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Entries in comedy (457)

Saturday
Jul222017

10 Favorite Moments in the Emmy Drama Actress Roundtable

THR's exciting tradition is upon us. They've released the full roundtable of Emmy Drama actress hopefuls. Well, hopefuls at the time. Oprah Winfrey was not nominated as she was expected to be for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The same thing happened to her when she was on the Oscar-seeking roundtable for The Butler. Despite being the former queen of talk, perhaps this format is a curse for her? The other women present were nominated: Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies), Jessica Lange (Feud: Bette and Joan), Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid's Tale), and Chrissy Meitz (This Is Us).

The Roundtable in full, and ten favorite moments therein after the jump...

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Monday
Jul172017

"Being There" -- Essential Viewing For the Right Now

by Nathaniel R

Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979) is a fortune teller. And the future it foretells isn’t rosy. The classic film about a TV-loving cypher who Forrest Gumps his way into history is approaching its 40th anniversary, but its essential viewing for the right now.  Don't wait until 2019 to see it.

Among the film’s many queasy previews of life in the early 21st century is the proliferation of screens. Here that takes the shape of television, with Ashby frequent crosscutting to whatever is on the TV in a given scene. Though the content we see is recognizably dated, its intrusion is evergreen. 

Hidden within the prophecy of multiple screens replacing actual experience, is an even sharper notion of the screen as a mirror...

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Friday
Jun302017

Posterized: Edgar Wright

Who knew that you could take a coffee break on the red carpet? by Nathaniel R

After the unfortunate "creative differences" on Marvel's Ant Man (2015) which Edgar Wright abandoned despite years of passionate development of the project, isn't it nice to see him bounce back so definitely with Baby Driver? That heist-comedy-wishitwasamusical-thriller opened this Wednesday to mostly stellar reviews (alas, our own Chris Feil wasn't a fan). I saw it at a packed screening on its preview night and the crowd ate it up; the movie tasted more delicious than my stale popcorn. That might seem like meager praise but please note that I have a high tolerance for stale popcorn and a low tolerance for heist films which are the single most overplayed action subgenre.

The witty director came to fame with UK comic sitcoms (my best high school girlfriend forced me to watch the first season of Spaced one visit and it was a delight). Wright then won a new round of fans on the big screen with the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004) which launched the loosely connected fan favorite "Cornetto Trilogy". He's just 43 so there's much more filmography to come. Hooray! 

How many Wright's have you seen and which is your favorite? 
It's too early to say definitively but I think he just might have topped his own best with Baby Driver. It's a goofy stylish and mechanically precise blast. 

Thursday
Jun292017

A League of Their Own, Pt. 1: Cow Girls & Charm School

25th Anniversary Four-Part Mini Series Event


Welcome sports movie fans. Or, in a pinch, actressexuals who will watch largely female casts do practically anything.

Twenty-five years ago on July 1st, 1992, Penny Marshall's period comedy A League of Their Own (1992) opened in theaters. It wasn't quite an immediate blockbuster but word of mouth was spectacular -- in its second weekend it grossed practically as much as its first, which as you know is exceedingly rare. The female led comedy proved another home run for the director of Big, eventually grossing over $100 million domestically. It ended 1992 as that year's tenth biggest hit, just behind Basic Instinct and shutting Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven out of the moneyed top ten.

For the next few days we'll be revisiting this beloved classic tag-team style like we did with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Thelma & Louise (1991), Rebecca (1940), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Please join in the conversation if you love this movie (and who doesn't?). - Editor

Batter up...

Part 1 by Lynn Lee

01:22 Inside an old-fashioned cape-cod house, a tall, slender, elegant older lady with reddish blonde hair (Lynn Cartwright, but with Geena Davis’ unmistakable throaty voice dubbed) is packing a suitcase.  As we’ll learn, she’s Dottie Hinson, one of the (fictional) first women to play in the (real) All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League, and is getting ready to attend a special event honoring the AAGPBL at the baseball Hall of Fame.  She seems oddly less than excited about it, even when her daughter turns up with her old baseball mitt...

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Friday
Jun232017

i've got good news. that link you like is going to come back in style.

Guardian Great interview with Holly Hunter about The Big Sick and her career. (People are already mentioning "Oscar nom!" in regards to her supporting work as Zoe Kazan's mother in the romantic comedy)

Pajiba on what the new Defenders posters might remind you of

Playbill Adorable John Benjamin Hickey, fresh off the revival of Six Degrees of Separation, thinks there should be a fine for people who leave their cel phones on in theaters. Agreed! 

Screen Crush picks the 25 best LGBT films of the past 25 years. Happy to see Pariah and Bound mixed in with the usual titles like Brokeback Mountain and such. And the past few years have been so good for LGBT cinema. I mean: Carol, The Handmaiden, Moonlight, Tangerine. #Blessed

Esquire Fun article by Tyler Coates on how he finally learned to love RuPaul's Drag Race which he had avoided for years and even bad-mouthed in print

Theater Mania you don't see this often but there's an actual age restriction on the Broadway adaptation of George Orwell's "1984". No one under 13 will be admitted due to its intensity. The show stars Tom Sturridge, Reed Birney, Olivia Wilde, and TFE fav Cara Seymour (who previously did that lovely guest spot for us). I'm seeing it soon so will report back.

IndieWire has issues with the "orientalism" of the new Twin Peaks. Add this to the onling Sofia Coppola controversy and... well... People I don't know what to do with all the outrage anymore at everything. There's got to be a line where, as an adult, you're just okay with what you're seeing and discarding the parts that irk you, or filing them under "I don't know about that but whatever" if they're not harmfully intended. Artists will always have their own peculiar obsessions and they'll always draw from a wide variety of influences (at least the good ones will) to craft their own stories and nobody really owns history; pop culture and the arts are giant beautiful melting pots of ideas and aesthetics from all over the world. Oh and also the Laura Dern hairstyle is not proprietarily Asian as the article seems to imply. I know this because I was obsessed with silent film star Louise Brooks as a teenager (Pandora's Box Diary of a Lost Girl 4ever!). It was originally called the 'Castle Bob,' because Irene Castle (a famous NY dancer) debuted the then-shocking look in 1915. It was a very controversial look but became a sensation in the 1920s with flappers and silent film stars. Hollywood's first popular Asian American actress Anna May Wong, who the article references as an influence on Dern's look, actually had to get her hair cut like that because it was so popular.

This is Not Porn great photo of Oscar winner Kim Hunter in makeup chair on The Planet of the Apes (1968)

Hilarious Reads and I Personally Needed the Laughs. You?

The New Yorker "Tennessee Williams with Air Conditioning"... *fans self* I was cackling so loud by the end of this. Best article in forever.

• McSweeneys "11 Ways That I, a White Man, Am Not Privileged" Oops. Hee!

Buzzfeed "25 Gay Pride signs that will make you laugh harder than you should" - so many of these are so wonderful I just want to hug all gay people for being funny and able to spell

McSweeneys "An Oral History of Quentin Tarantino as Told to Me By Men I've Dated" 

What places are delivering right now? So, in the early ’90s, right around when Pulp Fiction came out, Quentin Tarantino and Mira Sorvino were dating. I always thought Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion was a dumb chick flick, but I caught part of it on cable the other day and there was an ad for Red Apple cigarettes in the background of one of the shots! Do you know about Red Apple cigarettes?