Short Link 12

Today's Must Read
The Dissolve Nathan Rabin discusses his own group home experience and his relationship to Short Term 12 which is now out on DVD and BluRay

General Linkage
THR Garrett Hedlund offered the plum Captain Hook role in Joe Wright's Peter Pan adaptation Pan
Ken Levine, inspired by Quentin Tarantino, makes a major announcement 
Variety Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra) just sentenced to 8 to 20 years in Nevada! Yikes. 

AV Club Her trailer recut to replace Scarlett Johansson's voice with, uh, Philip Seymour Hoffman's. It's terrifying. you have been warned.
IAR interviews Destin Cretton on Short Term 12
THR a non controversy at Oscar on that strange Original Song nomination from Alone But Not Alone. Pity that Oscar is such sticklers about the rules on some classic important films like Moulin Rouge! and then lets things slide in weird cases like this
Coming Soon the Oscar winning doc Man in Wire could get the narrative feature treatment from Robert Zemeckis
/Film Disney's Frozen getting a sing-along version next weekend
BuzzFeed Rachel McAdams shares her two favorite lines from Mean Girls, 10 years later
Pajiba Chris Pratt sings a song about Jean Claude Van Damme's Sudden Death on Parks and Recreation

Finally...
EW Grace of Monaco pulled from the Weinstein Company's release schedule?!? Don't they realize I need biannual doses of Kidman like Virginia Woolf needs exhilarating trips to London? Readers who've asked how I'm coping should know that I have not yet loaded my coat up with stones. But there will be a reckoning if we never get to see it. 

P.S. Bette Davis thinks you're a vile sorry little bitch*

*show of hands: who thinks Bette is saying "sour" rather than "sorry" - I can't decipher it 

Best Actress Lineup Now Eligible for a Senior Discount

There's a vicious moment in August: Osage County wherein Violet Weston (Meryl Streep), who hasn't tasted enough blood for the day, humiliates her daughter Karen (Juliette Lewis) who has recently entered her 40s that she's losing her looks. A less vicious but still hurtful joke follows later in the film when Barbara (Julia Roberts) tells her sister Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) "You can't move to New York. You're almost 50, you'll break a hip.". The Weston women, tearing each other down and using their advancing age as just one of the weapons with which to do so, probably wouldn't take comfort in the maturity of this year's Best Actress race but the rest of us should. 

Even if it's not our dream lineup (my own happens to skew much younger this year), it's a good push back against Oscar's frequent preference of youth over accomplishment... particularly in this category.

I didn't mean to become the "age" guy but I salivate at the prospect of digging into Oscar statistics each year so I couldn't pass up the chance to write about the Best Actress shortlist, when Vanity Fair asked me to write about the relatively advanced age of the group. Their average age is 55. I'd already prepped my Jennifer Lawrence piece on "The Youngest Actors To _____ " when they contacted me so that's  two in a row. But I hope y'all take it in the vein it was intended: to celebrate the glories and mysteries of Oscar stats and the breadth of talented people, male and female, from fresh faces (in both senses of the word with JLaw) to accomplished veterans that show up for Oscar honors.

Here's the full piece ! 

Due to turnaround deadlines with Oscar nomination articles, many of them are written in advance. One of my favorite things about reading other sites on Oscar nomination day is noticing where the seams are wherein they've clearly had to edit something out or shove something in quickly. I had two versions of this Vanity Fair piece ready due to the great January wars of "Will it be Amy or Meryl?" and then they both made it. Goodbye Emma! *sniffle*

One thing I noticed in researching this piece and writing about the topic over the years is that people tend to think of past Oscar lineups as older than they actually were. I believe this is just a human tendency to age up anything that came before us. If you first fell for Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, for example, she is probably an "old" actress to you. But when she first became a sensation with the release of the Oscar winning blockbuster Kramer vs. Kramer, she had only just turned 30 or, in modern terms, was roughly the age that her put upon assistants Emily Blunt & Anne Hathaway are right about now. Fasten your seatbelts for this bumpy take-away truth: Bette Davis was younger than ALL of this year's Best Actress nominees (save Amy Adams) when she headlined All About Eve (1950).

Beauty Break: Smoking Kills (Glamorously)

Confessions, multiple: I have never been a smoker, I've been thrilled and proud of my friends whenever they've kicked the habit, I have never once missed the days when bars / restaurants allowed smoking...

... but I miss smoking in the movies. 

Rock Hudson blowing smoke rings

Fifty years ago this very day the Surgeon General first deemed it hazardous to your health and over the next fifty years it's slowly faded from the movies. Nowadays when you see smoking onscreen, it's nearly always to signify "rebellious character" or "villain" or is shot through some sharp retro-commentary filters: see everything about everyone in Mad Men or David Straitharn's whole act in Goodnight, and Good Luck. 

I know smoking is wrong. I know it kills. I hate the way it smells. But those tendrils of smoke on screen or a movie star's lips around a cigarette look so damn sexy. Here's proof...

Click to read more ...

Film on Film: 5 Classics That Deserve a Film of Their Own

[Editor's Note: Here's abstew with 5 Hollywood on Hollywood pitches. Co-sign!]

It's no secret that one of Film's favorite subject matters is, well, itself. The past two Best Picture winners (The Artist and Argo) have had Hollywood and the art of film-making at their core. And this weekend another film-on-film, Saving Mr. Banks, about Walt Disney's decades long struggle to bring Mary Poppins to the big screen expands across the country in its quest to join those previous films in Oscar glory. The story seems ready-made for the movies - beloved source material, larger-than-life characters/personalities, and, just because it can, a hard-knock-life childhood back-story thrown into the mix. (If the old Hollywood angle doesn't win them over why not add the Academy's other irresistible allure: the biopic. It's two films for the price of one!)

I'm sure many people were unaware what went into trying to convince author P.L.Travers to sign over the rights to Disney and I'm sure even fewer people knew about Travers' back-story. But so many classic films have equally fascinating behind-the-scenes stories that would make just as compelling films. In honor of Saving Mr. Banks, here are 5 other classic films that deserve their own film treatment. So, quiet on the set...Action! 

The Wizard of Oz 

Click to read more ...

Potent Quotables - Margo Channing in All About Eve

Anne Marie here, looking forward to the end of the holidays when we can all toast the new year with a martini in hand. Many iconic movie lines seem to have come from characters who were three sheets to the wind, so I'd like to celebrate a few of them. I'll start with one of my favorite divas: Margo Channing, Star of Screen and Scotch. Her poison of the night is martinis very dry; buckets of them in fact. During her party - after "fasten your seat belts" but before the bumpiest part of the night - Margo corners Max to deliver this gem:

 

Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

Though swimming in her self-pity at the bottom of a martini glass, Margot Channing is still a star.

Stars - even drunk ones - get the best lines, and the true insight and witty delivery speak to both Bette Davis's fantastic acting and Mankiewicz's devilish dialogue.

What's your favorite tipsy movie quote?
Slur it out in the comments, won't you?