Tuesday, November 19, 2013 at 3:00AM 
Léa Seydoux & Adele Exarchopoulos at the Governor's Ball
Let's see Léa & Adèle at all the Oscar-courting events. S'il vous plaît. Werk that circuit, ladies.
Saturday, November 9, 2013 at 4:52PM The European Film Awards have announced their annual year-straddling list of nominees and featured heavily are several Oscar contenders from 2012 and 2013. Recognisable names like Keira Knightley, Naomi Watts (not for Diana, thankfully) and Jude Law rub shoulders with Felix van Groeningen, Fabrice Luchini and Luminita Gheorghium, which is just how we like it!
However, like many award shows at this time of the year the biggest eyebrows isn't so much in what they nominated, but what they didn't. The cries of "snub!" will surely come thick and fast for Adele Exarchopolous and Lea Seydoux who failed to make the actress nominees for their soaring performances in Blue is the Warmest Color. Lucky then that the film picked up major nominations in picture and director for controversial Abdellatif Kechiche. Movies amassing big nomination hauls include Belgian Oscar hopeful The Broken Circle Breakdown, Italian Oscar hopeful The Great Beauty, and Germany's hit Oh, Boy! while films representing Romania, and Spain (albeit last year) also popped up prominently as did Francois Ozon's In the House.
High profile films amongst films that the EFA didn't find room for include Oscar-nominee Kon-tiki, Only God Forgives, A Hijacking, The Selfish Giant, Berberian Sound Studio (sadly - the best horror film of the last few years!), Borgman, and What Richard Did. Here's the list of nominees + the additional technical winners that have already been announced.
Sunday, November 3, 2013 at 12:00PM 
Blue is the Warmest Color, the erotic French drama, has moviegoers and film bloggers talking. Hear what Katey, Joe, Nick and Nathaniel have to say about it in the new podcast (we held the conversation for a week to give more of you a chance to see it). We also revisit the trilogy capping Before Midnight starring screenwriter/actors Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke.
This week's podcast also features affectionate (?) sidebar shoutouts to acclaimed documentary Call Me Kuchu, cranky moviegoers and ushers, Disney's Frozen, John Cassavettes Faces, the Israeli drama Late Marriage, the Ridley Scott classic Thelma & Louise, Sarah Paulson & Queen Latifah, and movie characters we'd like to drop back in on.
You can listen at the bottom of the post or download it on iTunes. Join in the conversation in the comments.
Supplemental Reading / Listening:
Blue Is...-Nathaniel's review
These Sapphic Superstar tweets ... referenced in the podcast
Operation Kino - Nathaniel guest stars on Katey & Mister Patches's podcast. We're talking Dallas Buyers Club
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 1:01PM 
Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) is voracious. We first note this when she’s devouring a huge plate of spaghetti at her family’s table. She practically hoovers it down, tomato sauce staining her mouth, before going back for seconds. She reads and writes the same way, albeit offscreen, devouring 600 page novels and writing intimate diaries. But what we see is her various oral fixations and one doesn’t eat literature. If she’s not shoving cigarettes in her mouth, it’s food (and, later, body parts). In one endearing moment she shoves a chocolate bar in her wet face during a crying jag getting a huge laugh from moviegoers who've also eaten their feelings.
Adele will eat anything but seafood. That would be a sly tongue-in-(uhhhh)cheek joke if the new lesbian drama BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR didn’t make a point of it in two separate scenes. Instead this provocative film -- already famous round the globe for its explicit sex and post-Cannes disputes between its actresses and director – risks camp by playing it straight. It shamelessly equates oysters to ladyparts and in one scene that is either comical, ridiculous, perverse or all three, Adele’s older girlfriend Emma (Léa Seydoux) teaches her how to eat them… in front of the parents!
Guess what? She likes it.
Friday, October 25, 2013 at 6:00PM Three makes a trend, right? This weekend will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The weekend will open to you like a magnificent vagina.
1. I must begin by warning you away from Ridley Scott's The Counselor. It's quite nihilistically repulsive despite elements you'd think would add up to an enjoyable watch, particularly Cameron Diaz's cheetah-obsessed bad girl. In one of the film's best moments -- and I use the term "best" only in the sense of grading on a curve -- Cameron spread-eagles on the windshield of her car. I'm sure Cameron Diaz has beautiful lady parts but, rather amusingly, her screen boyfriend Javier Bardem seems less aroused than shell-shocked. He finds the moment difficult to recover from describing it, dumbfounded, as "gynecological"
2. Not one to miss out on an impending internet meme, Jennifer Lawrence's big moment in the X-Men Days of Future Past teaser of a teaser is a spread eagle attack.
3. Finally... the coveted ticket this weekend is the Cannes winning Blue is the Warmest Color, finally opening up to you. In this three hour lesbian romantic drama Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchoupolos get naked (but for their prosthetic vaginas) for an explicit seven minute sex scene... a sex scene that so excited Cannes-watchers that the length of the scene was widely misreported to be twenty minutes. Despite my genuine love of sapphic drama I've managed to miss every critics screening so I'm seeing it this weekend with the masses.
Happy spelunking!
