Podcast: Summer Fun Times Movie Watching

Nick & Joe & Nathaniel are surveying highlights from the summer season thus far. Nick and Joe love Only Lovers Left Alive and Nathaniel has just returned from How To Train Your Dragon 2. 

00:00 Intro and Lucy
02:20 Alternative Blockbusters & Action Figures
04:00 Favorite Things We Saw This Summer 
08:45 Maleficent and Villainous Backstories 
12:00 Many Tangents: Kill Bill, The Lion King, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Jude Law
19:10 Summer Releases To Come, Melissa McCarthy & Channing Tatum
25:00 Jersey Boys vs. Think Like a Man 2
and...
30:00-48:00 As an appetizer for next week's 2004 10th Anniversary Podcast. We look back at the Oscar winners: Morgan Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Foxx, Hilary Swank and Million Dollar Baby

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download the conversation on iTunes (though sometimes it takes a day to show up there). Continue the conversation in the comments.

Related Reads:
Keith Uhlich on Godzilla and Wesley Morris on Maleficent

Summer Fun Times

Box Office Haiku: The Fault in Cruise's Budget

Cancer romance tops
Critics loved expensive "Edge"
Maleficent's legs!

Mutants or Monsters - 
What did you see this weekend?
Time for Tonys. Bye!  

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE
01 THE FAULT IN OUR STARS $48.2 NEW Review
02 MALEFICENT $33.5 (cum. $127.3) Podcast
03 EDGE OF TOMORROW $29.1 NEW
04 X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST $14.7 (cum. $189.1) Review
05 A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST $7.1 (cum. $30) Guest Review
06 GODZILLA $5.9 (cum. $185) Review & Podcast
07 NEIGHBORS $5.2 (cum. $137.8)  Review & Podcast
08 BLENDED $4 (cum. $36.5)
09 CHEF $2.6 (cum. $10.3)
10 MILLION DOLLAR ARM $1.8 (cum. $31.3)

P.S. Good Captain
Finally lapped those Legos
Champion of the year

Open Thread. What's On Your Cinematic Mind?

My day is jam-packed full: podcast recording, possible movie outing, Tony Awards and such so there's no time to write just yet. But this morning I kept thinking about Hattie McDaniel (random!) and how she must have had just one costume in her dressing room for years: the maid's uniform. We so need a biopic! 

What's on your cinematic mind?

Review: "The Fault In Our Stars"

This review originally appeared in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Shailene Woodley is everywhere. Which... well, I hope you like looking at her face. Not content to be the face of the post-Hunger Games YA dystopia fever (Divergent), she's also continuing that other everygirl thread in her career. She reads more like a girl next door, someone you know, than a STAR!; pretty but not intimidatingly gorgeous, relatable not charismatically mysterious.  She's specalized in earnest portrayals of ordinary teens getting their first taste of the tough stuff in life: death and desertion (The Descendants), disease and disappointment (The Spectacular Now). Hazel Grace Lancaster, her character in The Fault in Our Stars, doubles down and has to deal with all of it. 

Hazel is a 16 year old with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe, which she drags behind her like a depressing carry-on she wishes she could check. Though she's outlived the initial prognosis she's acutely aware that she'll never grow old. Inbetween flashes of well earned self-pity and sarcasm, she worries about her parents (the well cast Sam Trammell and Laura Dern, who is reliably excellent) and how they'll survive her death. She attends a cancer support group for teenagers, at her mother's prodding. Mrs Lancaster hopes it will lift Hazel's depression and help her make friends.

Enter the Dreamboat Boyfriend... 

Click to read more ...

Streep Honors Fonda at AFI

To your left you'll see Meryl Streep speaking about Jane Fonda at the AFI ceremony in her honor which will be broacast on television next Saturday night. (A post birthday weekend treat!)

It's funny because I strike this exact same pose of joyous reverie and 'I can't even believe this exists' prayer-eyes enthusiasm when I speak about Jane Fonda's best work! (In fact, maybe we should do Fonda once we're done with Seasons of Bette?)

Meryl Streep is one of many stars that showed up and there are already several articles floating around about the highlights but I shan't read them because I like to watch these things like a virgin and pretend it's live television and we're all experiencing it together for the first time. But it's true I cheated a little to watch this sneak peek of Meryl talking about her first onscreen appearance in Julia (1977), a debut I've written about previously.

But here's one more Streep photo with the best caption lolz.

The Tribute special will air Saturday June 14th at 9 PM ET/PT on TNT with encores on TCM.