mahna mahna (link-link-lee-link-link) mahna manha (link-link-lee-link) ♫

Stale Popcorn on the Giant Face of Chris Pine and weird twin hands on the This Means War poster.
Empire Ken Watanabe is in discussions for a role in the live action adaptation of Akira. Now, y'all know how much I hate the future existence of the movie but casting one Asian actor is not going to help. Just like the decision not to change the character names this will only remind people that this movie was super racist in its casting and opted out of Asian actors in the lead Asian roles.

Awards Daily Sasha is sticking by Viola Davis (The Help) for a Best Actress win for now, despite the people screaming "Streep Streep Streep"
The Wow Report the cast of Absolutely Fabulous in 2011.
New York Times 101 Notable Books of 2011. Whoa, get reading, you!
Twitch makes a plea for action flick Fast Five for Best Editing. For your consideration... 

80s Flashback
Press Play is looking at movies about grief in a very personal way. I loveRunning on Empty (1988) so much so I'm always glad to see a piece celebrating its emotional potency.
Between the Pages a Little Shop of Horrrors Cake. Wow. I think it's suppertime.

Muppet Mania
Aint It Cool I suspect this total love mixed with declining opinion will start happening more and more withThe Muppets (2011) but the total love you first feel makes it well worth seeing.
Gold Derby Can the Muppets finally win an Oscar? They've been waiting even longer than Glenn Close ;) since their first nomination came in 1979.  

Slate on the origins of the Muppets catchy signature nonsense "Mahna-Mahna" 
In Contention the sound of the Muppets. 

Thoughts I Had While Reading Harry Potter's "CONSIDER..."

This Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 "Consider..." FYC booklet arrived in the mail a couple of days ago so I thought I'd read it with you. Aren't I considerate?!  I can't scan it in as it's too heavy and bound tight to open flat. Expensive paper but then with those billion grosses they've got plenty of money to burn on a campaign.

So here we go...

I wish that you could see Melissa Leo in a fur coat reflected in his lenses!

okay, let's write this thing up. Click to continue if you'd like to read along...  as it's long and photoriffic.

Click to read more ...

Steve McQueen's Oscar Loss and Workout Win

Each year come awards season we see hundreds of frozen grins and hear hundreds of ever so slight variations on that autopilot soundbyte "I'm just so honored to be  ______." But how do the losing stars and snubbees really feel? One of my favorite things about celebrity biographies is that they have to dig a little deeper when it comes to the discussion of The Oscars; you can't fill whole books with soundbytes.

I was recently flipping through the new biography "Steve McQueen" by Marc Eliot and came across this passage on the Oscars. McQueen thought his sole nomination (The Sand Pebbles, 1966) was long overdue and eagerly participated in press events. He bought himself a burgundy Ferrari to reward himself for the nomination.

Yet on Oscar night, Paul Scofield won Best Actor...

The audience erupted in applause, even though Scofield was one of the many who did not show up. His co-star Wendy Hiller, accepted for him. She stepped to the microphone and said, "There is something very special in being recognized in a country other than one's own!"

And for Steve, there was something very unspecial about not being recognized in his own. After the ceremonies, Neile told a reporter that she was happy her husband had lost. "If he'd won, he'd have been impossible to live with," she chirped. "Not because of a big head but because he'd be worrying how to top himself next. I prayed he wouldn't win."

Steve McQueen in "The Sand Pebbles"

Steve said nothing to anybody that night. Several years later he was still bitter about the loss of the only Oscar nomination he would ever receive and took a jab at Marlon Brando, who won an Oscar in 1973 for his role in The Godfather; who not only didn't show up but had warned the Academy he wouldn't accept the award if he won it... Not long after Steve told Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, "Perhaps if I had announced that I wouldn't accept the Oscar, I might have won."

Following Oscar night, still having trouble finding his Sand Pebbles follow-up, he spent his nights drinking and womanizing and his days on an extended workout regimen.

pictorial evidence of his workout success after the jump...

Click to read more ...

The Actress. A Book.

It took a surprisingly long time but three of my friends independently read the book What You See in the Dark these past two weeks. I had recommended it emphatically a few months back but dropped the topic when nobody bit. All three of them told me much they liked it in separate conversations. Some of you may recall that I interviewed the author Manuel Muñoz right here, hoping some of you would pick it up as well.

Since it was on my mind again, I thought I'd share a passage so I flipped the book open and skimmed until I found one of the passages about the Actress (who it won't surprise you to hear was my favorite character in the novel... although not by much, which surprised me).

The scene takes place as the Actress is contemplating a scene she'll be shooting the next morning and her mind wanders...

A supporting role. Nothing more. In the Director's previous picture, that one actress had appeared playing two roles. She hadn't done a particularly stellar job, some in the industry had said, but the Actress thought the performance more than adequate. She had sat in the theater with mild envy, the role too rich for words: A distraught wife is trailed silently throughout San Francisco by a police detective, from flower shop to museum to the foot of the glorious Golden Gate Bridge, where she finally hurls herself into the bay. The detective rescues her and later falls in love, only to lose her again to a successful suicide attempt. It played, the Actress thought, like an odd type of silent movie, and she felt maybe she had fooled herself into believing she could have fit perfectly into the part. Was it really requiring much beyond posing, or was there something about silent-movie acting that she didn't know? She wondered what the script must have looked like, that other actress -- who couldn't have been professionally trained -- skimming the pages until she found her first line.

No matter how small the role was going to be, it would have been foolish to say no to the Director. He was in the midst of doing something extraordinary and uncanny with some actresses, finessing their star wattage and burnishing it into a singular, almost iconic image. That was the way the Actress saw it anyway, mesmerized by how he was stripping out all  the trappings of the industry and pushing these women toward something beyond even acting, something nakedly cinematic -- poses, postures, gestures, as if the women were in magazine ads come to life for just split seconds at a time, just enough motion for the public to remember them as images and not characters. It was like opening up a jewelry box she had had many years ago as a young girl, fascinated by the tiny plastic ballerina in the center and its brief circle of motion. She had closed and opened that box endlessly even though the ballerina did nothing differently. But even now, in a black sedan carrying her over the Grapevine back toward the Valley, where she had grown up, the Actress could close her eyes and remember the golden lace of the ballerina's costume, the full circle of her deliciously patient twirl, her perfect timing with the delicate chime of the music box's single tune. And that was the way the screen worked, too, she had discovered. Every actresses's trajectory carried a moment like that, and the Director was staging them effortlessly.

After the jump a brief bit about the Actress's brassiere. 

Click to read more ...

Flipping Through Movie Book Pages

For no reason whatsoever on this summer day, 08/22, I pulled a few random movie books off the shelf -- i used to buy used movie books all the time as a teenager (though two of these are books from this past decade) -- and opened them to pages 8 and 22 and am sharing my favorite sentences therein with you! If it's a photo page, I shared that instead. 

Ready? here we go!

page 8

page 22

We want our viewers not merely to enjoy the situation with a murmured, "Isn't he cu-ute" but really to feel something of what the character is feeling."

from Disney Animation The Illusion of Life

*

page 8

"Thirty-six tables with their scintillating glassware and long tapers, each table bearing a replica in waxed candy of the gold statuette award, filled the entire floor space of the room," said the hotel's press release.

page 22

The plot was farfetched -Shearer and leading man Robert Montgomery have an affair at the same time her father has one with his mother -- but Mrs Thalberg looked great in her chic Adrian wardrobe and bobbed hair."

from Inside Oscar aka The Holy Bible

*

page 8

Is that goo for his mouth, or the goo for his nose?" Lucas asks wiping a bit of brown slime off Jabba's cheek with his finger.

page 22

Disneyland is a movie that invites its audience right into the screen, combining mass appeal with mechanical ingenuity.

from Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas

* 

page 8

After seeing that film I was left with the understanding that the Bollywood musical and its outrageous comic tragic storytelling succeeded because of a deal that exists between the film and its audience."

page 22

from Moulin Rouge!

*

page 8

'For example, it's striking how obvious it is in retrospect that the New Wave was, fundamentally, a product of it's time: impertinent, playful, inventive; emphasizing chance, rupture, improvisation, and brilliant intuition; creating sequences that loop back on themselves like gags or that metonymically demonstrate the entire film."

page 22

Critical thought enabled them not only to approach film but to conquer it, and it became such an essential element of their intellectual growth that it came to symbolize the entire creative  process for them.

from French New Wave

*

page 8

The gypsy nature of my film life hasn't helped me resolve this disturbing sense of musical beds."

page 22

I wobbled into the building, found the office and in my best southern Brooklynese announced to the secretary, "Ah'm heah to play Scarlett O'Hara"

from Shelley Also Known as Shirley

*

Shelley Winters! Why do I have this book? LOL. The cover says it was a #1 bestseller (published in 1981)

I was just watching her in A Place in the Sun (1951) again Saturday night*. She was not exactly a subtle actress but she was definitely a born loudmouth storyteller. Some people are born to be stars but it's almost like Shelley was born to be an old loudmouth lady recalling stardom and gossiping about even bigger stars. When I was a kid it seemed like she was always on tv talking about one celebrity or another from '50s era Hollywood.

This post = SO RANDOM! 

*times have sure changed. Shelley was nominated for Best Leading Actress for this movie but today this would 100% be considered a supporting performance given that she's missing for huge passages of the film.