Little Link on the Bloggie

Today's Must Reads
Cleo Journal has an excellent piece by Sara Black McCulloch on audience complicity, cat-fights, and star persona in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 
Grantland Mark Harris, typically brilliant, looks at this weird dispirited holding place (2015) before the next wave of superheroes are due to hit the movies for five plus years

Linkage
Variety Melissa Gilbert, that little girl from that Little House on the Prairie must have liked her role as SAG President some years ago -- now she's running for Congress in Michigan where she moved in 2013! Michigan politics are SO messy. Perhaps Laura Ingalls can help clean things up!
Gabby Sidibe loves Jussie Smollet cleaning her floors. LOL. Get all of that dirt, papi!
Criterion Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons look back on The French Lieutenant's Woman 
LA Times talks to the men behind Shaun the Sheep's dialogue free wonders
Rope of Silicon Angelina Jolie's By the Sea gets a hard "R" from the MPAA  

Empire Reese Witherspoon to produce and star in a supernatural thriller called Cold. She stays busy, that one
Defamer talks about the twist in Joel Edgerton's The Gift. I can't read this yet because I haven't seen the film but I love Rich Juzwiak's articles
The Hairpin "32 Things That Are All In Your Head" 
MNPP Gratuitous Miguel Angel Silvestre
The Film Stage PT Anderson made a music video again. This time for his Inherent Vice supporting actress Joanna Newsom
Uproxx a sequel to the one-off wonder Edge of Tomorrow is a possibility. Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossble - Rogue Nation) and Tom Cruise maybe thinking about it
Slate argues that the problems with the Fantastic Four might just be in the source material 
AV Club on the proliferation and pros and cons of the anthology format, post American Horror Story. Interesting but I dearly wish people would stop crediting Ryan Murphy with inventing a genre. Anthologies have existed since the beginning of television. He just popularized them again after a few decades when they went mostly extinct. It's like crediting Baz Luhrmann for inventing musicals or something.

ICYMI
Here at TFE we recently discussed that recent damning Miles Tellers profile in Esquire and The New York Times has now published "a brief history of the tough celebrity profile"  featuring Mira Sorvino, Cara Delevingne, Ernest Hemingway, and more. I thought I'd share it since we were just talking about Mira Sorvino at length in Mighty Aphrodite.

Stage Door
Playbill awww. Cyndi Lauper visited the stars of Fun Home backstage. Incidentally the show has been selling out houses for months now. That Tony win did good for a great musical. I keep wondering if anyone will dare make it into a movie?
CNN Benedict Cumberbatch is on stage in London as Hamlet but having trouble with fans who are filming him do it. Jesus, what is wrong with people? Just watch the thing you've paid to see. 

Animated Feature Contenders: Henry & Me

Tim here. With the Oscar nominations coming in just under a week, this is our last chance to look at the little odds and ends on the list of 20 films submitted in the Best Animated Feature category, and pretend that the race isn’t down to The LEGO Movie and five movies vying for four runner-up slots. And of all the odds and ends, they don't come a whole lot odder than our final subject, Henry & Me.

Henry & Me is a direct-to-DVD feature that finagled a courtesy theatrical release, no doubt in part so that it would show up in articles like this one, and win some free publicity as a calling-card for young Reveal Animation Studios, and raise the profile of a release that’s seeing a healthy chunk of its sales going to charity. The risk of such a gambit is that it relies on the reviewer playing nice with a sweet-minded but rather dim bit of nonsense.

More...

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Curio: Cyndi's Colors

Alexa here, following up on Glenn's Cyndi Lauper post. I've been a Cyndi follower and sometime apologist (see: my previous support of Vibes) since grade school, so Sunday night was a big night.  Now if only we could conjure the perfect role for her to complete her EGOT; perhaps Jonathan Demme could harness the power of her marvelous quirk?  For now, here are some Cyndi creations to celebrate her Kinky Boots.

Illustrated poster by Nour Tohmé.

Kinky Boots support at the Keep-Calm-O-Matic.

Cyndi doll art and trading cards after the jump...

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After Link: Blue Jasmine, Red Wedding, Emerald City

Stranger Than Most encourages you to see these 20 underseen masterpieces. Lot of great films mentioned though I shall limit my "seconded!" shouting to Summer Hours, Three Women and [safe] today
Guardian Joss Whedon "I kept telling my mom that reading comic books would pay off"
Gawker volcanic imagery aside, After Earth is not scientology propaganda, just a crap movie
Hollywood & Swine after After Earth's rough opening weekend, Sony cancels "take your kid to work day" LOL
The Atlantic when did men -- other than George Clooney of course -- lose their charm?
Cinema Blend pages from Heath Ledger's Joker diary. CB claims this is from a German tv series but the narration is in French so I'm not sure what's going on

WSJ Speakeasy Interesting... turns out Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is a riff on the Bernie Madoff scandal and Speakeasy claims that Alec Baldwin's performance will be talked about. (Perhaps I should change that supporting actor chart?)
Salon The internet is losing its collective mind over Game of Thrones. As I said on twitter, I am more and more convinced that fans are victims and George R R Martin and the HBO series are their abusive lover. FWIW I quit reading the books after the Red Wedding. It's just not for me. Don't need the gore and the abuse!
Playbill sings the praises of Broadway breakthrough Annaleigh Ashford from Kinky Boots. Is she the next Goldie Hawn? 
Cinema Blend The Wizard of Oz (1939) is converting to 3D and IMAX for its 75th anniversary next week.
/Film ruh roh. The screenwriter of Green Lantern is signing on to the Blade Runner sequel. It was already a bad enough idea, lightning rarely striking twice.

Watch & Listens
YouTube Patrick Stewart speaks out on domestic violence and mental health awareness - lovely
KCRW - The Business interviews (literally) naked Mitchell Hurwitz on the challenges of continuing the Bluth story for a 4th season of Arrested Development

And did you see this fun video tribute above to Cyndi Lauper whose show Kinky Boots (just discussed) has a ton of Tony nominations? Various morning shows and current Broadway casts contributed for the 30th Anniversary of her classic hit "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"

Stage Door: Showgirls with Kinky Boots

I'll be out of the country for the Tony Awards this year on a much needed vacation but before they arrive I thought I'd share with you my final theatrical experiences of the season, the first of which is way Off Broadway (though close to Broadway geographically)  and the second is one of your major Tony contenders.

Both of them adapted from movies because that is what gets financed these days!

Elizabeth Berkeley (Nomi Malone) and Rena Riffel (Penny/Hope) in Showgirls (1995)

Showgirls: The Musical is playing Wednesdays and Saturday nights at XL Nightclub. I raced to see it with friends since I love the movie so much. Plus I was fascinated that "Penny" herself, excuse me, "Hope" ("no one wants to fuck a Penny!"), the actress Rena Riffel, is reprising her role for the stage. She's self-aware enough to embrace Showgirls infamy as a career (she's also the star of the straight to DVD Showgirls 2: Penny's Revenge) the way C list stars of certain sci-fi programs end up as geek convention regulars hawking their wares. It's a honest living! I totally wanted to hug her or at least let her sign my ass or something. What a good sport! [more on Showgirls and "Kinky Boots" after the jump]

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