top o' the linkin' to ya

Sydney Morning Herald production halted on The Great Gatbsy (briefly). Baz Luhrman hit on head just before Christmas. Ouch.
Listen Eggroll Mike D'Angelo's Christmas movie viewing history. Hee.
Rope of Silicon on that revolving director chair for Thor 2. What will it mean for the movie?
Indie Wire Ninety-seven Original Scores that are eligible for Oscar this year. Only five can be nominated of course. A notable omission is Alexandre Desplat's work on The Tree of Life but we figured that would get disqualified due to the abundance of non-original music in the film. As Hans Zimmer promised, he did not submit his wonderful Rango score. (sigh)

Coming Soon Charlize Theron discusses her role in Prometheus
Wider Screenings [NSFW]  in terms of budget to profit ratio the most successful film of all time is... Deep Throat.
Horror Asylum the Whedon-less reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is apparently dead. Yay!
Scene Stealers Trey Hoch really hates War Horse. He's not playing around with the hate.
The Wrap finds a silver lining in some not-so-great 2011's fare: good characters in forgettable movies.
THR Scott Feinberg's top ten. 
Hollywood Elsewhere on the strange omen of movie poster defacement in NYC, Mark Wahlberg's Contraband in this case. I also believe in this theory. The more a poster is defaced the more angry or irritated people are with its star or existence for any number of reasons.
Guardian has a Q&A with Samuel L Jackson. His greatest fear is "not working" which explains a lot about his film choices! 

Natty the Link Slayer

24 Frames Why is Harvey Weinstein the ultimate campaigner?
Art Info meet the sexy subway rider from Shame, actress Lucy Walters.
Mother Nature six things you probably didn't know about It's a Wonderful Life 
Super Punch Robot Chicken makes an Alien funny: the dangers of acid blood.  
Whedonesque Huh. Did not know this. Willow on Buffy was only a coincidental redhead. T'wasn't planned at all though it's impossible to think of Willow as anything but.
Alyson Hannigan is pregnant again. Congratulations to Mommy Willow! 

In Contention Kris Tapley's "superlatives" of the year. He's on #TeamMargaret and Team Tilda.
Sum Up Film the Desperate Women of the Best Actress Race
My New Plaid Pants Man crotch, the hot new movie poster trend
Empire Robert Redford back to work eh? He'll team with Margin Call's breakout writer/director J.C. Chandor on All is Lost, a man vs nature drama.
Cinema Blend Leonardo DiCaprio has two villain roles coming up and The Devil in the White City just hired its screenwriter Graham Moore
The Carpetbagger This is a "hearing about your nomination" story that isn't 100% generic. Angelina Jolie was at the dentist office. Hee. 
The Playlist Jessica Chastain to star in The Darling... which is about 4 or 5 movies from now on her schedule. At some point girlfriend's going to have to come up for air! Maybe she'll take a break in 2015?

For what its worth The Academy has disqualified The Smurfs from the Animated Feature race. No one expected it to be nominated but it's still important to note. 18 films were submitted and the category requires 16 qualifying entries for five-wise "Best" category. If more are disqualified before the nomination ballots go out, the shortlist may get, well, shorter. It's a curious and quite competitive category this year given the rarity of a Pixar fumble and a frontrunner (Rango) that is not quite beloved. That said, Pixar's Cars 2 could still well be nominated from force of habit. The Golden Globes went there despite several more acclaimed option and so did the Annies though they select ten nominees so it was practically a gimme. It's kind of a nail biter, isn't it? Do you think Pixar will manage a nod?

Q&A: Small Screens & Sex Workers

Since there were so many television centric questions in last week's "Ask Nathaniel" insert, I figured we'd have to give them their own Q&A post. We'll get to the movie questions on Tuesday. But for now let's handle all these questions involving smaller screens than we usually go for.

BENSUNCE: Like George Clooney, which current television actors would you see having a successful career on the big screen?

Expecting anyone to have Clooney-sized silver screen success after switching from the small screen is, well, a recipe for disappointment if not disaster. He's a 1%er. Most of the people I enjoy on TV now already had their movie shot and have gone small screen for better / bigger roles than they were getting at the movies. But the current small screen actors I think absolutely deserve and would ace major big screen opportunities are Christina Hendricks and Jon Hamm (Mad Men). On a riskier pipe dream note I hope Harry Shum Jr (Glee) gets at least one romantic comedy opportunity both because he's adorable and because Hollywood really needs to end their strange delusion that Asian men can't be romantic leads... or leads at all. 

SEAN D: If you were in charge of the Emmy awards how many nominations/wins would Buffy the Vampire Slayer have received?

I knew talking about Buffy earlier this month would get send us all spinning back in time to Sunnydale. It's always difficult to answer questions like this because so much of what should have been nominated and won in any given year in any given artform is contingent upon the competition that year. But I will say that I think Buffy's second, third and sixth seasons had no business whatsoever not being nominated for Best Drama Series and I think they should have won the Best Series Emmy at least once for Season 3. I'd probably have nominated the show itself for seasons 2 through 6 consecutively though I get why people have issues with seasons 4 through 6. But the standard lines of complaining about those seasons are wrongheaded ("it should have stayed in High School") and short sighted ("it got too depressing!"). In the first short season Buffy The Vampire Slayer was merely finding its footing and establishing its identity and the last season was a badly paced mess with a couple of wonderful moments but the rest is gold. As for writing Emmys, it's inexcusable that "The Body" and "Once More With Feeling" didn't have writing and directing nominations and in both cases you could make strong arguments for actual winged statues, too.

Shouldn't "Doppelgangland" have secured Alyson Hannigan an Emmy nod?For acting the show deserved the following nominations at least (Season #)

Actress, Drama
Sarah Michelle Gellar (2, 4, 6)
Supporting Actor, Drama
James Marsters (2), Anthony Stewart Head (6) 
Supporting Actress, Drama  
Allyson Hannigan (3,4), Emma Caulfield (5, 6)
Guest Actress, Drama 
Juliet Landau (2), Eliza Dushku (3)  
Guest Actor, Drama
Harry Groener (3) 

TOM M: Which recent film would make the leap to television and prove a MASH-ing success? And which television series has the bones to make a great film?

Crazy difficult question. The mediums are so different despite all the crossover these days. I don't know about M*A*S*H* level success ratios for anything but I would love love love or should I say I would ♥ a series based on I ♥ Huckabees that focused on the existential detectives Vivian (Lily Tomlin) and Bernard (Dustin Hoffman). I would fill my DVR with that nonsense and delete every other show taking up too much room. I could see a series based on Inception working fairly well and I think Scott Pilgrim vs. The World should have been a TV series to begin with.

Nathaniel's dream television series

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

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10th Anniversary Top Ten: "Once More With Feeling"

One of the all time best episodes of anything ever turned ten just a week(ish) ago... but I wanted to celebrate on a Tuesday.

Dawn's in trouble? Must be Tuesday."

That means for the past week and for many weeks after circa 2001 I had the songs from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Once More With Feeling" in heavy rotation in my head and or ipod. 

One of my favorite moments of any awards season, obscure though it be, is the moment during the AFI's one and only televised award ceremony in January 2002 (anyone remember that? They combined TV and film like the Globes do) when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was nominated for best drama series. When they announced the category a clip from this very episode played proudly alongside clips from its three fellow nominees, all traditional awards heavyweights: The West Wing, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. This is the sort of company Buffy should have been keeping during its run though Emmy voters just couldn't see it*.

For today's top ten, because I can never find a good excuse to talk about my #1 favorite TV series of all time, here's a top ten of that historic episode, in chronological order because the episode is so beautifully constructed.

TEN BEST MOMENTS IN "ONCE MORE WITH FEELING"

• Intro Once More With Feeling proclaims itself 'a very special episode' immediately, dispatching the usual credits for an overture style opening credits with each cast member smiling inside the (spot)light of the moon. It then surprises by 'going through the motions' of a typical day without dialogue before getting to its first number "Going Through the Motions", instantly recalling the gold standardepisode Hush. It's a ballsy confident move and, as it turns out, telling: Aren't those two episodes essentially fraternal twin classics, each riffing imaginatively on the difficulty of truly communicating with the people we love most?

• "Going Through The Motions" manages to answer all the complaints about Season 6's Sad Sloggy Buffy Summers and respond with a knowing and compelling cry for help. And it performs this dramatic spell with hilarious little sung asides (Demon Just Realizing He's Been Killed: "She's not even half the girl she --owwww!" | Hot Guy Rescued: "How can I repay... " Buffy: "Whatever...")

♫ I don't want to be... going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can't even see, if this is really me
And I just want to be
Aliiiiiiiiivvve ♪" 

The best part is the ending which reworks a now excessively familiar sight, a vampire being dusted, into something newly magical; Buffy emerges from the cloud singing beautifully, like it's fairy dust not ashes. 

8 other 'best' moments & grudge-holding Emmy bitching

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My Missing Whedon: "Angel"

This morning I read all 3,040 words of "Angel by the Numbers" an essay by Dan Kerns, who started on Joss Whedon's vampire series Angel as Best Boy and worked his way up to Gaffer. I discovered the article through Whedonesque and I heartily recommend it. During the reading I consumed ½ a cup of coffee (I've successfully narrowed down my daily consumption to 2 cups!), ignored the urge to pee twice, and thought of 4 other television shows: my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which sits comfortable at #1 of my all time favorite tv shows), one-of-a-kind Firefly, fascinating but uneven Dollhouse, and the non-Whedon series Dexter because "Darla" (Julie Benz) was mentioned and I just watched the first three episodes of Season 5 and it's just not the same without her... (and maybe it's the kind of repetitive series that should've wrapped with Season 4?)

Buffy, Angel and Faith.

Before I move on to work on 4 pending articles, I feel the need to admit that I've only seen 19 episodes of Angel, despite seeing literally every other episode -- even the unaired ones including the aborted Buffy pilot where Willow was not Alyson Hannigan (!) -- of every other Joss Whedon series and all of his movie work, too! Hell, I've even seen that animated sci-fi bomb Titan A.E. (2000). I've never understood why I couldn't work up much interest in Angel as a series but perhaps it was the procedural stand-alone nature of the early episodes which are the bulk of what I saw. Maybe I was just angry that Buffy received only 1 spinoff and not 2 (At least twice a year I impatiently dream of a 4 season run of "Faith the F*cked Up Vampire Slayer"). Of the 19 episodes I remember only about 6: the one where Oz visits to give him the Ring of Amara, the one where Willow drops in to restore Angelus soul, and any of the times that Eliza Dushku stopped in for a little big city ass-kicking. You get the picture: Crossovers! I tried again 2 times in later seasons and could not understand what the hell was going on.