Year in Review: 20 Best Movie Posters

by Nathaniel R

The Year in Review party continues. Contrary to those headshots against monochrome backgrounds titles you see while scrolling through Netflix, the movie poster as an artform is not dead. It just has diminished in popularity and might soon be evolving. The upright rectangle has been the norm for almost a century, probably because it was just-right for magazines and newspapers. But both of those modes of information-distribution are outmoded. The standard shape might still continue in dominance, though, given that it's also the shape of a phone but who knows. But we digress. The 20 best movie posters for 2020 films after the jump...

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Showbiz History: 12 Years a Slave, Mama Rose, and More...

5 random things that happened on this day, January 4th, in history...

1853 New York born Solomon Northup regains his freedom after abduction and enslavery in 1841 in Washington DC. The abolitionist thankfully recorded his life story in the memoir 12 Years a Slave which became an instant best-seller. Over a century and a half later, the film version by the British auteur Steve McQueen deservedly won the 2013 Best Picture Oscar. 

1903 A horrific end to a story of animal cruelty and a shameful event in the then nascent film-industry, too. Topsy, a 27 or so year-old elephant, who was ripped from her family as a baby in Southeast Asia and never adjusted well to life in the America circus, is famously electrocuted in Coney Island...

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Year in Review: Greatly Abbreviated Box Office Lists and 'What Ifs'

the year in review lists are winding down but not quite yet done!

If you had predicted that Bad Boys 3 would be the biggest grosser of 2020 in January, nobody would have believed you.

We shan't rehash what's happened to movie theaters this past year (everyone knows). But normally at this time we have tons of fun compiling extensive deep-dive lists of how well movies of various genres and types of releases did. And of course we can reflect on how the success impacted their awards chances (Parasite never would have won Best Picture without that incredible theatrical run, becoming the biggest subtitled hit in the US in the past 16 years. Since there was only the first three months of the year with normal box office the lists are VERY strange and in some cases we just couldn't do them. But here's an extremely abbreviated version of what we normally do...

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Showbiz History: Aretha, Mame, and Florence Pugh

5 random things that happened on this day, January 3rd, in showbiz history

1897 Marion Davies born in Brooklyn. The 1930s film star is best remembered in history as the mistress of tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Multiple films have featured their relationship including current Oscar hopeful Mank (2020).

1952 Dragnet begins airing in its regular time slot Thursdays at 9:00 PM on NBC (a couple of weeks after the pilot airs). The influential series -- which basically created the #1 tv genre, the procedural, will run for eight seasons, be relaunched in the late 1960s for another four seasons and spawn three movies. The last of those was a comedy in 1987  starring Tom Hanks just before Big served as the bridge between popular comic actor and serious actor, netting Hanks his first Oscar nod. Two short-lived one season attempts to revive Dragnet were attempted in 1989 and 2003 respectively...

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Joan Micklin Silver (1935-2020)

by Nathaniel R

A appreciative goodbye to the writer/director Joan Micklin Silver who died on New Years Eve at 85 years of age of vascular dementia. Long before elevating female directors was a thing for the media or the industry, she was out there doing her thing. Imagine the lift for female directors in the 20th century to get not one but several films made with little media attention or social justice support. The NY Times has a fine overview of the type of obstacles she faced.

Silver's directorial debut came in the 1970s with the Jewish drama Hester Street which earned a well deserved Best Actress nomination for Carol Kane and a WGA nomination for Micklin herself for Comedy writing -- though what an odd classification that was for the immigrant drama...

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