Vintage '05

The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 2005 is just a week away so get your votes in! Before we get there it's time for more context of that year in showbiz history. Ready? 

Great Big Box Office Hits:
Franchises of multiple kinds dominated the box office with Harry Potter 4, Star Wars Episode 3, and the launches of Chronicles of Narnia and Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy as half of the top ten list that year. Other huge hits were the romantic comedy Hitch, the Brangelina pairing of Mr & Mrs Smith, the remakes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, War of the Worlds, and King Kong, and the comedies Wedding Crashers and Meet the Fockers.

Oscar's Best Picture Nominees: 
In the mid-Aughts the Oscars were veering away from big hits in their Best Picture lineups (to eventually rule-changing results) but Brokeback Mountain was the most successful of the lot with $178 million globally...

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The New Classics: Wonder Boys

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: The Suicide List
Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys understand that writers are often their own most carefully crafted creations. You can often catch the writers in the film pausing to appreciate when they hit upon just the right turn of phrase. Life doesn’t allow for second drafts. So very satisfying to nail it on the first. 

By understanding the way writers reveal themselves through narrative shapes into which they attempt to force their lives, Wonder Boys solves the age-old problem of making writing cinematic. We never hear a word of Grady Tripp’s prose that gets blown away at the film’s end, but after we spend two hours stumbling through the shambolic mess of his life, it feels superfluous. His life is already one long, run-on sentence crying out for an editor’s red pen...

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The beauty of Rodrigo Prieto's cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Our look at 2005's Best Cinematography Oscar nominees continues. First, we explored the filmography of Australian wonder Dion Beebe, and now it's time to shine a light on another master cineaste, this one from Mexico. 

Throughout his career, Rodrigo Prieto has worked with a variety of artists and projects, spanning from independent shorts to internationally acclaimed auteur cinema, from pictures full of Oscar buzz to Taylor Swift video clips. His big breakthrough came in 2000 with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Amores Perros and, since then, he's become a name known to any cinephile worth their mettle. In those early projects, Prieto's style was mostly identifiable by a passion for high-contrast imagery with coarse, grainy textures, but, over the years, he's evolved into a creator of sober imagery that's more interested in evoking a severe elegance than dazzling with aggressive stylings.

Here are 10 highlights from Prieto's enviable filmography…

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"French Exit" News and Enthusiasm

by Nathaniel R

In case you haven't yet heard the New York Film Festival has selected French Exit, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, as its closing night film this October. Key positioning at film festivals is generally a sign of confidence by movie studios though it naturally doesn't always mean anything. But we're very excited nonetheless.

Since four and half months of quarantine or social distancing has us exhausted of streaming movies and television we've thankfully branched out for entertainment. We've read a few books during this COVID summer, too. One was French Exit which we read in anticipation of the film.

La Pfeiffer has appeared in a number of adaptations but only two novels before French Exit had us screaming 'MICHELLE PFEIFFER WAS BORN TO PLAY THIS ROLE. MICHELLE PFEIFFER WILL SLAY THIS!'...

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Horror Actressing: Anna Massey in "Peeping Tom" (1960)

by Jason Adams

The adage goes that curiosity kills the cat, but in Michael Powell's 1960 shocker Peeping Tom it's only half true -- curiosity kills one while saving the other. Mark, the deranged killer camera-man at the film's heart (played with shy finesse by Karlheinz Böhm), finds Helen (Anna Massey) by perching on her windowsill and peering in at her birthday party -- she's his downstairs neighbor and full of life as irrepressible as her vast array of bright monochromatic dresses. They seem an odd match from the start but Helen can't seem to get Mark off her mind -- there's something curious about that upstairs man, and she's going to find out if it... well you know.

Is Helen film's very first Final Girl? 

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