Merry Link-Mas

Grantland Mark Harris on The Good Wife and Scandal and TV trends in 2013
Variety on that misleading marketing campaign for Frozen and how it paid off. I feared this would happen, not the success but the "our lie worked!" part. I firmly believe that the movie would have been just as successful if they hadn't lied about what it was. Any movie that drops in the low teen percentile from week to week at the box office was going to be a huge smash hit regardless. People love this one and are either returning or telling all their friends that it's great.

Fun 2013 Lists!
The Wire talks the 13 best SNL skits of the year. I rarely watch the show so this all felt new to me!
The Playlist Redbox's most rented titles in 2013 reveal the immense popularity of Melissa McCarthy. I wonder what she's charging now per film?
Junkee Glenn looks at the best of Queer cinema
Towleroad I neglected to share it but I love this 'most powerful coming out stories of the year' and how did I not write about Maria Bello!
The New Yorker's 13 most read posts
Huffington Post Huffpo reviews the year and all the things white people stole from black people from Miley Cyrus twerking to Julianne Hough's Halloween "black face" and dubs this 'the year of cultural appropriation.' Oh, HuffPo, that's EVERY year in our regurgitated pop culture 

And Check This Out...

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The most popular TV show set in each state as determined by Business Insider. Hat tip to i09 for this juicy discovery. A lot of it is just as you'd expect (The Golden Girls for Florida!, Seinfeld for New York!) but others are more surprising or like memory jogs. If you're from the States do you like your state's representative show?

Gravity's screenplay: to nominate or not to nominate?

Have you seen this "From Script to Screen" video for Gravity? It's basically a very concise and very watchable "Making of" documentary for the YouTube generation. That generation is basically all of us now, whenever we were born. "You've only got 5 minutes? Here you go!"

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Stage Door: Why no remake of "Oliver"?

In just one year's time the newest incarnation of Annie will be on movie screens. It'll be the third major filmed version after a handful of Broadway revivals. So why can't its boy counterpart Oliver! get any love? Both are musicals about optimistic orphans who get caught up in a web of criminal activity involving boozy lying scene-stealing adult caretakers (Miss Hannigan and Fagin). Both orphans escape the clutches of criminals to find great happiness / wealth in a proper home in time for the curtain call. The sun'll come out tomorrow, indeed.

I'm on record as being a huge fan of the much maligned Best Picture winner Oliver! (1968)  but the current stage production at Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey (running through the 29th if you're interested) is unlikely to provide me with lots of new company. [more]

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The Wolf on Link Street

Parade 10 movie locations worth visiting from Walter Mitty to Sideways to Harry Potter and more...
Cinephilia and Beyond has links to all 2013 screenplays available for download legally direct from studios
New Yorker the best movies of the year
Slant best posters of the year
Variety The Santa Barbara Film Festival is celebrating the Before trilogy with screenings. I love that trilogy but what ISN'T Santa Barbara celebrating? I swear they have some tribute to every single contender... they're like the NBR, carefully giving out enough awards to get EVERY studio to their annual dinner

The Onion "9 Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence That Will Make You Reassess The Scope Of The 1986 Vienna Convention On The Law Of Treaties Between States And International Organizations"
Deadline Brie Larson and Jessica Lange are joining lead Mark Wahlberg in the James Caan lead role in a remake of The Gambler (1974)
Vulture John Ridley on the toughest scene to write in 12 Years a Slave, the one with Alfre Woodard 

Wolfy
Dealbook how do Jordan Belfort's victims feel about The Wolf of Wall Street?
In Contention counts down Leonardo DiCaprio's best performances. Wolf scores pretty high
The Wrap a Wolf of Wall Street Academy screening gone berserk. Scorsese gets a "shame on you" from a voter.
Awards Daily Sasha Stone also chimes in with a "this is why we can't have nice things" though I'm like "this is the last time anyone is going to call the movie 'nice'. 

It's been the talk of twitter today but I love David Poland's truth-serving response most...

@Matthew_Lucas But I hate these hyped up stories about Academy screenings that are always f-ing Rashomon with slight dementia

— David Poland (@DavidPoland) December 23, 2013

An Oscar question
Here's a new spot for Dallas Buyers Club trumpeting its prize haul thus far. That awards loot is somehow more than what's sunk in if you know what I mean... but it's been a noisy season and Focus is relatively quiet. Is Dallas Buyers Club something we're underestimating outside the obvious places (Actor & Supporting Actor)

Curio: My 2013 Wish List

Alexa here. 2013 has been filled with movie gifts aplenty, my favorites thus far being the smaller-scale treasures Stories We Tell and Frances Ha. But enough pixels have been spilled over the best films of 2013, so I'm using this space to share the film curios I've been dreaming of this year, all of the art variety. Some of these I've already gifted myself, too impatient to wait for someone else to get on it!  Here's hoping you get everything you're wishing for this year, too.

1. Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground by Matthew Chojnacki. This volume nicely covers some of the best indie film posters out there, and includes some of my favorite artists in the process. I couldn't wait for the holidays so I bought it off of my own Amazon wish list; it's sitting on our coffee table right now.  

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