#TeamLink

Anne Helen Petersen has 5 crotchety excellent questions about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Bad Ass Digest a terrific piece on Margaret & #TeamMargaret, the time between Christmas & New Years and the space between Mess & Masterpiece
Daily Mail Christina Hendricks returning to the 1960s for Bomb a political period piece from sporadic director Sally Potter. The film is about two teens who get involved in the "Ban the Bomb" movement. The film will star Elle Fanning and Alice Englert. Englert is actually the daughter of the great filmmaker Jane Campion though most sites are missing this info since people keep spelling her last name wrong. 

Movie|Line interviews Dee Rees on her feature Pariah which is about to open at long last. Go see it!
Black Book interviews the incomparable Sandra Bernhard before her New Year's Eve shows.
Awards Daily Sasha looks back on box office versus Oscar and how drastically things have changed over the years from when Terms of Endearment could end the year at #2 just behind a Star Wars movie. We covered this topic in great detail a few years ago but it's always worth contemplating if crazy depressing. Basically what it boils down to is adults started watching pay cable and left the movie theaters and the industry got really good at making films exactly like television: i.e. your favorite series returns on ____ . Stay tuned!

Oh look! It's one of our first official stills from Soderbergh's stripper drama Magic Mike (2012) with all of the boys four of the boys accounted for: Joe Manganiello, Alex Pettyfer, Matthew McConaughey, and Mike's leading man Channing Tatum. 

top ten bonanza! 
Beiber fever caps the Top Grossing Documentaries of 2011 according to IndieWire -- It's interesting to note that the list contains only two of the movies from Oscar's 15-wide finalist list: Buck and Bill Cunningham New York | Our friend Katey Rich delivers her top ten for Cinema Blend and boy has she stayed loyal to Meek's Cutoff  | Acid Cinema has a fun snarky preface and an individualistic top ten | Paste Magazine offers up a bizarre top 50 (Happythankyoumoreplease???? Really?) | Guy Lodge at In Contention doubles up for a top twenty with high marks for Weekend and Drive, of course, which he famously offered to have sex with at Cannes last summer |  Now Toronto's list reminds us that release dates differ greatly from country to country. 

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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Red Carpet Convo: Emmy Reds, Midriff Blues

In this edition of Red Carpet Convo Nathaniel talks to Mark Blankenship of The Critical Condition and our resident fashion obsessive Jose. 

Nathaniel: Is it too late to talk about the Emmy divas and their dresses. This pop culture wheel does spin madly these days -- knocking me right off my axis sometimes.
Jose: We're only a day behind E!'s own red carpet talk (not that comparing onself to E! is any sort of compliment.)
Mark: We can think of it as a gift we're giving to a busy world. Sit back. Relax. Fondly remember days gone by... Sunday gone by.

Karen, A Good Wife, Crazy, Gwynnie, Skinny

Nathaniel: Well, it's horrible to follow Joan Rivers but then our purposes are never quite the same with our red carpet coverage. We're here to talk about the ladies and we're less bitchy and we're allowed to discuss actual careers, too. If we're so moved. I think we should start with this "Worst" collection and get the negativity out of the way.
Jose: You did NOT just put Gwynnie in your worst list.
Nathaniel: I did. Left to right. Megan Mullaly. I instantly regret putting her here because at least there are colors other than reds but it reminds me of this one tie I wore back when I thought loud colorful ties were fashionable simply because men's clothing was such a sedative.
Jose: I didn't even know she'd been to the Emmys. I have nothing against the dress at least it's a change from her usual black pant suit look.
Mark: The dress is kind of overwhelming. Like, you expect to unfold it and discover it's actually a giant, silk screened print of an Impressionist painting.
Nathaniel: Damnit, now I like it more.

Nick & MeganMark: Is she on television now in the absence of Party Down?
Nathaniel: She does guest stints on Parks and Recreation where she plays the demonic ex-wife of her actual husband Nick Offerman. They're hilarious together.
Jose: Wait, she's married to Nick Offerman? *mind explodes* I can not for the life of me, wait to see what she and Patty Clarkson come up with to mess with poor "Ron Swanson". [Editor's note: Patty Clarkson will be on Parks and Recreation this year.]
Nathaniel: That show is so great. Okay, Julianna Marguiles, The Good Wife or as she's known in some quarters The Wife With the Goodly Hot Husband. Thank youuuu, reaction shots.

Mark: See... look, I don't hate this dress. I don't mind that she took teardrops from an old chandelier and put them on her bosom. I find it whimsical.
Nathaniel: I just don't understand it. I keep wanting it to be really abstract and structural with the way it juts out up top like it's decolettage that wants to be a stiff collar or a Disney cliff.
Jose: I applaud the risk she took by going with Armani Privé (these people design like they're dressing up astronauts for dinner parties) but I laugh at her terrible choice, it's just too fugly. Maybe she wanted to carry on the "arrive by way of eggs" tradition established by Björk and Gaga.
Nathaniel: But see that's just my objection to it. If you're going that way, GO that way. It looks much weirder and therefore better from far away.
Mark: For me, seeing it in motion made it kind of fascinating but just staring at this picture makes me like it less.

Who's the  woman in the pink and why is she wearing a mud mask?
Nathaniel: LOL. That's Paz de la Huerta who is insane.
Mark: !!! That's who that is? She's unrecognizable. And I watch Boardwalk Empire for chrissakes.
Jose: This is what happens when you take an oompa loompa out of the chocolate factory and send it to Extreme Makeover. 
Nathaniel: She's been doing that weird lip thing for awhile. If it's not the chocolate factory it's those easter candies that color your mouth.
Mark: Either that or like someone who just strolled out of a nuclear meltdown. Isn't that kind of how your skin looks if it's burned by an A-bomb?
Nathaniel: I wouldn't know.

Mark: This image reminds me of how frustrating she is on the show; all affect, all the time.
Nathaniel: I don't watch the show. Every time I try I think Sopranos During Prohibition. Yawn.
Jose: Ugh no. The Sopranos rocked, this one is just "important", I watched the entire first season to see if it was about more than prestige and winning awards and no, it wasn't.

Nathaniel: Since Jose and I are in disagreement about Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark you must break the tie.
Mark: About her look or her work? Jose do you like her in general?
Nathaniel: Her look. We both like her work. 
Jose: I'd like to coerce you to like this Pucci dress by suggesting that it was paying homage to this.

Mark: Ha! yes. Although I thought she was tipping her hat to Madonna's Shanti/Ashtangi period.
Nathaniel: Again I repeat. If you're going that way, GO that way. None of this half-assedness. Half-assed and midriff, no relation.
Mark: Zing!
Jose: I ADORE Gwynnie. She is the only reason I subject myself to Glee and why I have gotten into so many bar fights about the 1998 Oscars.
Nathaniel: LOL.
Mark: I really like her too. I think she's talented and charming and reasonably aware of how ridiculous she can sometimes be. That said, loving someone means telling them the truth and truthfully, this outfit is bad news. If it were all one dress, then maybe, but the midriff is just awful. The top looks poorly cut to me and slices up her body in a strange way. I agree that she should have gone further here. Farther?

Nathaniel: I don't like any dresses that risk making super skinny women look like they've put on lbs because that's CLEARLY an optical illusion. Gwyneth has a great body.
Mark: Either way show me some bellybutton or cover it up altogether.
Jose: I shall go the grave defending this look, it's just perfect to me!
Mark: I hope this is not the rift that ruins our blossoming friendship, Jose.
Nathaniel: I sense trouble. "1998 OSCARS!" *runs*
Jose: lol. Let's discuss  Jayma Mays before you two continue to break my heart.

Mark: Well she looks like a lamp. Or a bottle of cheap bourbon dressed as a Southern Belle.
Jose: I loved her. She looked a hundred years younger than the actually younger Glee girls. Did y'all see what Dianne Agron was wearing? Yikes.
Nathaniel: Well the younger Glee girls are always trying so hard.  I think they're scared of life after Glee. But the tiers on this dress are so weird like a pepto-bismol wedding cake. And I think when you're as delicate as Jayma, something that looks flimsy, easily torn or flammable if placed over a lightbulb is not a good idea.
Mark: Has her character gotten any better on Glee? I stopped watching partway through Season 1.
Nathaniel: Let us not discuss "character" and Glee in the same sentence lest you kill my buzz for the season premiere tonight.
Mark: Fair. But has her random collection of weekly, contradictory impulses gotten any more coherent? I know the answer before I...
Jose: lol.
Nathaniel: I SAID NO. DON'T KILL MY BUZZ.

Jose: I hate Glee but I shall respect your wishes, Nat.
Nathaniel: I hate myself for loving it but love it I do. Let's move on to BEST ACTRESSES!
Mark: The Best Comedy Actresses, you mean? 
Nathaniel: Same difference. Best Actress Drama doesn't count until they stop nominating Mariska Hargitay.
Mark: Hahaha!

READ THE REST for best actress comedy, best dressed and a few men.

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Christina Hendricks on "Drive", Acting During Car Chases and That Scene

Michael C. here. I missed Margo Martindale's work on Justified, but judging by the response to her Emmy win, and by the consistently stellar level of her work, the award was no doubt well-deserved. All the same, it was hard not to mutter a curse under your breath when a name other than Christina Hendricks was called out. For four seasons on Mad Men Hendricks has been the epitome of a what a great supporting performance can accomplish. Her nuanced, deeply felt performance as Joan Holloway prevented the character from being the period caricature it could have been in lesser hands, and raised the bar for the rest of the show.

Christina Hendricks as "Blanche" in DRIVE (2011)

Now with Drive, in the small but crucial role of Blanche, Hendricks is taking that skill for finding the heart underneath flashy surfaces to the big screen. I got to chat with Hendricks recently at a press event where she arrived bright and enthusiastic fresh from the set of Mad Men. Here are some of the highlights from the event where I was able to get a few questions in:

On her confrontation with Ryan Gosling…

Christina Hendricks: We shot that very intense scene the very first day of shooting. None of really knew each other, and we were in this hundred degree creepy little hotel room. And so Nicolas came up to us and said, “I’m the kind of director - I will shoot and shoot and shoot until you tell me not to shoot. So be vocal with me and let me know if you feel comfortable with what we’ve already got” No director ever does this. It’s really a nice thing to hear.

He was just very collaborative and very understanding; because it was really intense stuff we were shooting. And because I really didn’t know Ryan yet, it was this very real feeling of fear in this very uncomfortable hot room. So it was intense to shoot, but I think it lead to a successful scene. We all got to know each other by the end of the day [laughs] All sweating together.

Michael: How much of that intensity were you ready for and how much did you experience for the first time on the day?

Christina Hendricks: I think the night before we rehearsed it so we could get the blocking down but we didn’t rehearse it emotionally. We knew where we were going to be standing. Cause we knew it was going to be a long day and we knew it was going to be hard with the entire crew in there. So we all got together the night before and said, “We’ll walk here and here and then you’ll go down and the money bag will be here.” So I wasn’t quite ready for this strong leather glove on my face and I remember my heart being like “Ba-boom! Ba-boom!” He [Gosling] is such an extraordinary actor it felt real and very much in the moment. We did that scene over and over and over, so I was an emotional wreck by the end of the day. I was crying for twelve hours straight.

Michael: It comes across. Just watching it is draining.

Christina Hendricks: It was heavy. Nicolas would be like, “Can you do one more?” and I would be like “[gasping sobs] Hold on.” And Ryan was like, “Who are you? How can you keep doing this?”

 On choosing Drive...

Christina Hendricks: I choose a project based on who’s involved and my faith in them and the script and the rest you just let go. I’d seen Nicolas’s film Bronson before we met and I was so impressed by it and so excited by it that I was like, “This guy’s going to do something cool." The end result was kind of what I imagined he would do. It was stylish and rich in color and scary and heartfelt and all these different things that I knew that he would do. I had a lot of confidence in him.

(From this point forward we could not avoid getting into SPOILERS -so read on if you've seen the movie)

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Review: The Self Possession of "Drive"

There's 100,000 streets. You don't need to know the route."

The Driver is alone in a hotel room. Looking out over the city at night, negotiating on a cel phone he'll abandon immediately. We never learn his name. We don't need to know it.

His face is Ryan Gosling's, but even so it's a less familiar landscape than you'd think. With Drive, the actor erases any doubts (were there any?) that he's the most exciting young movie star on this side of the Atlantic. For the driver, his face has taken on a new mask-like stillness which twice in Nicolas Winding Refn's brilliant new movie, is covered (redundantly) by an actual mask. There is no knowing this driver; if we were given his name we'd forget it anyway or doubt its authenticity. Even the underscore, a brilliantly retro synth score, that memorably features Kavinksy's "Nightcall" just as we're being introduced keeps us at a certain remove, a hypnotized female voice singing "There's something inside you. It's hard to explain." Indeed.

To summarize the plot of Drive would immediately reduce it to a standard nihilistic noir or crime drama. If you must know -- though I hope you've already seen it because it's best seen cold without knowing the following details -- the driver is a stunt driver for the movies and also a mechanic and also quite willing to be your getaway for crimes. He won't ask questions and you shouldn't either. He just drives. His mechanic boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston, excellent) and his quiet neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan, excellent) and her child Benico (Kaden Leos, also excellent... you'll be sensing a trend here) are the three people in his life that he seems to care for, despite his dangerously self-possessed aura. In the course of Drive, this walking loner archetype is gradually humanized whether through narrative emotional connections or performance choices. Both the neighbor and the boss have troubled histories including people who are Trouble and the driver's very tight social circle is soon forcibly opened by crowbars, shotguns and handshakes. The cast expands to include a wealthy investor/criminal Bernie (Albert Brooks... seeking Oscar), his mouthy colleague Nino (Ron Perlman, delighted to show off) a lesser criminal Cook (James Biberi) and his associate Blanche (Christina Hendricks, memorably put-out in stilettos), and Irene's ex-con husband with the perfect name of "Standard" (Oscar Isaac, just terrific). Needless to say, shit goes down both in and out of cars. Very violent, exquisitely directed shit goes down. 

To Refn and Gosling's credit, the unknowable driver doesn't stay a mere Embodiment of Something (like, say, Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men) which helps the movie immeasurably. The few times the driver's humanity peaks through, his voice trembling, a flash of fear across his face, or even a moment of tenderness are genuinely unnerving; the untouchable man is touched. Even the stoic loner, who loves only driving and barely speaks, can't escape the violent messy pull of humanity. His choice to dehumanize again, donning the mask a second time, is a genuinely frightening image that I haven't been able to shake since seeing the movie. 

Drive is one of those movies. It makes you think in and of its images. I generally take notes when I watch films though I can't always understand them afterwards, the danger of scribbling in the dark. My notes for Drive... are strange. The standard illegible chicken scratches appear but there are also crude images scribbled in, attempts to capture the movies indelibe compositions, use of color and general mise-en-scene. (I've recreated two of them here for you since my scanner is broken).

I'm not sure why i wrote red all over this one. Stills show that it's more orange.

Drive is just one of those movies, the kind that unfold with such individuality and confidence and sense of possibility that you can almost imagine the celluloid standing up and strutting right past you, knowing full well you're going to turn and look. Yeah, I'm hot shit, it might say, if it weren't so emphatically the strong and silent type. One could argue, as I did with myself on second viewing, that the movie does boast about its own coolness in just this way and too often. If there's something to be said against Drive beyond its nasty nihilism (the extent of the violence is... uneccessary) it's just that. The movie stops in its track a few times and whether or not you're hypnotized (I was absolutely) it's clearly showing off. Let's just say that Nicolas Winding Refn is the most exciting Mad Dane to arrive in the movies since Lars von Trier... and knows it, too.

Though Drive's initial retro impression with the synth score, glistening cityscapes and practically neon hot pink titles immediately is that it's paying homage to the 1980s and Michael Mann, Drive very quickly becomes only its own memorable self. But because it's so emphatically a movie, so possessed by the motion in its pictures  --even its frozen tableaus are alive with suggested movement, promised ugly futures you fear you'll lunge towards without warning -- it can't help but recall the great tradition of cinema's coolest movies.  Leaving the movie the first time (I've already seen it twice) I thought most of Pulp Fiction. Not Pulp Fiction as we know it now -- annoyingly replicated never duplicated -- but Pulp Fiction back when it first took the world by storm; they aren't much alike but for that blast of intoxicating fresh air in the theater. A/A-

Recommended Further Reading
The Film Experience - "People Will Love It Ten Years From Now"
Nick's Flick Picks - a coiled python
Serious Film -"atmosphere. neon glow and moments that hang in the air..."
My New Plaid Pants "Chrissy Hendricks, Stiletto Wobbler" 
In Contention "the finest layer of B-movie grime that time and money can buy" 

Have you seen Drive? If so do sound off in the comments.