Aunt May and Link and the Dying World

Marisa Tomei earlier this year in LA. She is 50 years oldOnce the Rumor Spreads
I will not be linking to anything Marisa Tomei as "Aunt May" in Spider-Man related until it is "official" -- and with the internet nowadays that line is always blurred since people report "in talks" as official when in talks only means a role is being discussed and contracts might be signed. Until this is not official, though, I'll be over here weeping in the corner as this possible tragedy befalls one of my favorite actresses who should NOT be rushing her "last fuckable day" to play a famous part that has for 50 years in pop culture, or as long as Marisa Tomei has been alive, signalled grandmotherly love and worry. Marisa Tomei is as sexy as ever. When people say that anyone is aging well they might as well be saying "they look pretty good for their age. Not as good as Maria Tomei does at 50 but then who looks that good?!?" 

Links
429 terrific juicy interview with Jonathan Groff on Looking, celebrity, coming out, dating other actors, and more
Grantland Mark Harris on Jake Gyllenhaal's incredible artistic growth of late, really upping of his game as an actor
The Dissolve not sure why I didn't see this piece earlier but this a very heartfelt defense of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a film I did NOT respond well to, that is helping me see it a different light... though it sounds like the changes they made from the novel were unwisely reductive in terms of the film's reductive/protagonist's view
Matt Zoller Seitz says goodbye to The Dissolve. I love MZS
THR in terrible news Paramount and AMC collaborating on making theatrical window even shorter. It's like they want to kill moviegoing altogether 
i09 Elektra is official for Daredevil S2. The Greek assassin, easily the best of Daredevil related characters, will be played by Elodie Young who is of French & Cambodian descent 

Elodie Young is on twitter and while I type this she has 5,766 followers (or like 1,000 more than me to show you how unfamously few). By the time you read this her numbers have probably skyrocketed to god knows what.
Movie City News David Poland reacts with a partial history of the changes in the theatrical distribution model over the years
Matt McGorry wants to #FreetheNipple
PressPlay video essay on Shakespeare on the silver screen
Pajiba looks at Adrien Brody's strange filmography of late. Bet you you've only heard of like one or two of them!
NYT talks to Stephen Sondheim about Lin-Manuel Miranda's new Broadway musical Hamilton
Comics Alliance awesome 15" sculpture of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman available for preorder -- sadly it's $270

Off Cinema
Slate fascinating disagreements out there on whether cats are domestic or wild animals

Finally...
I highly recommend checking out this tumblr "Every Single Word" which takes movies and reduces them only to lines of dialogue spoken by actors of color. I really hope they make more of these videos. Here are two examples: American Hustle and Enough Said... though I suppose Enough Said is more impactful if you've watched all of them.

Tribeca: A Good Kill To Backtrack

Further reporting from the festival in Tribeca, here's Jason on a pair of disparate flicks about Sad-Eyed Men Doing Bad Things.

Good Kill -- If you've seen Andrew Niccol's modern sci-fi classic Gattaca (and I hope you have; do you think it will make the second half of TFE's sci-fi countdown?) then you can no doubt summon up that indelible image of Ethan & Uma wandering amid a field of shimmering solar panels at sunrise, a mirrored oasis in the desert. There's nothing that beautiful in Niccol's new film Good Kill, nor should there be - it's about the dirty science reality of the here and now, not a gleaming future vision - but it nonetheless occupies the same kind of space; removed, floating off the sand like morning evaporation. 

But the light is different now; harder - consider us then a vulture mid-flight, or more practically that of a military drone, lasering in on its target. Hawke (whose real-world surname reads as ironic now that I write it out in this context) is a pilot not allowed to fly anymore; whose military career's found itself confined to a metal crate in the Las Vegas desert marked "You Are Now Leaving The United States" where he plays life and death WarGames half a world away, incinerating "enemy combatants" (a term the movie purposefully broadens beyond any meaning) with the flick of his trigger finger.

The hardness that's settled around Ethan Hawke's eyes in the eighteen years since Gattaca comes in handy in this respect too - repetition and weariness are our subject now; the sunlight itself is diffused by death and destruction, the only thing raining down. A globe covered in sand, with one small sad patch of grass (a repeated shot of Hawke's backyard from above - one square in a patchwork of otherwise dusty browns) feeling more like a blight, an aberration, than either home or comfort.

Backtrack -- When I wrote up my take-down of the killer-bee move Stung yesterday I talked a bit about where Horror Movies stand these days; how a certain school of low-budget film-making (that Stung does not belong to) has found a nifty off-kilter vibe of dread to riff upon. Well Backtrack doesn't belong to that school either, but for other reasons - Backtrack, whatever it cost, feels costly, bloated, crammed with screaming CG ghosties that pop out at the screen screaming when the director needs to goose us. 

It also feels immediately dated - the specter of The Sixth Sense (the leather of psychiatry couches ripe spaces for afterlife confessionals) looms large, but it also feels like it was made ten years ago amid the J-Horror remake boom. It fits nicely right in alongside Jennifer Connelly's immediately forgettable Dark Water, for example. Needless to say what all that adds up to is a bunch of exposition endlessly reaching backwards for back-story under back-story under back-story, only intermittently remembering to throw some wild-eyed spook our way as it strains for purpose and/or substance.

And what a shame that this is how we're using the terrific Robin McLeavy! If you've never seen 2009's deeply darkly twisted Aussie romance The Loved Ones do yourself a favor; she's a real spark-plug. Robin shows up about halfway into Backtrack with her big dark eyes and the movie doesn't have anything for her to do - it actually goes out of its way to neuter her - and that's its scariest accomplishment of all.

170 Days until Oscars: Brody & Dreyfuss

170 is the amount of days by which Adrien Brody (The Pianist) narrowly defeated Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl) to become the Youngest Best Actor winner ever. Do you think both of them deserved their wins?

Adrien Brody (29) and Richard Dreyfus (30) are the 2 youngest Lead Actor winners

1977 Best Actor	2002 Best Actor
Woody Allen, Annie Hall	Adrien Brody, The Pianist
Richard Burton, Equus	Nicolas Cage, Adaptation
Richard Dreyfus, The Goodbye Girl	Michael Caine, The Quiet American
Marcelo Mastroianni, A Special Day	Daniel Day Lewis, Gangs of New York
John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever	Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt

The most hilarious thing about this statistic is that Adrien Brody is both the youngest Best Actor winner at 29 AND the only twentysomething winner. Meanwhile "29" is actually the most common age to win Best Actress. These eight women all accomplished it and none of them were anywhere close to making a "youngest" list. 

Ginger Rogers, Kitty Foyle (1940)
Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight (1944) 
Judy Holliday, Born Yesterday (1950)
Elizabeth Taylor, BUtterfield 8 (1960)
Julie Andrew, Mary Poppins (1964)
Jodie Foster, Silence of the Lambs (1991) 
Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line (2005)
Natalie Portman, Black Swan (2010) 

A record book ode to double standards! This can't possibly bode well for Jack O'Connell (Unbroken) who just turned 24 last month... but what an impressive season he's likely to have anyway with two acclaimed leading man performances already jostling about for attention (Starred Up, '71) and one more as Christmas present (Unbroken).

current best actor chart  (i'll update all the charts once I'm back from Toronto on the 14th)

Beauty Break: Stars in Chains

I was all prepared to write a short and snappy post about Historical Inaccuracies via Hot Bodies when I saw Adrien Brody buffed and chained for Houdini. Only then I looked at photos of the actual Houdini and it wasn't such a stretch after all. He must have spent as much time in the gym as he did locked in vaults underwater. Houdini, a new two night miniseries about the famous magician and escape artist, premieres tomorrow on the Discovery Channel.

Let's ignore for the moment that Adrien Brody has had a very strange career post-Oscar (and pre-Oscar come to think of it). Can he get back in the awards game with this. Or, rather, does History Channel ever win Emmy attention? You tell me, Emmy experts.

And we thank Brody for the sudden beauty break inspiration. Let's ogle stars all chained up, some even voluntarily, with a gallery after the jump. I mean, can you guess who this is for instance?

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Tribeca: "Third Person," An Inconclusive Panorama of Trust Issues

Just a few more Tribeca reports to go. Here's Diana on "Third Person."

In another chapter on writer stereotypes (see also: 5 to 7), Paul Haggis’ Third Person opens on Liam Neeson’s hulking handsome frame sitting at a hotel desk, staring at his computer, with an open bottle of red wine and an ashtray heavily weighted down by burnt out cigarette ends. In the midst of the toiling and typing, he hears a child’s voice say, “Watch me.” This phrase becomes an iteration throughout the film, linking together three stories of loss and trust issues. You know how Paul Haggis likes to link (see also: Crash). To paraphrase author Michael (Neeson), all three are weak, but each have strong, albeit bordering on cliche, choices.

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