Jake Gyllenhaal will be visiting 'Fun Home'

by Murtada Elfadl

Gyllenhaal with Tesori in 2018

Thankfully the box office failure of Cats hasn’t put the kibosh on green lighting musicals for the big screen. The latest Broadway sensation to get the big screen treatment will be Fun Home, based on illustrator Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her bittersweet relationship with her father. Yes that’s the Bechdel of the Bechdel test. Jake Gyllenhaal will produce and star as Bruce Bechdel, the role that won Michael Cerveris a Tony for best actor in a musical- one of 5 Tonys Fun Home won in 2015. The part is multi faceted as the elder Bechdel is a closeted conflicted gay man and the musical charts not only his daughter’s queer awakening but also his messy relationship with her and with his wife.

Sydney Lucas as Small alison with Cerveris on Broadway

I loved this show on Broadway and I'm excited to see a film adaptation, but with reservations about this casting. I hope Gyllenhaal can give it the pathos and depth it needs while not relying on the tics that have become a trademark of his performances since Prisoners (2013). On the other hand he has proven himself to be adept at musicals having starred in Sundays in the Park With George on Broadway and Little Shop of Horrors off Broadway. He will be taking Sunday to London next May.

Fun Home featured lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline or Change). On stage the part of Alison is played by three actresses at different ages but we don’t know if the movie would follow the same plan. Sydney Lucas was senastional on Broadway as the youngest Alison. That character gets the showstopping number, Ring of Keys. Another great part is that of the mother Helen Bechdel for which Judy Kuhn was Tony nominated. The Daily Mail which broke the news - Baz Bamigboye is reliable on theater and theater to film adaptations - credits Sam Gold, who directed the Broadway production, as the director but no news yet of who’s writing the adaptation. 

Have you got your Ring of Keys ready for this?

Best Animated Feature Contenders: "Ne Zha"

by Tim

Thus far in this round-up of 2019's animated features, we've been focusing on Oscar hopefuls and the more artsy side of animation. This week's subject, Ne Zha, is neither of those things, but in its own way, this is still as significant as any other film we've looked at. This is a blockbuster of the first order: the second-highest-grossing Chinese film in history (and the second-highest-grossing film made in a language other than English), with the highest single-territory gross for any animated film ever made. And even though stories about the Chinese box office always have to come with an asterisk attached (those numbers are often cooked a bit, especially when records are in play), that is by any means enough of a big deal that it's more than a little frustrating that essentially nobody in the United States has heard about any of this.

Ne Zha is a film the Chinese animation industry has been working towards for a long time. Along with the rest of Chinese cinema, animation has spent most of the last decade looking to beat Hollywood at its own game, providing the kind of opulent spectacle that for a long time was the exclusive domain of big-budget American filmmaking...

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My Ride or Die - Elisabeth Moss

by Ginny O'Keefe

Awards season is well upon us which means lists of our favorite performances and films. For many years I’ve had a “Ride or Die” performer who I would root for throughout all of awards season hoping they would get a longshot nomination. Last year my ride or die was Toni Collette for Hereditary, a performance that was criminally unrecognized -- the snubbing of said performance will leave me bitter for years to come. Several years before my Ride or Die was Benicio Del Toro’s haunting and hurting performance for Sicario. So as you can tell, my Ride or Die basically sums up performances that have no chance of winning or even being nominated for any major awards. Nevertheless they stay in my heart throughout the Globes, the SAGS, the Independent Spirit Awards and of course the Oscars.

A few weeks ago I attended a screening of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica with a Q&A afterward with Elisabeth Moss and I realized less than eight minutes into Moss’ Becky Something launching herself into the scene like an unstable ball of light, that Moss was my Ride or Die this season...

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ASC Nominees and "Spotlight" Cinematographers

The Cinematographer's guild has spoken and they basically went with mainstream Best Picture frontrunners as is their habit. The five theatrical nominees are...

• Roger Deakins for 1917
• Phaedon Papamichael for Ford V Ferrari
• Rodrigo Prieto for The Irishman
• Robert Richardson for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
• Lawrence Sher for Joker 

All but Sher are familiar to the Oscar race having been nominated before, particular Deakins (14 nominations / 1 win) and Richards (9 nominations / 3 wins).

Their "spotlight" nominees -- a fairly new category -- are always more interesting since they tend to be far removed from the Oscar race...

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Still more prizes...

Why were critics so uncritical of Toy Story 4's retreading?

Yes, people are still giving out prizes. We don’t say this facetiously since we haven’t even given out ours yet (still cramming in screenings!) but both the Team Experience Awards (voted on by our whole team sans me -- they don’t let me vote!) and the Film Bitch Awards (yours truly's own long-running prizes) are coming in the next week or two. But until the guild awards start en masse this week (whilst Academy members vote on the Oscar nominations) here are the five latest industry or critics groups to announce. We only wish that there were more variety since Parasite, Bong Joon Ho, Adam Driver, Brad Pitt, Apollo 11, and Toy Story 4 continually to dominate their categories with stampede like force. The only category where the groups disagreed en masse (this week at least) was Best Actress; Ronan, Nyong'o, Zellweger, and Johansson all picked up another prize. And Best Supporting Actress was dominated by Florence Pugh in this week's roundup which is a bit different than earlier in the critics awards season where it was always Dern vs Lopez. 

The latest prizes after the jump...

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