Nicole Does Cannes, Part Deux.

Jose here. After its fall from grace (pardon the pun, no, really do) less than a day ago, Grace of Monaco is back with a punch, having just been selected as the film that will open the 67th annual Cannes Film Festival in May. Just yesterday, it was announced that the movie had been pulled from its March 14 release date, leading people to assume that the film was in trouble. The Hollywood Reporter speculated that director Olivier Dahan hadn't delivered a final cut to The Weinstein Company, adding fuel to a fire started last year when the outspoken director accused Harvey Weinstein of cutting a "catastrophic" version of his film.

More on Grace of Monaco, Nicole Kidman and Cannes openers after the jump! 

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We Can't Wait #14: Veronica Mars

[Editor's Note: We Can't Wait is a Team Experience series, in which we highlight our top 14 most anticipated films of 2014. Here's Dancin' Dan on Veronica Mars.]

Veronica Mars
Kristen Bell reprises her role as the title character in this neo-noir murder mystery that picks up nine year after where Season 3 of the eponymous TV series left off.

Talent
Rob Thomas, creator of the original series is in the director's chair. Kristen Bell is joined in front of the camera by other series regulars including Jason Dohring.

Why We Can't Wait

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Oscar's Losing Game

Andrew here, to talk about the Oscar nominations. It’s been one week since they were announced and are we all talked out? Of course not. The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences can't catch a break from its loudest critics each year. People often view the Oscars as some kind of monolothic entity and not as a group of individual persons with specific tastes, which grants them the aura of sinister agenda like a Bond villain. And given the weight of the crown -- Oscar remains the most significant film award -- they're subject to the sort of ardent scrutiny that would reveal flaws in even the most ostensibly immaculate of things. 

Whether you're a lover or agnostic on AMPAS, there is no denying that they provide fodder for movie conversation the way few other things do. But there's one frustratingly circular and inescapable bit of criticism which comes each year that I find particular exasperating. I'm referring to the complaints which always follow a critically maligned film earning Oscar laurels, specifically for technical proficiency. “Did you hear The Lone Ranger earned as many nominations as Inside llewyn Davis.” or “The Transformers trilogy has earned more collective Oscar nominations than the Before trilogy.” or “The Wolfman has an Oscar, Peter O’Toole does not.” And so on. I almost always think it’s meant facetiously, until I realise these lazy claims are used as legitimate attempts to illegitimatise the worth of the AMPAS (an entirely different topic altogether). It’s all part of a yearly unchanging cry from movie lovers, “How can X (Terrible Film)  be an Oscar winner/nominee when Y (Great Film) is not?" [more...]

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Short Link 12

Today's Must Read
The Dissolve Nathan Rabin discusses his own group home experience and his relationship to Short Term 12 which is now out on DVD and BluRay

General Linkage
THR Garrett Hedlund offered the plum Captain Hook role in Joe Wright's Peter Pan adaptation Pan
Ken Levine, inspired by Quentin Tarantino, makes a major announcement 
Variety Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra) just sentenced to 8 to 20 years in Nevada! Yikes. 

AV Club Her trailer recut to replace Scarlett Johansson's voice with, uh, Philip Seymour Hoffman's. It's terrifying. you have been warned.
IAR interviews Destin Cretton on Short Term 12
THR a non controversy at Oscar on that strange Original Song nomination from Alone But Not Alone. Pity that Oscar is such sticklers about the rules on some classic important films like Moulin Rouge! and then lets things slide in weird cases like this
Coming Soon the Oscar winning doc Man in Wire could get the narrative feature treatment from Robert Zemeckis
/Film Disney's Frozen getting a sing-along version next weekend
BuzzFeed Rachel McAdams shares her two favorite lines from Mean Girls, 10 years later
Pajiba Chris Pratt sings a song about Jean Claude Van Damme's Sudden Death on Parks and Recreation

Finally...
EW Grace of Monaco pulled from the Weinstein Company's release schedule?!? Don't they realize I need biannual doses of Kidman like Virginia Woolf needs exhilarating trips to London? Readers who've asked how I'm coping should know that I have not yet loaded my coat up with stones. But there will be a reckoning if we never get to see it. 

P.S. Bette Davis thinks you're a vile sorry little bitch*

*show of hands: who thinks Bette is saying "sour" rather than "sorry" - I can't decipher it 

A brief history of faux-Frankensteins

Tim here. All this talk of the great-looking movies we can’t wait to see, and the Sundance crop of interesting (or semi-interesting, or bad) indie films is pulling focus from the reality of filmgoing as most of us live it. Which is that it’s January, and unless you’re still cleaning off the last end-of-year films as they trickle out into medium-wide release, the options for seeing a movie in theaters right now are dire.

Case in point, tomorrow finds the release of I, Frankenstein, which, if I’m being honest, is very much I movie I’ve been looking forward to as much as anything on my official We Can’t Wait ballot, though for entirely different reasons: the combination of Frankenstein, demons, and chiseled abs promises bad movie awesomeness of a sort that I don’t expect to be replicated anytime soon.

It’s not the first nominal Frankenstein adaptation to go so far afield from the source material, either; not even the first outrageously bad one. There is a grand tradition of Frankenstein-derived films so utterly bizarre and off-the-wall and divorced from Shelley that they make I, Frankenstein look dull, sedate, and conventional. After the jump, let's take a quick look at some of the strangest.

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