Best Shot: "HEAVENLY CREATURES"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Each week we assign a movie. Participants are asked to select its best shot and post it to their own webspace by Wednesday evening. Everyone is welcome to join in. Next week's topic is Beauty & The Beast (1991) and there had better be a big crowd. Who doesn't love that movie?

Today we're gazing at...

HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

With last year's mania for the dehumanizing Kick-Ass, this Spring's death-skilled Hanna and the internet's current casting obsessions with Hunger Games, in which a young girl Katniss (to be played by Jennifer Lawrence) becomes a killer to stay alive in a future that loves murder games, you'd think just about every other violent act in the world nowadays was committed by teenage girls. This type of violence can still shock onscreen -- and I hope it always will -- but it almost never arrives with both bludgeon force and emotional acuity the way it does in Peter Jackson's hysteric and hysterically imaginative Heavenly Creatures.

The problem that Heavenly Creatures poses with a "best shot" blogging experiment is not that it doesn't have these images, but that the images are rarely static and eager to be captured with your typical screen capturing devices. Only full on film clips would suffice. Peter Jackson loves the motion in his motion pictures and Juliet ("Introducing... Kate Winslet") and Pauline ("And Introducing... Melanie Lynskey") are about the most spastic female characters of the past couple of decades outside of maybe Molly Shannon's "Superstar!" They're constantly flinging themselves about. (read the full post.)

Click to read more ...

"these strange links happen all the time"

Alt Film Guide reports on a fascinating-sounding Art Direction seminar coming to Hollywood later this month. It's $40 for the whole series / $30 for students. I'd sign up if I were in LA. Several Oscar nominees are speaking.
Towleroad Remember when Julianne Moore was supposed to play Hilary Clinton?
Time is taking your votes for their upcoming Time 100 list. The list is narrowed down to 200 now. Naturally some movie people are on the finalist list including but by no means limited to Lee Unkrich of Pixar fame, Angie & Brad, and to my delight, The Bening.
Gold Derby Speaking of Annette Bening. She's getting another honor this time from Women in Film in June. But weirdness. They've named Katie Holmes "the face of the future" Um... This isn't 1999.

Go Fug Yourself imagines a conversation between Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban. Comes with the requisite poll of course. Do you like this look?
Twitch, noticing all the underage killers in movies, does the only sane thing one can do: LIST.
Stale Popcorn posts his self proclaimed crowning moment: a top ten Renée Zellweger facial expressions in her Case 39 movie. Oh Zeéeeee you expressive loon.
Viktor Hertz Pictogram Movie Posters? Have I ever shared these before? I can't keep track. They're so fun. The best ones are for the horror movies like Psycho and Rosemary's Baby and Magnolia. Well, Magnolia is not technically a horror movie but I like that poster too. Horror of the soul perhaps?

I didn’t love him when we met and I did so many bad things to him that he doesn’t know. Things that I want to confess to him, but now I do. I love him…. This isn’t any fucking medication talking! This isn’t. I don’t know, I don’t know. Can you give me nothing? You have power of attorney! Can you go, can you go in the final fucking moments and change the will? I don’t want any money. I couldn’t live with myself with this thing that I’ve done. I’ve done so many bad things...

Happy Birthday, Celluloid!

JA from MNPP here, with your cinematic history lesson of the day. On this day one-hundred and forty-two years ago, the inventor John Wesley Hyatt patented a process of mixing together cellulose nitrote and camphor, which he'd meant as a means of producing cheap billiard balls (which had up til then been made strictly of ivory). They'd actually purchased the patent from a British inventor, Alexander Parkes, who'd gone bankrupt twice over trying to figure out a good use for his substance (including creating a line of waterproofed clothing) - lawsuits inevitably followed between them once the plastic began to take off, but it was Hyatt who's credited with calling it celluloid and figuring out its final composition.

Although the process began ten years later, it wasn't until another ten years after that, around 1888, that celluloid began being sliced down into sheets for photography (check out Hannibal Goodwin and his five million dollar winning lawsuit against Eastman Kodak over that), which by 1889 made their way into Thomas Edison's grubby hands and the rest is cinematic history.

Unfortunately celluloid had some disadvantages. It doesn't age well, and a lot of early films were ruined because of it. And it turned out to be highly flammable - the supposedly regal movie-house in my tiny upstate NY hometown actually burned to the ground back in the 1940s because of it - and it'd started being replaced by acetate and polyester by the 1950s (and now of course everything's digital). Still, even if the substance itself hasn't lasted, the word itself still carries weight.

This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."
-- Alfred Hitchcock in his AFI Lifetime Acheivement Award speech, March 1979 

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First and Last, All Things.

the first and last images from motion pictures.

Can you guess the movie?

New on DVD: Zeéeeee, Tron, Jack, and Swans Hangin' On

Just out on DVD: Casino Jack, Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I Love You Philip Morris, Little Fockers, The Tacqwacores, Tron Legacy and the final season of Friday Night Lights (yes! can't wait).

Which went on your queue immediately?

And finally, I kid you not, "The Renée Zellweger Collection" has hit stores. I always find these three-pack "collections" so bizarre as they're usually highly unrepresentative of someone's career. The films featured in this one are ME MYSELF AND IRENE, DOWN WITH LOVE, and MY ONE AND ONLY. I guess Down With Love is totally "a Renée Zelwegger picture" but the other two? Well, I haven't seen My One and Only so I shouldn't say that. Have you?

P.S. I like Down With Love. Fun movie. I like Peyton Reed so much but his career doesn't seem to be happening in the way I'd hoped post Bring It On (2000). Sigh.

Meanwhile, Black Swan which came out last week on DVD is still trying to hold on to our collective psyche by launching midnight screenings hosted by famous queens.

Shequida and Manila Luzon (one of my favorite girls on RuPaul's Drag Race) hosted the event which got the crowd dancing here in NYC.

Events were hosted at midnight in Los Angeles (there's the wonderful "Chloe" to your far left -- her YouTube videos sending up Chloë Sevigny as fashion hipster icon are a treat -- with "Rhea Litre"), Chicago (that's Frida Lay as the Black Swan and "Mercedes" as the White Swan) and San Francisco (Heklina and Sister Roma hosted).

Attendees were encouraged to dress up of course.

I totally considered going as my girl Winona in a silver X dress with a nail file protuding from my cheek but alas... my ideas are always bigger than time and my budget can account for.