Review: Jake Gyllenhaal's one-man show "The Guilty"

by Matt St Clair

Despite being a proponent of Bong Joon-ho's advice to overcome the "one-inch barrier" of subtitles, I confess that I never got around to seeing the popular Danish film The Guilty (2018) which became an Oscar finalist for Best International Feature in its year. As a result of this blind spot, none of my thoughts on the new English-language remake will pertain to how it measures up to the original. Instead, let's talk about what a tense one man show this is. 

Although Jake Gyllenhaal has actors surrounding him, both in-person and through vocal performances on the telephone, The Guilty is laser focused on his character, 911 dispatcher Joe Baylor. Joe is on the phone trying to save a woman named Emily (voiced by a skillfully elusive Riley Keough) who’s being kidnapped by her ex-husband...

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"The Awful Truth" about Irene Dunne

by Baby Clyde

I adore Irene Dunne. Who doesn’t? She great in everything. She’s great AT everything. So why is she so little known these days? How can a woman who was an A List Movie star for 20 years during the Golden Age of Classic Hollywood be so little remembered? Obviously, she’s a big deal to Old Hollywood loving cinephiles but to the public at large she’s a more or less forgotten. I think this mainly comes down to the fact that she doesn’t really fit in anywhere. She was a Jack of all Trades and consequently isn’t specifically identified with one genre. In many ways her versatility was her downfall (in terms of staying in the public imagination).

She started in movies quite late. Born in 1898 she was already a fair bit older than most of her contemporaries when she headed West, after a successful if unspectacular Broadway career. Making her first film in 1930 she was an immediate hit. Her second film, 1931’s Cimarron, won the Best Picture Academy Award and she received the 1st of her five Best Actress nominations...

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Links: Sally Sings, Scarlett Settles, and Sorkin Speaks

• /Film If you're in Los Angeles, there's a live-to-film concert of Nightmare Before Christmas coming on October 29th and 31st. Billie Eilish will be doing "Sally's Song"
• Vulture Best Actress will cause even bigger than usual stan-wars this season
• Vanity Fair Aaron Sorkin finally breaks his silence about his long working relationship with disgraced bully producer Scott Rudin

• Letterboxd an interview with Melanie Lynskey for her new film Lady of the Manor
• Tom & Lorenzo Maggie & Jake at the Lost Daughter premiere at NYFF
• The Guardian why haven't there been more black queer love stories post Moonlight?
• The Times Jake Gyllenhaal interview
• Uproxx a really fun perceptive review of Venom: Let There Be Carnage
• Variety a report on the "Power of Women" dinner in Beverly Hills
• FSR a brief history of Marcia Lucas and Star Wars

Finally... According to Variety Scarlett Johansson and Disney have settled their Black Widow dispute out of court AND Disney has added that Tower of Terror starring Scarjo is back on. This all obviously means that Scarlett was paid handsomely enough for everyone to make nice again. Deadline, in a follow-up piece, suggests she received an additional $40 million for Black Widow. Good for her again for reminding the mighty Mouse House that a contract is a contract and they can't treat people this way. Especially not people with the means to fight back so Scarlett did everyone in Hollywood a service. (The millions of obnoxious people calling her greedy online should burn their latest paycheck without cashing it -- just one to put their money where their mouth is -- and then clock how they feel about not being paid for their work as promised). The new streaming frontier has thrown Hollywood economics into disarray and that's particularly true for the talent. They used to make lots of money in residuals for example... sort of an accidental pension plan but streamers have not been structured to pay people more if their show happens to be a success (unless it's a long running tv series of course and they need to renew contracts). Eventually all this will be ironed out but until then its safe to assume that the corporations are not willingly sharing the new wealth since they're not yet expected to. Expect a lot more battles over paydays and, one assumes, the actors union getting a little more wise to the new streaming economy, contractually speaking.

HollyShorts Pt. 2: Amanda Seyfried, Sofas, and Cigarettes

By Ben Miller

The virtual HollyShorts Film Festival is in full swing and begins to focus on specific genre categories as the days roll on.  It's an Oscar Qualifying Festival so nominees or even a future Oscar winner could well emerge. In part one we looked at nine shorts with a couple of familiar actors appearing. While there is just too much to cover, here are nine more highlights and a few more celebrity actors, too...

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Revisiting the original "A Star Is Born"

by Cláudio Alves

As the next Supporting Actress Smackdown approaches, The Film Experience is celebrating the cinematic year of 1937. It was then that Hollywood consolidated its favorite myth about itself. While the story model had been making the rounds for ages, both in gossip and on-screen (check out What Price Hollywood?), William A. Wellman's A Star Is Born is the first movie of its name. The tale of Norman Maine and Vicky Lester, his downfall and her rise to fame, would be told three more times to great effect, but one should never forget the original. Not when the movie is this pristine, written to formidable effect by a team that included the legendary Dorothy Parker and performed with utmost conviction by Fredric March and Janet Gaynor…

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