Daredevil 1-2

I fell in love with Daredevil as a young boy when Frank Miller, pre Dark Knight, took over the comic. It wasn't just the sexiness of a blind superhero (what?). Miller's run in the early 80s brought us famous characters like Bullseye and Elektra and Stick and a dangerous physical immediacy that other comics just didn't have. Naturally the Frank Miller run, plot-wise, was what the execrable 2003 movie tried to cover, jamming it all together with spectacularly disastrous and silly results. Marvel's first foray into Netflix territory gets so much right in its first few episodes that people need no longer fear The Man Without Fear but embrace him. Instead we need only fear, together whilst binge-watching, that Daredevil won't be able to keep this quality up for for its whole first season.

Herewith thoughts on the first two episodes...

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A Few Unsung Supporting Actors

I dive headfirst into 2015 cinema tomorrow at Sundance but tonight I did some finalizing of my Supporting Actor ballot for 2014. I really should do these things earlier for advocacy purposes. For while the Oscar race was curiously composed of just five people essentially -- you could see tumbleweeds drifting across the communal hive mindscape whenever this category was mentioned -- there were several men giving fine performances out there. As with Best Actress, they were just ignored and everyone shrugged, "weak year".

It's almost never that simple. Though some years of cinema are better than others, it's rare to find a weak year in any acting category. The reason is simple math: with hundreds of movies coming out every year and each of those containing dozens of performances, there are always more than 20 commendable performances to be seen and discussed.

You can see my supporting actor ballot here. It's my closest match to Oscar this year I believe but among the just-misses are very fine performances. Some performers, for various reasons, just don't get talked about. Sometimes that's because the role is "thankless" like Kristofer Hivju's excellent juggling of tone as a perfect subplot foil for the A plot and characters in Force Majeure's. Other times it's because their role is "soft" -- romantic dramas tend to be tough for men to win attention for, hence nobody really considering Charlie Cox's work in The Theory of Everything as a performance just as the third point in a triangle. And in one case, hi Shia Labeouf, it's because the extracurricular celebrity circus overshadows the actually excellent acting from the sidelines. LaBeouf was fascinatingly intense in both Nymphomaniac and Fury, constantly suggesting things about his characters that are more complex than what's in the screenplay. What might he be capable of if someone actually handed him an awards-calibre role? 

Open Thread. What did I miss?

THE LEFTOVERS just gets better and better. how phenomenal is Ann Dowd any way?It occurred to me yesterday while making an exceedingly poor attempt to fully recuperate from TIFF madness (I should have been resting my strained eyeballs but instead I was emptying the DVR) that I had missed two whole weeks of regular news. I joked about this on twitter but I'm 150% sure that I missed something I'd actually like to have known about!

It's easy to miss things, even if you're fully immersed in the industry. (An example: I was talking to Felicity Jones at that Theory of Everything party about her scenes with Charlie Cox, who is so sweetly crush-worthy in the movie, and she somehow hadn't heard that he was the new Daredevil for Netflix!)

What movie things, besides TIFF and the standard Oscar buzz, have been on your mind these past couple of weeks?

Catch me back up. Fill me in.

Links: Daredevil Casting, Cage Laughing, Maleficent Building, X-Men Griping

Today's Picture To Gawk At
This one goes out to my podcast pals via Theater Mania because we know you've always wanted to see a photo of Julianne Moore with Sophie Okonedo!

Juli with the cast of the 2 millionth revival of "Raisin in the Sun"

Linkages
New York Times Maya Angelou, the famous author and poet, sometime actress, and one time director (Down in the Delta, 1998) has died
Pajiba Charlie Cox, who killed my beloved Pfeiffer in Stardust will be the new Daredevil for 2015's Netflix series. I haven't seen him in act in like seven years (no really)... so I have no idea what to say about this. Kept a low profile he has as a once rising star. Thoughts?
Playbill Best Picture winner The Sting (1973) will become a musical on Broadway. (That's mandatory now for famous movies)
AV Club HBO going further back with its gay content and planning a 1960s based gay telefilm Open City about gays and the mafia... not to be confused with the modern term "the gay mafia"
i09 talks to production designer turned director Robert Stromberg about his world-building on movies and Maleficent 

YouTube every time Nicolas Cage laughs in a movie. This is so funny and disturbing 
Variety Gross! Clueless's Stacey Dash (Dionne) is a Republican and has just joined Fox News
Variety Golden Trailer Awards getting more popular each year 

Would Be Emmy Precursors
Finally, The Broadcast Television Critics Nominations were announced today. I don't belong to this kid brother organization of the BFCA (which I do belong to) that is still very new... but I can't say that I'm pleased with them for the Mad Men shutouts in their drama nominations or that they're so conversative in their taste when it comes to some of Emmy's issues. (The Big Bang Theory, really? and no RuPaul's Drag Race in Reality Competition despite the media always complaining about how dumb the Emmys are to not see its subversive brilliance?) But if you're curious you can take a look. Things That Are Awesome:  Lauren Weedman for Guest Actress for Looking on HBO. Lots of nominations for Masters of Sex and Orange is the New Black; Things That Are Stupid: Mad Men shut out; Things That Are Interesting: Joe Morton who plays Kerry Washington's father and Bellamy Young, who plays the perpetually defeated unloved First Lady are the only members of Scandal to get acting nominations. The lack of interest in Girls on HBO (only nominated for Andrew Rannels in Guest Performer). Two acting nods for Shameless as a Comedy (it's new campaign tactic) even though it's more of a Drama than it used to be.

art by Jason MetcalfX-Men. Emphasis on the Men. 
Dim the House Lights has an excellent piece expanding on my frustrations with X-Men Days of Future Past and the X-franchise's unwillingness to care about its female characters. This article goes one step further and argues that their agency has been completely erased. Compellingly argued, too.

Rachel & Miles X-Plain the X-Men in my readings about the X-Men movies I chanced upon this great funny podcast that attempts to explain the X-Men's very convoluted history, right from the beginning in the 1960s. If you care about comic books, the X-Men, or want to just marvel at how professional some podcasts sound (seriously, what equipment do people use that their voices are always so shiny, clear and untarnished by sound debris?) [all the episodes on iTunes]

LFF: Home to Britain

David reporting on four of the British films in the London Film Festival.

The crown jewel in the archive selection this year is the BFI’s pristine restoration of J.B.L. Noel’s overwhelming 1924 documentary, The Epic of Everest. It’s one of those films where the sheer audacity of what’s being filmed, as opposed to any technical prowess, is what really impresses. And when the intertitles (it’s silent, of course, though outfitted with a gorgeously minimalist new score from Simon Fisher Turner) announce that a particular shot is brought to you using a revolutionary telephoto lens, that’s quite an achievement. Though no words are spoken, and faces barely seen, it’s hard not to become enthralled in Noel’s recounting of their journey through Tibet and up the mountain, with breathtaking long takes of some passages of the mountain gripping in the simplicity of distant figures precarious movements. Andrew Irvine and George Mallory died in the attempt, a tragedy captured in a climax that combines painful distance – the camera could only be taken so far up the mountain – with melancholic intertitles that seem to reach out through time. The BFI restoration is released in the UK this weekend, with a detailed DVD and Blu-Ray release sure to follow – in any format, it’s an awesome experience of an extraordinary expedition.

Charlie Cox (remember him?) in Hello Carter plus two more new films after the jump...

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