OTD: Vera Drake and Lily Tomlin

On this day (Sept 1st) in showbiz history...

1934 Metro Goldwyn Mayer releases their first animated short, The Discontented Canary. It wasn't Oscar nominated but they soon begin to crash Walt Disney's stranglehold on that particular category back then, with nearly annual nominations (for a time) beginning in 1939 (Peace on Earth) and regular wins in the 1940s thanks largely to the Tom & Jerry series. 

1952 Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is first published. It wins the Pulitzer and gets adapted to the movies twice, the first time as a feature in 1958 with Spencer Tracy and the second time as an Oscar winning Russian animated short in 1999 which was painted on glass. 

1977 Blondie signed their first major record company contract. Whatever happened to that Debbie Harry biopic we were supposed to get? Wasn't it going to star Kiki Dunst or was that just our TFE fantasy?

2004 Mike Leigh's marvelously humane and potent Vera Drake wins the Golden Lion in Venice. The film is nominated for 3 Oscars including a surprise Best Director bid. Imelda Staunton goes on to lose the Oscar to a far inferior performance. We've been demanding a recount ever since.

Happy Birthday to Them
Oscar Nominees: Lily Tomlin (Nashville), Rachid Bouchareb (Foreign Film nominations for Algeria: Outside the Law and Days of Glory)
In Demand: Zendaya (Spider-Man: Homecoming), Boyd Holbrook (Logan, Narcos)
Other Famous Types: Gloria Estefan
Foreign Stars: Fengyi Zhang (Chinese movie star), Lhumnita Gheorghiu (brilliant Romanian actress), Mohammed Assaf (Palestinian pop star) 

Soundtracking: "Evita"

It's Madonna's birthday!! Chris Feil looks back at one of her biggest soundtracks...

By the mid-90s, musicals were all but dead, even though Disney created their own resurgence in animated form. Madonna’s career however was always heading toward reviving it: she constantly reinvented the game for the music video and her Breathless Mahoney songstress was Dick Tracy’s genre flirtation device. With her divisive performance in Evita, she brought the cinematic musical back into the popular culture and delivered a hit soundtrack in the process.

And I should qualify that for emphasis: a hit soundtrack to a quasi-opera about propaganda and Argentine political figures when the popular music landscape highlighted Alanis, Tupac, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Madonna did that in arguably the least accommodating musical or cinematic climate, and perhaps only Madonna could have done it. Like it or not, much of the film’s success (even musically) is thanks to her star power, no matter how indelible Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s score remains.

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Review: The Glass Castle

This article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

‘This would be easier to take on the page.’

That thought kept striking me from odd angles all during the new movie THE GLASS CASTLE  now playing nationwide. In 2005 the writer Jeanette Walls turned the rags of her childhood into adult riches with her memoir “The Glass Castle.”  The book won several awards and sold millions of copies. It was translated into dozens of languages. The big screen, however, has a tricky vocabulary and grammar all its own.

The Glass Castle flashes back-and-forth between adult Jeanette Walls (Brie Larson), a gossip columnist ashamed of her oft-homeless parents (Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts), and her memories of her difficult nomadic childhood...

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Yes No Maybe So: LBJ

 by Seán McGovern

Debuting at TIFF on September 9th and primed for a theatrical release on November 3rd, Rob Reiner's LBJ brings to life the story of the man who immediately succeeded John F. Kennedy, following his assassination.

Lyndon B. Johnson appeared on our screens twice last year, with Bryan Cranston in All The Way and John Carroll Lynch in a supporting role in Jackie. Reiner's film looks set to follow the Vice President as he navigates his way from tragedy to the Oval Office. For this LBJ we get Woody Harrelson at his brusque best, with what looks to me like a... prosthetic chin? And when actors get out the heavy make-up you know they mean busines...

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Link Wood

THR Felicity Jones replaces Portman in a Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic
Vox How Tom Holland's dance training makes him a fresh Spider-Man
LA Times talks to 18 funny black actresses about their comic careers
Vulture Revenge of the Twink as slimmer male stars finally start getting action roles -- a nice switch over from the steroid set. For now at least

Pajiba five reasons why HBO's proposed Confederate series, from the guys behind Game of Thrones, is a terrible, disappointing, irresponsible idea
Vulture Bilge Elbiri ranks all of Christopher Nolan's movies. The new one, Dunkirk, is #1
IndieWire David Ehrlich ranks all of Luc Besson's movies so you don't have to. The new one, Valerian, is #6
My New Plaid Pants honors the current social media exhibitionistic streak of Zachary Quinto and his boyfriend
Playlist Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Under the Skin) working on his next film already. Yaaas!
Den of Geek People are still fantasizing about Christoper Nolan doing a James Bond movie including, apparently, Nolan himself. 
Leonard Maltin interesting article on film preservation -- what happens to the cannisters and film -- and the impending distintegration of the Hopalong Cassidy westerns
IndieWire reminds us on Dunkirk weekend, that Atonement already went to that infamous war plagued beach in that film's breathtaking 5 minute tracking shot

Off Screen
Show Score Radical Idea... what if stage shows kept the house lights on?
The New Yorker gives good satire on why Hillary Clinton should disappear from public life
Out Greyson Chance, who first came to fame with a viral video of a Lady Gaga cover when he was just 12 has come out at 19 years of age
GQ "it's time you stopped believing in 'dressing your age'"

Oh and Today is...
INTERNATIONAL NATALIE WOOD DAY
i.e. a holiday that should be real since July 20th is her birthday. She would have been 79 today... the same age as Diana Rigg, Jon Voight, Terence Stamp, and Richard Beymer who all still work. Imagine what kind of movies and TV projects Natalie Wood could have done in in the past 40 years. *sniffle*  I imagine she would have moved to TV early as so many movie queens did in the 1980s but I bet she would have had a movie comeback too, given that she was still so young when she died.