Emmy Category Review: Outstanding TV Movie

We'll be investigating a couple handfuls of Emmy categories before the main event. Here's Juan Carlos Ojano...

Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale in "American Son"

The competition between HBO and Netflix is rarely embodied as well as it in this category for 2020. The giant streamer dominates this category with four nominees, but it's the long-standing Emmy-devouring cable network that could prove the spoiler. This year’s slate of nominees include a film festival acquisition, an interactive film, an episode of an anthology series, a “television event”, and an epilogue to an Emmy-winning drama series. (The last three winners were all episodes of the anthology series Black Mirror. They were Bandersnatch in 2019, USS Callister in 2018, and San Junipero in 2017.)

Let's consider each nominee...

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Shelley Winters @ 100: A Double Life (1947)

For the next few evenings we'll be celebrating the career of Shelley Winters for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

Shelley as a young starlet (1943) and as a prestigious character actress (1968)

Shirley Schrift had been kicking around showbiz for eight years before the needle moved. At just 19 years of age, before she had any real professional credits, she auditioned for Scarlett O'Hara (like virtually every aspiring actress of the time) during the famed nationwide search. Director George Cukor himself (the initial director of Gone With the Wind) advised her to get acting lessons. She did and her work ethic and ambition paid off. Broadway roles followed and Hollywood soon after. The first years of her movie career were mostly filled with uncredited bits in Columbia and MGM pictures. With studio jobs came the usual tinkering with persona starting with a stage name. Shirley became Shelley and the Schrift became Winter and then Winters. Though some screen icons were given the instant star treatment, Winters career was closer to the norm of working actors in studio-era Hollywood. You were just one of thousands of faces but if you were lucky, charismatic, talented, or if executives took an interest (all four was naturally ideal), they'd work carefully on your image and groom you for larger roles.

At twenty-six the actress's luck changed suddenly -- as it does if it changes at all -- with two roles that launched her to stardom...

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Tweetweek

tweets curated by Nathaniel R for your momentary amusement...

A story that ends with a corpse on the floor is a tragedy. A story that begins with a corpse on the floor is a mystery. A story that begins with a floor on a corpse is The Wizard of Oz.

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) July 27, 2020

I know its a weird year for movies and the Oscar will be a mess so I was thinking what if - and hear me out - what if - and I’m just spitballing here - but what if we gave Julia Roberts another Oscar for Erin Brokovich

— Chris Murphy (@christress) August 8, 2020

After the jump unexpected Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Young Girls of Rochefort, and Still Alice jokes, and great casting ideas for anything...

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The beauty of Wally Pfister's cinema

by Cláudio Alves

After looking at Dion Beebe and Rodrigo Prieto's filmographies, it's time to consider another of 2005's Best Cinematographer nominees. Our subject today shall be the man whose gloomy visual idioms helped redefine the superhero genre and its aesthetic possibilities – Wally Pfister.

The Chicago-born cinematographer was, for some years, synonymous with Christopher Nolan's cinema and, more specifically, The Dark Knight trilogy. Weirdly enough, Wally Pfister never considered himself a big fan of Gotham's brooding protector. His favorite iteration of the character wasn't even the comics, but the campy 60s TV show whose visuals are at complete odds with what Pfister would devise for the 21st century Batman. Still, his career is not all caped crusaders, and the director of photography has established a personal style that transcends genres. Wide lenses, low angles, steely palettes, horizontal motion, and visible light sources are his calling card. At least, they were, before he abandoned the craft of cinematography to try directing.

Here are 10 highlights from Wally Pfister's influential career…

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2005: Mercedes Morán in "The Holy Girl"

by Nick Taylor

Few working directors are as exciting as Argentianian genius Lucrecia Martel. To talk about her work means to talk about her bold experiments with lensing and editing, her immaculately controlled sound design, her unusual risks with structure and dense layering of themes in her screenplays, all capped off with a very particular sense of humor. Martel’s films don’t immediately spring to mind as performance venues, but one of the many (many) things I love among her small but indomitable filmography is her ability to coax tonally compelling characterizations from her actors, rather than overwhelming them under the weight of her own directorial idiosyncrasies. Daniel Giménez Cacho is able to find a million minute gradations of wounded pride, misplaced vanity, and diminished hope in Zama, keying to Martel’s riskiest wavelength by resourcefully flexing a very deadpan poker face. The many women running around La Ciénaga are charged with their own peculiar energies that combine and differentiate from each other in endlessly fascinating ways.

Mercedes Morán, a high point in the latter film, returns for The Holy Girl in one of its main roles, and she not only delivers the best performance in the film but sets a high bar for what an actor can do in Martel’s canon...

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