the past. Said Evan:

"Shelley Duvall is a Gumby-esque goddess. Her flailing around the Overlook adds a campiness that feels tonally detached from the rest of the film, but somehow still works."

Stage Door: A Hellavu "On the Town" Revival

New York, New York, a helluva town.
The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun'.
New York, New York, it's a helluva town! ♪ ♫

On the Town, the 1944 stage musical by Betty Comden & Adolph Green, most famous in its 1949 big screen incarnation with Gene Kelly & Frank Sinatra, is back on the boards. (Just in time for Green's centennial this December. What a songwriting pair those two were.)

I always thought the '49 film was somewhat forgotten, at least in comparison to Anchors Aweigh (1945) the first Kelly/Sinatra sailors musical but maybe that's because I'm an Oscar freak and the first pairing was a much bigger Oscar deal in its day with 5 nominations and a win. So I was surprised some years ago that On the Town made the AFI's 25 greatest musicals list at #19 . I always thought of it as very stage bound so I shouldn't have been surprised that it's so utterly delightful on the stage. [more]

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The Honoraries: Maureen O'Hara in Black Swan (1942)

Drum roll please...

Welcome to our miniseries "The Honoraries". From now until November 8th when the Governor's Awards are held, we'll be celebrating the careers of the three Honorary Oscar recipients of 2014 (Maureen O'Hara, Hayao Miyazaki, Claude Carriere) and the Jean Hersholt winner (Harry Belafonte). Because I am behind  schedule and sniffly and sneezy we'll start with a reprise repurposing of a look back to the super entertaining swashbuckler Black Swan starring matinee idol extraordinaire Tyrone Power (who so deserves a biopic) and the woman we've campaigned to receive a Honorary for years and years now. The Academy finally listened and Maureen O'Hara, Queen of Technicolor, we'll finally get her golden due on November 8th. 

Herewith a look back at Black Swan which the Portman/Aronofsky drama was NOT a remake of. Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara don't see themselves in mirrors or have hallucinatory mental breakdowns scored to Tchaikovsky in this swashbuckler. But cinephiles with good taste in Old Hollywood beauties may feel like they're hallucinating when looking at Tyrone Power or Maureen O'Hara in Technicolor. [more...]

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