Interview: on the Ghostly Costume Design of "The Beguiled"

 by Nathaniel R

The costume designer Stacey Battat has, to date, worked mostly in female-oriented contemporary indies. That's quite a perfect niche to build a design career from. Or at least it is when the women who've visually helped define your early work are such stylish talented icons themselves. Battat first made her mark on two Parker Posey features in the late Aughts (Broken English, Happy Tears). Soon after she was deep in the Julianne Moore business (Still Alice, Freeheld, What Maisie Knew). Other credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him and Mozart in the Jungle but it's been her partnership with writer/director Sofia Coppola that's come to define her young career.

The two began working together on the LA dreamy Somewhere (2010). Battat proved invaluable to all the fashiongasms of Coppola's arguably most underrated feature The Bling Ring (2013). Then came an atypical challenge: a forgotten girls school deep in the Civil War era.

I spoke with Battat recently by phone to talk about one of the most visually striking films this past year, The Beguiled, and what she brought to it. Our interview, edited for clarity and length follows...

Click to read more ...

VOTE In Our Thirst Trap Party. We Rounded Them Up For a Sexy NY's

Happy New Year's Eve! One last year in review list during the actual calendar year (though you know 2017 film year doesn't truly end until the Oscars are handed out). Here's Nathaniel R...

[Pictured left: Lady Bird just needed to see some D. We've all been there.]

In a not so festive season when we've all been thinking hard about a lot of terrible thinkings like corrupt governments and oligarchies, sexual misconduct and systemic isms that make life such an oppressive mess for so many people (and damage everyone -- even the opporessors -- since we all are truly in this life together) as well as the terror of both climate change and this particular cold snap  (I'm super sick right now, yay!)  it may feel counterintuitive to be silly and celebrate, I dunno, sexy movie men.

But it is New Year's Eve as I type this (my least favorite holiday since i can remember... I only like to goof off at home and make lists for this one) and we must start the New Year on a positive hedonistic note. Puritanism is bad for you anyway since sex and the enjoyment of sexy things can be a source of immense  joy and pleasure and intimacy and/or whatever both consenting parties have agreed upon. 

If you're a cinephile some part of you loves to look so this one's for you as we ogle some movie men after the jump. We squeezed them into six themed groups in their showoff or coy glory from which you should vote and choose the winners, okay? Okay!  

1 SIDEBAR HEROICS

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: A Plaster Haze in The Beguiled

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is no sprawling epic of the Civil War. The Farnsworth Seminary for Girls, where Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) presides, is no Tara. There are no ballgowns or battlefields. There is only a big lonely house, the seat of a plantation that has decayed into an isolated finishing school for an especially isolated handful of girls.

Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) is thrust into this setting, his leg wounded and his uniform bloodied. The resulting tension simmers for days, weeks even, before exploding in nocturnal chaos and violence. All the while the house stands silent, forcing these emotions up and down the stairs and into small, dimly-lit corners. There is a forever haze about this place, though never quite hot enough to break into a sweat.

This tightly-knotted mood owes a great deal to production designer Anne Ross, a frequent collaborator of Coppola’s, as well as art director Jennifer Dehghan and set decorator Amy Beth Silver...

Click to read more ...

Denzel Back in the Oscar Race?

Chris here.

After it was such a surprise late addition to the TIFF lineup, it wasn't much of a shock that Roman J Israel, Esq. got one of the more muted responses of the festival's big premieres. But the film is coming right around the corner and we can expect a much more attentive response for its release now that we have more time to actually get excited for it. And from the looks of the new trailer, it looks like we'll be getting more of peak Denzel Washington after a near miss with Oscar in Fences.

So can this film build on the momentum that Washington had last year? The Best Actor race is on the thin side, aside from incoming behemoth Gary Oldman, so some movie star goodwill can't hurt. Writer/director Dan Gilroy certainly gave us a complex sociopolitical male vehicle with Nightcrawler and this looks like another layered morality tale, even with significantly less scabrousness than that debut. But if there's any actor today who can mine the full depth of a character's compromise and regret, it's Washington.

As for the film itself, it will have to overcome some already tepid reviews to register beyond the megastar. There is certainly some promise here in the trailer, even if I'm bracing myself to be enraged by yet another film sidelining the fabulous Carmen Ejogo and giving us Colin Farrell sans beard. Roman J Israel, Esq. opens on November 3.

TIFF: The Greek Theatre of "Sacred Deer"

by Chris Feil

Is it better to have good friends or a large number of friends? It’s a question asked casually in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer that hosts some of its more loaded themes: social connection, the difference between acquiring and appreciating, the futile pursuit of a nuclear unit. As discussed between odd teenager Martin and adult Steven, played by Barry Keoghan and Colin Farrell, it carries even more terrifying subtext for their unsettling relationship.

Click to read more ...