(Tap) Dancing With the Links

The Mary Sue Cupcakes in case you'd like to eat The Hobbit or his dwarf friends!
Towleroad the 50 most powerful 'coming outs' of the year
Atlantic the review of Les Miserables that I wish I'd written. Just beautiful
Gawker That guy who cyberstalks actresses is sentenced to a whole bunch of prison time. Somewhere ScarJo is smiling
MTV Jamie Foxx on Electro in Spider-Man 2 (the second one... so I guess Spider-Man 5?). I hate the pride that the costume will be sleek black. Electro has a dumb costume but sleek black Matrix wear for superhero movies is SO dull and overused now.

Carpetbagger Eddie Redmayne is Hollywood's new crush ... and an Oscar contender?
The L Magazine chooses the top 25 films of the year from Looper through Magic Mike and Lincoln
David Poland what the hell as GQ done to Channing Tatum?
Awards Daily Sasha shares the figures of AMPAS branches

The Black List is out. The annual list of well liked unproduced screenplays. See any synopsis that make you restless to be watching an actual film?
In Contention Kris Tapley's top ten list. Amour and Moonrise Kingdom do make a fine double, don't they?
Next Projection on ten favorite scenes of the year from Haywire to Holy Motors
Slate on Dexter. I made the mistake of tuning in to this last episode after having finally given up the series earlier this year and found it so reprehensible that I wish I hadn't accidentally tuned in. Used to be a good show. Now I'm just embarrassed for the actors ...especially Jennifer Carpenter who has tried so valiantly to make sense of a now nonsensical character.

Finally... have you read Reese Witherspoon's tribute to Naomi Watts in The Impossible? She really goes all out with the praise name-checking Meryl Streep's Sophie's Choice and Sally Field's Norma Rae. But this is my favorite part:

If I have anything to do with it (and I will literally tap dance on Sunset Boulevard for you!), you will be holding every beautiful statue that exists by the end of February."

OMG. Do it, Reese, do it.

poll by twiigs.com

Thanksgiving Linkovers

Good afternoon! I only had one piece of pumpkin pie last night so it absolutely cannot be counted as an unqualified success of a Thanksgiving. So, desperate for leftovers (I wasn't even sent home with any spare pie!), I turn to good blogs, the whip cream of this internet pie.

Film Dr. a pictorial primer on Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
MNPP JA's living vicariously through Amanda Seyfried fixation continues unabated
Towleroad homoerotic Skyfall poster 

In Contention the first of countless top ten lists, Cahiers du Cinema finds Holy Motors at the top
DP/30 Jake Gyllenhaal talks End of Watch. Which I still haven't seen. I am a bad Gyllenhaalic this year. (I also missed Won't Back Down) 
Awards Daily Sasha interviews Ang Lee (Life of Pi)
LA Times Tracy Letts says he didn't alter much about August: Osage County for the screen in his screenplay. So... it's three hours long then? 
MovieLine Noomi Rapace does her best Mick Jagger in a new music video. But is it Mick Jaggery enough? 
Empire Marisa Tomei may co-star in a new Hugh Grant romcom. I can see that pairing totally working.

Finally...
Timothy Brayton, easily one of the best (and most completist-friendly) online film critics, has ranked every single Bond film (with each link going to a new review) the Bond Girls and each James Bond. That's a lot of 007. 

Yes yes. I'll post the results of the readers poll here soon -- sorry for the holiday delay -- but before we are totally Bonded out, knock back a martini with Tim's reviews and lists.

Jodie Foster at 17

Our Jodie Foster 50th Anniversary Celebration continues...

Her answer is priceless

Michael C here to pass along this clip I discovered while researching the estimable Ms. Foster. Nowadays child stardom is commonly seen as the first stage in an inevitable downward trajectory of substance abuse and self-destruction so it's a bit jarring to watch this footage of Jodie Foster interviewed at age seventeen.

It's a rare thing to hear a movie star – or a politician for that matter – of any age speak with such poise and thoughtfulness. To listen to it after having lived through the E! News and TMZ takeover of celebrity reporting makes it seem positively alien. I love the way she keeps gently steering fluff questions toward substantive answers, like when she responds to a question about a potential boyfriend with an observation about the phoniness of fawning celebrity praise.

I imagine many young stars that meet with similar success so early in life receive a shock when they discover the world is not going to unroll at their feet in all their future endeavors.

Yet here we find the young Jodie Foster already tempering her big ambitions with the knowledge that there will be surely be failures along the way. Agents of up and coming celebrities should play clips like this for their clients to study. 

Jodie Foster in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"

For Jodie Foster Week I invited guests to talk about favorite Foster films. Here is one of my favorite authors Manuel Muñoz ("What You see in the Dark," "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue") on a pre-Taxi Driver Scorsese/Foster collaboration. - Nathaniel R]

Coming up with another word for “precocious” is hard, since its precision begs no real qualification. The word bothers me a little as a go-to choice to describe Jodie Foster’s brief appearance in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. What are we seeing in her portrayal of a girl who dislikes her real name (Doris) so much that she ditches it in favor of another (Audrey)? I thought my pleasure in rewatching Alice would come in getting to see Foster in that vulnerable adolescence where few of us had learned to mask, moderate, or amplify our sexual identities. How much more apparent would this be on camera, especially when we, as viewers, sometimes willingly blur the lines between performer and performance?

I’m happy to come away from Alice seeing Doris/Audrey as more than a thinly written tomboy role... [More]

Click to read more ...

The Man With the Golden Link

Natasha VC Melancholiay Kiki was right. Noooooo....
MovieLine on Sam Raimi's purchase of Angelfall, the YA series that's meant to be the next Hunger Games. The only thing getting me through the endless repetitiveness of today's cinema culture is that most of these series have an end date. So once Hunger Games ends, people will be looking for the next Angelfall instead. (Can you tell I'm so excited that Twilight is over!!!?)
HitFix talks to Matthew McConaughey about a Magic Mike sequel and all that weight he's lost for The Dallas Buyers Club.  
Movies Now profiles GKids, that winning animated indie distributor who should be taken seriously in each year's Oscar race 

Awards Daily on the ever present narrative of Oscar's Difficulty with Race. Which, to be fair if you ask me, is not so much Oscar's problem as Hollywood's difficulties; Oscar is only a prism. 
Hollywood Elsewhere Newsflash: Jeffrey Wells apparently takes Armond White seriously (suggesting his partly negative Lincoln review matters)! Who does that?!? (White just takes whatever position is contrarian. That's why his reviews always come out later than everyone else's.)
Gawker thinks Joe Wright's artistic gamble with Anna Karenina pays off. I'm noticing enough positive reviews to wonder if the worm is turning on this thing in terms of Oscar (people were so weirdly and prematurely down on it post Toronto from the lack of consensus I suppose) but maybe that's just wishful thinking since I liked it and thought Keira Knightley was truly fab in her divisive gutsy jaw-first way.
i09 Five minutes of the new Star Trek film to play in select IMAX theaters before The Hobbit. Because I am not a Trekkie and don't pay close attention I had somehow missed that this film is called Star Trek Into Darkness and now I am embarrassed for everyone involved. Sounds SO hokey and jokey and pretentious all at the same time! A feat you might say.
Vulture Sigourney Weaver pretended she was doing Shakespeare while acting in Alien (1979) "I was such a snob" 

Today's Must Watch
Tom O'Neill at Gold Derby talks to Tony Kushner about Abraham Lincoln's much-speculated upon sexuality and why there's precious little of it in Spielberg's Lincoln.