Lana @ 100: Love Has Many Faces

Celebrating Lana Turner's Centennial. Here's Baby Clyde...

1965 was the year Martin Luther King marched on Selma, The Civil Rights Act was signed and Malcolm X was assassinated. The Vietnam War was raging, London was swinging, The Beatles played Shea Stadium and Dylan went electric. The times they were a changing, but some things stayed the same because this was also the year Lana Turner starred in the trashiest of all her tawdry melodramas, the Acapulco-set potboiler Love Has Many Faces or as it should have been called ‘Lana Has Many Costume Changes’.

In it she plays Kit Chandler a rich, international glamourpuss, with luxury apartments around the globe, who chooses to reside in the luxury Mexican resort with her estranged husband Pete (Cliff Robertson). When a dead body washes up on the shore it transpires that the deceased beach boy was one of Lana’s many conquests and she's the main suspect in the murder investigation....

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Who Will Be The Oscar Acting Surprises & Snubs?

 by Christopher James

Does Golden Globe + SAG + Critics Choice automatically equal Oscar?It’s been a busy week of precursors. With the Golden Globes, SAG Awards and Critics Choice Awards all announced, we have a lot more clarity on the acting categories in the Oscar race. How accurate are these precursors when it comes to predicting Oscar nominees? Let’s dive into the stats and see if this can help us solve who will be our Oscar nominated actors.

For the purposes of analysis, we looked back from 2003 - 2019, as 2003 was the first year the Critics Choice awards had five nominees. Now they have expanded to eight nominees in some categories, but that’s another rant for another time...

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All That Link

• A24 virtual two week engagment of Minari starts 2/12. Tickets now on sale!
• Vanity Fair's awesome annual Oscar special -- you'll remember I wrote a piece on Parasite last year for it! -- is arriving for subscribers. The cover story on Chadwick Boseman is available now even if you don't subscribe
• HuffPost on Michelle Pfeiffer's underrated skill as a comic actress
• AV Club a review of Mark Harris' new film biography book Mike Nichols A Life

More after the jump including Britney Spears, Pleasure, Olivia Newton-John, Borderlands, and still more showbiz obituaries (what is happening lately?)

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Showbiz History: The Warriors, Like a Virgin, and Berlinale Winners

9 random things that happened on this day, February 9th, in showbiz history...

1964 It's the first appearance of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. 73 million people were watching.

1971 Supposedly All in the Family's fifth episode "Judging Books by Covers", airing on this night, is the first on American TV dealing with homosexuality. Archie Bunker mistakenly assumes a guy he meets is gay and then later learns that one of his best friends actually is.

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Interview: Makeup artist Denise Kum on working with Gong Li and Mulan's epic battles

by Nathaniel R

Gong Li and Denise Kum on the set of Mulan

Mulan may have been released in September but some of its most memorable looks -- battle scarred villains, matchmaking painted faces, Gong Li's masked face and taloned hands, and Mulan's hair flowing in battle -- are still remarkably easy to conjure up with great clarity months later. We were thrilled to speak with its gifted makeup artist Denise Kum about her career and work on the Disney epic.

We spoke over Zoom while she was in Prague completing work on a World War II drama called Operation Mincemeat before diving into full fantasy with Amazon's forthcoming series The Wheel of Time based on Robert Jordan's bestsellers. Kum's work stretches from lush period pieces, through grounded dramas, to high fantasy and superhero franchises. She likes to genre hop. One consistent throughline in her work, though, is her frequent collaborators. "I've worked with Niki since I was very young," she says with obvious love for Mulan's director Niki Caro. Mulan was also a reunion with the costume designer Bina Daigeler who she's known for years and production Designer Grant Major "I've know him since I was, god, 18 or 19. He's actually the godfather of one of my daughters." This tight-knit filmmaking family's shorthand was helpful on Mulan though she's quick to add that "That's an unnatural situation for a film of this scale."

[this interview has been edited for length and clarity]

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