Links

Guardian the kids of the controversial Oscar nominated documentary Jesus Camp 10 years later - how are they doing and how do they remember their evangelical childhoods?
ESPN's Bodies issue is out. Check out the gallery. The human body is really so beautiful. But I realize we're not supposed to acknowledge that because people are so angry about the profile at...
Vanity Fair on Margot Robbie. Which is... Honestly I can't see anything wrong with it. Almost every good celebrity profile talks about what the star looks like, and what their big screen appeal is. It's not especially salacious as these things go. I'm stunned that it offended so many people. But me...
Nathaniel... I don't want to live in a world where we cant celebrate movie star beauty
Playbill Kristin Chenoweth doing a reading of proposed Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for the stage? Oh god oh god let this Broadway musical happen. Amen.
Dear Cast & Crew Dear Harry Nilsson -- (great letter re: A Bigger Splash)
EW Five Nights in Maine poster and trailer. Apparently this premiered at TIFF last year. I don't remember reading about it but Dianne Wiest, Rosie Perez, and David Oyelowo are all in it!
Vanity Fair Hive A.I. isn't just all the rage in movies and on television. It's an investor obsession, too.
Twitter Apparently some dumb people launched a petition to have Jesse Williams fired from Grey's Anatomy due to his BET Humanitarian Awards speech 

Look at This!

Production has begun on Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool which stars Annette Bening as Oscar winner Gloria Grahame in her final days. Jamie Bell is The Bening's leading man. We hope The Bening is making one last sustained run at winning that Best Actress trophy that's eluded her. Momentum counts for a lot in Oscar races so if it doesn't happen this year for 20th Century Women, maybe it'll happen next year for this biopic of sorts? Though actors win Oscars all the time for playing real life people, the only star who has won an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner is Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004).

Random Emmy Thought
By now you've probably heard that the 7th/8th Game of Thrones season will start shooting later than usual due to weather issues. Different websites have different wording on this news. Sometimes it sounds like just the slightest delay and not worth reporting but for the clickbait traffic. Other articles suggest that this will delay the premiere until late Summer instead of GoT's traditional late spring early summer airing. If the latter take is true that means we'll actually have an Emmy free year of Game of Thrones in 2017. That would be a welcome relief for those of us who hate to see the same shows dominating year after year. Unfortunately they're also splitting GoT into two more super short seasons with only 13 or so more episodes left before the series finale. It worked for Breaking Bad and Mad Men in terms of Emmy statuettes though it was bad for interrupting the natural flow of storytelling arcs (at least with Mad Men - I can't speak to how it affected Breaking Bad). At any rate I stand by my proclamation that these split final seasons are anti-audience and nothing more than a cynical cash grab for advertising dollars, extended media attention, and double the awards that a show should be eligible to receive. It's gross. I wish Emmys would rule against 6 or 7 episodes counting as a full season. There really ought to be some standards and "season" by its very name suggests a few months of time. Six episodes is not a few months of story -- it's barely more than one!

I'm linking out... ♫ I want the world to know, gotta blog it so...

Guardian Carrie Fisher is doing an advice column? What happy potentially hilarious news
Salon They're prepping a Rumi biopic and the filmmakers want Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr for the leading roles of Rumi and his mentor Shams. Those were real people and Persian muslims. Here we go again with Hollywood's tone deaf casting imperatives... (sigh)
Coming Soon Jennifer Lawrence to star in a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, once estimated to be worth $4.5 billion and now nothing. Adam McKay to direct so we're guessing he got a taste for Oscar with The Big Short and wants more.

MTV Teo Bugbee looks at the career of James Wan from Saw (2004) to The Conjurer 2 (2016)
Village Voice Angelica Jade Bastién on the female gaze of American Psycho
Pajiba gets vicious with a list of 'female equivalents of Sam Worthington' (i.e. generically attractive & completely unmemorable but they keep getting big roles) including Zoey Deutch, Britt Robertson, and Lily Collins (who Warren Beatty will try to make happen again soon in his Howard Hughes movie). But I have to admit Lily James is growing on me so I wouldn't have included her   
Pride Source actress Lea Delaria (Orange is the New Black) thinks "LGBT" needs to go and be replaced by Queer. Actually we're kinda for it as there are more and more letters attached "LGBTIQA"
/Film Helena Bonham Carter and Mindy Kaling are joining Bullock & Blanchett in that Oceans Ocho movie we were fantasy casting earlier 
The Tracking Board ... and speaking of Oceans 11, that movie's director Steven Soderbergh is making a new heist movie himself called Logan Lucky. The cast will include Hilary Swank, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig, Katherine Heigl, Channing Tatum, and Riley Keough. 

Tony Season
Playbill in counterprogramming for the Tony Awards, TCM will play Alexander Hamilton (1931), the biopic starring George Arliss. Haha.
Gothamist good god, I'm seeing Hamilton just in the nick of time. They're upping the price of premium seats to $849 each and orchestra seats to $179-199. That is insane. I sometimes wonder what would happen if everyone just refused to go to theater priced over $50 for an entire year. It might make the art more accessible / popular. I'm seeing the show next week 

P.S.
And look, two of the greats met each other! President Obama and Madonna. As Madge points out they're both Leos so it's "a cosmic convergence"

A meeting of the Leo's! 🦄. A Cosmic Convergence!! . 2 ❤️#rebelhearts @jimmyfallon

A photo posted by Madonna (@madonna) on Jun 9, 2016 at 1:24am PDT

Shia Gets Served

Jason from MNPP here, taking a look at today's big news out of everybody's favorite Oscar baiting genre, the bio-pic - famous actor slash shit-stirrer Shia LaBeouf is set to play famous athlete slash shit-stirrer John McEnroe in Borg/McEnroe, which will tackle the long-term rivalry between Mr. McEnroe and the underwear-salesman slash Swede Bjorn Borg. Playing Borg is the actor Sverrir Gudnason, who I am not familiar with, but he sure does have some big tiny shorts to fill...

(Cue my childhood crush on Borg rearing its head.) 

Stellan Skarsgård is also in the film, playing Borg's coach, and Danish director Janus Metz (Armadillo) is directing. Anyway Shia might maybe be rebounding? I actually think he's given his best performances over the past couple of years in the middle of what did seem to be a bit of a public breakdown. He's managed to channel it into his work in interesting ways, that is. And there aren't many movies in the world right now that I need to see more than I need to see Andrea Arnold's American Honey, and the word out of Cannes on that one only made that more true. And playing John McEnroe seems like a crazy good match of actor and subject. What do we think?

Q&A: Everybody Wants Drop Dead Gorgeous Editing & Combative Personalities

It's the time again: Reader Questions hooray. I picked 8 to answer this week. Thanks to everyone who asked. I can't answer all but who knows - the unanswered might well inspire something down the road, conciously or otherwise. You never know...

MARSHA: Are people like Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump just so evil and insane that they are beyond parody, or are there actors and directors you can think of who could convey their humanity and worldview?

NATHANIEL: Marsha, I promised I wasn't going to talk about politics until September, remember?!? Don't tempt me.  All I will say is that a great actor can perform magic even under impossible circumstances. Remember how deep Julianne Moore was able to go with Sarah Palin?

JB: Can we discuss Drop Dead Gorgeous. In spite of having all the right ingredients, it's never quite hit cult (gay) status like I always assumed it would. Why do you think that is?

lots more after the jump...

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Misty Copeland Gets the Biopic Treatment

Kieran, here. It was announced today that a biopic of ballerina Misty Copeland is currently in the works at New Line Cinema. Based on Copeland's own memoir "Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina," the film will chart Copeland's rise to fame as the first black principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, despite a delayed beginning--she didn't start taking ballet until age 13, which is extremely late compared to other dancers. The project will be penned by Gregory Allen Howard, who scripted Remember the Titans and the upcoming theatrical Harriet Tubman biopic (not the Viola Davis project, though Nathaniel was correct in wishing that those projects would merge). No director is attached to the project as of yet.

News of this project means an opportunity for a black actress to take center stage (no pun intended) in a major motion picture, which shouldn't be a rare occasion but feels like it in the current cinematic landscape. [More...]

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