Be More Link

• Glamour Amandla Stenberg goes au naturel with the body hair at the Rome premiere of The Hate U Give. Oh and also its their 20th birthday today. Happy birthday to them!
• /Film Release date shuffle. Wonder Woman 2 has been pushed back to 2020 so now it's the Terminator reboot (with the original stars) and a reboot of Charlie's Angels facing off in Wonder Woman's old Novemeber 2019 date
• Self Styled Siren anecdote of the week involves 1940s and 1950s star Jennifer Jones
• MNPP lots of photos of Cory Michael Smith to celebrate his coming out and his new film 1985

• MCN first Gurus of Gold chart of the season with the actressing awards and Best Picture
• Orlando Weekly Indiana Jones Land is probably coming to Disney World in the early 2020s with various parks dreaming up pitches
• Variety it's going to be a big year for traditional studios at the Oscars
• Coming Soon In demand Jean-Marc Vallée attached to a Yoko Ono / John Lennon biopic
• Variety Critics Choice nominees for Documentaries. I really can't with the randomness of 6-9 nominees (are there any rules) in 12 different categories. It's like CHOOSE. If you nominate everything there is zero drama and no reason to look at what's been chosen.
• THR How to Build a Girl about a young woman (Beanie Feldstein) becoming a rock critic is building an impressive supporting cast with Emma Thompson, Paddy Considie, and Chris O'Dowd all joining
• New Yorker lottery drawings in the age of plutocracy
• Next Best Picture a report on 'lone acting nominations'
• Deadline Be More Chill, opening soon on Broadway has already auctioned off its film rights. Meanwhile Hamilton still hasn't ironed out a deal for the film rights but its expected to be a $50 million sale

Exit Video
Hey look & listen, it's a brief soundbyte of a Mary Poppins Returns song in this "special look" that's basically pieces of the original trailer recut with a pieces of a song.

Blueprints: "Crazy Rich Asians"

I’m back. Thanks everyone for bearing with the small hiatus that the column took for the past few weeks. Who knew being overworked and sick wasn’t a good time? For our return, let’s take a look at the biggest movie of the summer, and how a pivotal scene operates in many emotional levels. -Jorge

Warning! Crazy Rich Spoilers ahead!

There are many things to admire in Crazy Rich Asians. Consider theway it reinvents a rom-com formula that seemed to have gotten stale. Or its historic all-Asian cast, something that hadn’t happened in an American movie in over two decades. Big themes of family, legacy, tradition and culture running through its veins. And Michele Yeoh’s stare. One scene in the movie encompasses all of these traits.

The mahjong game, the final confrontation between Rachel (Constance Wu) and Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh) was not in the original novel; it was written specifically for the film. It's one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the movie, where Rachel finally gives up the fight and backs away from her fiancée and his family that clearly doesn’t want her there. But in the scene, Rachel reclaims power and control in many levels at the same time. Let’s take a look at the script to see how the most tense movie moment of the summer was crafted. Sorry, Mission Impossible...

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Months of Meryl: Mamma Mia! (2008)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#39 —Donna Sheridan, a dancing queen, hotelier, and single mother of a bride-to-be.

MATTHEW: When it comes to motion picture musicals, the old adage certainly holds true — they really don’t make them like they used to. But when it comes to Mamma Mia!, the 2008 cinematic adaptation of the long-running jukebox stage show/certified cash cow that’s still chugging along on the West End and in numerous cities across the globe, one could justifiably say that they, thankfully, never made them quite like this.

Structured around the music of ABBA, the story is thin but not automatically dire, at least on paper: Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) is an unusually deceptive 20-year-old engaged to be married to Sky (Dominic Cooper) and living on the fictitious, picturesque Greek island of Kalokairi, where her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) owns and operates a modest yet crumbling hotel...

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Queer TIFF: "Vita & Virginia" and "Tell It To the Bees"

Nathaniel R trying to catch up on those festival reviews! 

Herewith two films about married women breaking out of their heteronormative bonds for passionate lesbian affairs. And what I thought were two movies written by famous actresses though, in fact, only one was...

What would Virginia Woolf make of the multiple cinematic attempts to capture her enigmatic persona in two hours flat? Hell, what did the literary icon make of the movies themselves since they were invented in her lifetime? If I'm ever able to interview Woolf expert, actress/writer Dame Eileen Atkins, I plan to ask her. Woolf was most famously played onscreen by Nicole Kidman in The Hours in which Atkins had a small role. Now it's the ever bewitching Elizabeth Debicki's turn in Vita and Virginia, written by Atkins from her play of the same name...

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Podcast: Crazy Rich Asians and Glenn Close for Best Actress

Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl welcome Nick Davis back to the podcast this week for lots of Crazy Rich Asians talk.

Index (58 minutes)
00:01 Introductions. Randomness.
02:10 Nick has read the book that The Wife is based on!
05:01 Crazy Rich Asians talk. Lots and lots on with SPOILERS (sorry). We love the ensemble including Michelle Yeoh, Harry Shum Jr, Pierre Png, Gemma Chan, and more...
36:34 Older films we've been watching: Travels with My Aunt (1972) Your Name (2016), and Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969)
42:00 Recent releases: I Feel Pretty, Madeline's Madeline, The Darkest Minds
50:45 Steve James new docuseries "America to Me"
54:00 Glenn Close for Best Actress! 

Referenced in this discussion
• Nathaniel's year old review of The Wife from TIFF
• Murtada's Desiree Akhavan interview
• Justin Chang's Crazy Rich Asians review
• Kelley Dong's Crazy Rich Asians review
• The 1972 Best Actress list

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Crazy Rich Asians, The Wife