Almost There: Burl Ives in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1958, Burl Ives won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Some cinephiles would, understandably, assume that the great honor came to him as a reward for his legendary turn as Big Daddy in the silver screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn't so, however. Burl Ives did indeed win his Oscar for playing the impassioned patriarch of some portentous American clan, but it was for a story set in the arid landscapes of the Far West rather than the humid heat of Mississippi. The winning movie was William Wyler's The Big Country, a sublime epic of its genre whose taste for cruelty is only matched by the lushness of its score. It's not a well-remembered flick despite its quality, and, while great, Ives' supporting turn pales in comparison to what he did as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that same cinematic year...

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Curio: Paul Harding's Collectible Heroes

by Nathaniel R

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As someone who studied illustration but couldn't wrap my hands around three-dimensional work, I've always been fascinated and envious of sculptors. In fact, whenever I'm in a museum I'm much more likely to drift towards sculptures than stare at paintings. In fan culture sculptors have a special if uncelebrated place. Someone has to sculpt those action figures and collectibles you can buy and CG animation involves lots of 3 dimensional rendering. Paul Harding recently caught our eye for a jaw-dropping rendering of the principal characters of our current favourite comedy series What We Do in the Shadows (pictured above). It's brilliant caricature and the details in the expressions are joy-making -- look at Nadja's eye roll! 

More examples of his work after the jump...

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Links: An Amy Adams Double, Nolan Rankings, and Homosexual Erasure

Must Reads
• Vulture Rachel Handler hilariously ranks Christopher Nolan's movies by how willing she would be to die for the privilege of seeing them in movie theaters.
• The Hollywood Report looks back at the making of X-Men (2000) and how it created a monster with young director Bryan Singer

More after the jump including Amy Adams-centric news, "Do You Have the Antibodies?" a hit waiting to happen, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's failures, a new Brad Pitt project and more...

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Bradley Cooper entering PT Anderson's world

by Nathaniel R

We were wondering when we'd get casting news for Paul Thomas Anderson's next film and it's finally starting to trickle in. Though the untitled movie revoles around a famous teenage actor attending high school in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s (yes, we're thrilled that PTA is returning to Boogie Nights time and locale) the buzz is that it's actually an ensemble piece. And there are supposedly at least three prominent adult roles. Bradley Cooper is in talks for one of them but we don't know which. The juiciest adult roles are rumored to be a film director, an agressive agent, and a closeted politician.

Cooper is one of the best actors of his generation so we can't wait to see what Anderson can pull from him since the auteur is just amazing with  actors...

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2005: When Tilda Swinton went full Hollywood

Please welcome back former contributor Sean Donovan who returns to the fold...

With the 2005 Supporting Actress Smackdown quickly approaching TFE, let’s take a moment to think about a future Best Supporting Actress winner who was just then gathering her strength, summoning her powers of fierce alien glamour, and dipping a toe into Hollywood. 2005 was a pivotal year for Tilda Swinton in that it was her first engagement with big budget genre filmmaking. Tilda had found her way onto some Hollywood projects prior to this -- The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001) with Tom Cruise, Jonze and Kaufman’s contemporary classic Adaptation (where she briefly shares the screen with Meryl Streep and my little gay heart explodes) -- but 2005 brought bombast, costuming, and blockbuster genre storytelling to her body of work...

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