Link Party

This is Not Porn an 11 year old David Lynch meeting Vincent Price. LOL
TMZ Shadow Trooper trademark filed for the Star Wars franchise. 
Nicks Flick Picks Sometimes the rating has to be an A+. Truly nothing else would do
Salon has a gossipy unflattering list of difficult directors: Lars von Trier, David Fincher, etc...
MNPP Rock Hudson one time 

Variety Nate Parker (Beyond the Lights) isn't waiting around for Birth of a Nation to make him happen in a bigger way. He's already working on writing his next picture Carry On a paralympic wrestler movie.
Variety Julia Roberts to star in a true story lawyer drama. Said to be a meaty role for her though the story sounds like it's all about her client. 
Coming Soon I have no words about this Red Band trailer for the animated comedy Sausage Party
Kenneth in the (212) Actor Robert Davalos (East of Eden) dies at 85. RIP 

Small Screen
MNPP [NSFW] Corey Stoll (♥) goes gay in an explicit scene on Girls 
Playbill Sydney Lucas, the young girl who was so brilliant in Fun Home on Broadway joins the cast of AMC's new series The Son which will star Sam Neill
Comics Alliance new trailer and poster for AMC series Preacher, a comic book adaptation starring Dominic Cooper
Variety Underground, a slave escape drama, is a huge hit for WGN

Off Cinema
Spin Macklemore owns a painting of Justin Beiber with a pancake on his dick
Theater Mania suggests Broadway musicals based on 5 TV shows
Boy Culture an audio recording from Liza Minnelli to everyone who wished her a happy birthday online

Reminder
Tonight is the Hit Me With Your Best Shot for ATONEMENT (2007). You can see read and bask in early entries already from Awards Madness, Cinematic Corner, I Want to Believe, Film Mix Tape, 54 Disney, Christian Bonamusa, and Out to the Movies... and that's a lot in already so tonight might be crazy. Stream it quick and join us. The full roundup will be up late, probably about 10 PM EST

A Toast to Lilly Wachowski

This week, the younger Wachowski sibling revealed that she has transitioned. Everyone raise your glasses to Lilly Wachowski!

In an open letter, Lilly detailed her recent struggle with different press outlets that have nearly gone public with her story, particularly taking the Daily Mail rightly to task for their vulturous treatment of trans individuals. While it's disgusting that press interference has pushed Lilly to reveal her transition publicly before she might have planned, her statements about the current state of trans acceptance and treatment utilize her sizeable platform perfectly. Thank goodness she got to tell her story in her own way.

The letter is a gorgeous bit of writing, a rare insight into the more introverted of the already media wary siblings. In one of the most crucial and eloquent moments of the piece, she questions our societal perception of gender:

But these words, "transgender" and "transitioned" are hard for me because they both have lost their complexity in their assimilation into the mainstream. (...) But the reality, my reality is that I've been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.

That sentiment is one that is also present in the sisters' work, and one of their most exciting themes, to boot. Now that both siblings are living openly (Lana came forward with her transition in 2012) perhaps they'll be able to explore that even deeper than we've seen with Cloud Atlas and Sense8. For the trivia obsessives, Nathaniel wondered if this made the Wachowski's the first sister directing duo? The names that immediately popped up were the Soska sisters. Do you know of any others? 

Avu DuVernay to direct A Wrinkle in Time

Lynn here, chewing on another bit of non-Oscar related movie news.

Ever since it was announced earlier this week that Ava DuVernay had signed on to direct the upcoming film version of Madeleine L’Engle’s much-beloved A Wrinkle in Time, I’ve been trying to imagine just how the director of Selma is going to approach a sci-fi fantasy that features benevolent shape-shifting inter-dimensional beings, entire planets controlled by a single giant brain, and children who literally cross the universe by bending the laws of both space and time.  She won’t be starting from scratch, at least; the project’s apparently been in the works for some time, with a script by Frozen’s Jennifer Lee.  But this will be the first time the book’s ever been brought to the big screen.  It’s frequently, and unsurprisingly, been called unfilmable, and the only previous adaptation – a 2003 TV movie on ABC – was such a failure that it’s best known for the quip it inspired from L’Engle:

I expected it to be bad, and it is.”

In other words, there’s every reason for apprehension.  Is there also reason for hope?

Click to read more ...

The entire history of the directors of the Best Documentary nominees

Tim here. Since Glenn already did such a great job looking at the films that would ultimately be nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar, I wanted to approach that category from a different angle. You might call it the auteur studies approach: I've decided to highlight one film made by each of the directors whose films are up for that award.

And the best part is, you can follow along! Each of these movies is available for streaming... 

Click to read more ...

Interview: Ciro Guerra on the Must-See Oscar Nominee "Embrace of the Serpent"

Embrace of the Serpent, Colombia's great Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee took so long to arrive in theaters it may have well have arrived by rickety wooden boat after its grueling journey on the Amazon. But it's finally in theaters in select cities and just in time for the Oscars. Do NOT miss it.

I had the pleasure of speaking with the director Ciro Guerra about this cinematic triumph ... which I'm guessing was harder to make than The Revenant.

NATHANIEL: This is an extremely ambitious effort for a filmmaker as new as yourself. It's only your third film. How long have you been working on this?

CIRO GUERRA: I worked on it for about four years before we started shooting. I had done just two very personal films that were close to my experience, and my past, and my culture. So I wanted to go the opposite way, and take a journey into the unknown.

NATHANIEL: You did. It's hypnotically strange.

CIRO GUERRA: For us Colombians, the Amazon is the most unknown thing. It’s half of the country, but clearly we don’t know much about it. So, I had always been intrigued and fascinated and it had been a lifelong dream to do a film in the Amazon, and you know, these are the kind of films you can only do while you’re young. [More...]

Click to read more ...