Samuel L. Jackson's Cannes glory

by Cláudio Alves

If the COVID-19 pandemic hadn't happened, Spike Lee would have presided over this year's Cannes jury.  When the festival made public their selections for 2020, I wondered which of those titles would have been rewarded by Lee's jury. It was particularly interesting to consider the director's jury presidency because he's had a somewhat contentious relationship with Europe's most prestigious film festival. Back in 1989, many believed Lee should have won the Palme d'Or for Do the Right Thing (they were right) and, when he came out empty-handed, there was a storm of controversy over the jury's decisions. Two years later, that polemic was still on people's minds as the filmmaker presented Jungle Fever at the Croisette.

Spike Lee would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize for his third film in competition, 2018's BlacKKKlansman, but that wasn't the first time one of his movies had won a Cannes prizes. 1991's aforementioned Jungle Fever managed to win a most unusual prize thanks to Samuel L. Jackson…

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May Retrospective: “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972)

by Cláudio Alves

After many years redefining the paradigms of American comedy along with Mike Nichols on the New York stage, Elaine May made the jump to the movie business when she appeared as an actress in some late 60s cinematic endeavors, including Mike Nichols' The Graduate. It wouldn't take long for her to branch out and, by 1971, she was writing, directing, and starring in A New Leaf.

In our last piece about this intrepid artist, we looked at that movie and how May's genius was able to transcend the interference of pushy producers and remain a near-masterpiece. This time, we'll be looking at the picture May directed after that flick, a production that suffered much less interference from panicky executives. It's also the only picture May directed she didn't also write and the single one of her movies to ever be nominated for the Academy Awards.

We're, of course, talking about the Neil Simon-penned The Heartbreak Kid…

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50th Anniversary: The strange case of Gig Young's Oscar

As a sequel to our recent look-back at the 42nd Oscars , please welcome guest contributor Orrin Konheim...

Fifty years ago, the Academy Awards marked an odd milestone when they awarded a Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Gig Young for They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969) although they didn’t know history was being made at the time. Eight years later, Gig Young would shoot his wife of three weeks (and then himself) in the only known instance of an Oscar-winning actor committing murder.

His tale is a disturbing one with few answers...

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Emmy Watch: Who are the Supporting Actor Drama Contenders?

Giancarlo Esposito in "Better Call Saul"by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Our Emmy punditry continues with Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. This category has plenty of contenders, but unlike the corresponding female fields, there are more past nominees that aren’t eligible than ones that are. The end of Game of Thrones means three opens slots, and Michael Kelly is also out of the running since House of Cards is (mercifully) over.

What’s especially interesting about this category is that, because of season-skipping, character departures, and category switches, there’s actually only one nominee from the past four years who didn’t earn a repeat bid the next time he was eligible. That happens to be Jon Voight (Ray Donovan), who is indeed a very unlikely possibility this year for the final season of his series after three years of missing out. He’s way behind a number of other actors…

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"Rob Roy" at 25

by Eric Blume

It’s been a quarter century since the release of Rob Roy, a film directed by Michael Caton-Jones and featuring the pairing of Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange. The period drama is about the eponymous 18th Century Scotland clan chief Robert Roy MacGregor.

Evidently there was a box-office hunger for this type of film around 1995, since one month later Mel Gibson’s Braveheart opened. The latter tragically went on to win Best Picture some nine months later.  Both films feature tales of broad-stroke heroism, where the main figure is portrayed as a rebel fighting the system, full of masculine bravado and BDE (the un-fun kind)...  

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