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• Glamour Amandla Stenberg goes au naturel with the body hair at the Rome premiere of The Hate U Give. Oh and also its their 20th birthday today. Happy birthday to them!
• /Film Release date shuffle. Wonder Woman 2 has been pushed back to 2020 so now it's the Terminator reboot (with the original stars) and a reboot of Charlie's Angels facing off in Wonder Woman's old Novemeber 2019 date
• Self Styled Siren anecdote of the week involves 1940s and 1950s star Jennifer Jones
• MNPP lots of photos of Cory Michael Smith to celebrate his coming out and his new film 1985

• MCN first Gurus of Gold chart of the season with the actressing awards and Best Picture
• Orlando Weekly Indiana Jones Land is probably coming to Disney World in the early 2020s with various parks dreaming up pitches
• Variety it's going to be a big year for traditional studios at the Oscars
• Coming Soon In demand Jean-Marc Vallée attached to a Yoko Ono / John Lennon biopic
• Variety Critics Choice nominees for Documentaries. I really can't with the randomness of 6-9 nominees (are there any rules) in 12 different categories. It's like CHOOSE. If you nominate everything there is zero drama and no reason to look at what's been chosen.
• THR How to Build a Girl about a young woman (Beanie Feldstein) becoming a rock critic is building an impressive supporting cast with Emma Thompson, Paddy Considie, and Chris O'Dowd all joining
• New Yorker lottery drawings in the age of plutocracy
• Next Best Picture a report on 'lone acting nominations'
• Deadline Be More Chill, opening soon on Broadway has already auctioned off its film rights. Meanwhile Hamilton still hasn't ironed out a deal for the film rights but its expected to be a $50 million sale

Exit Video
Hey look & listen, it's a brief soundbyte of a Mary Poppins Returns song in this "special look" that's basically pieces of the original trailer recut with a pieces of a song.

Doc Corner: HBO's 'The Sentence'

By Glenn Dunks

If I told you The Sentence was a documentary about the frustratingly pedantic injustice of the American judicial system and how it directly targets minorities and in particular one specific mother of three in Michigan, you would probably think there is much ground to cover and any number of directions the film could go. Unfortunately for viewers intrigued by the subject, The Sentence isn’t that film. In its place is a documentary that too often feels like just a collection of home movies strung together with little insight into the processes and machinations of the system.

The Sentence follows the story of director Rudy Valdez's own sister, Cynthia, and the efforts that eventually lead to her pardon in 2016 on drug charges. Cynthia was jailed in the mid-2000s due to something of a loophole known as “the girlfriend problem” despite years apart from the man who actually committed the crimes and now living a life of domestic normalcy...

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Doc Corner: 'Studio 54'

By Glenn Dunks

The most famous nightclub of the 20th century ran for only 33 months, but has gifted us with decades worth of memories. Studio 54, inarguably the pinnacle of 1970s disco decadence was a home for reckless hedonistic abandon and affected sexual liberation all under the appropriately throbbing beat of Donna Summer, Sylvester and Thelma Houston. A celebrity haunt and a genuine phenomenon with girls in fur coats and boys in short shorts and Cadillacs circling the block, it was the place to be even if you couldn't get in.

Studio 54 has played a good sized role in movies, too, so it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to get a comprehensive documentary about it. There have been movies like 54 (recommended in Director’s Cut format and nothing else) and others like Summer of Sam set against Studio’s influential disco beat. And, of course, any documentary about the 1970s, especially as it relates to celebrity or queer life, will inevitably take a limousine detour down W 54th Street in Manhattan. Is Matt Tyrnauer’s film worth the 40-year wait? For the most part, yes; although it can’t but feel like there is still much more that was left on the dancefloor...

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Doc Corner: '306 Hollywood'

By Glenn Dunks

Hollywood 306 is the debut documentary from the sister-and-brother directing team of Elan Bogarin and Jonathan Bogarin. It’s a special film about a very un-special person. The film is not grand, but one rooted in the experience of a woman, the Bogarins’ grandmother, whose very unremarkable life in some funny way makes her entirely remarkable. It’s a film that is both intimate and large in generosity and heart, filled with delicate whimsy. That might sound like the type of movie that can be sickly sweet but the movie is visually interesting and evocative in its narrative choices.

Following the death of their grandmother Annette Ontell at the age of 93, Elan and Jonathan decided to perform a sort of ceremonial “archaeological excavation” on her home at 306 Hollywood, New Jersey. While initially laughed at by their delightfully profane mother who wants to empty the house and sell it, she agrees to give them one year...

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Doc Corner: 'Bad Reputation' and 'Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.'

By Glenn Dunks

Biographical documentaries about dead musicians often fall into two camps: the reverential and the tragic. Films that focus too much on the latter like Amy or Whitney  pale in comparison to something like Liz Garbus’ What Happened Miss Simone?, a film that knew that to understand your subject's tragedy you first have to understand the many facets of the artist in question.

This week, however, we get two biographical documentaries about important and influential musicians who are still (thankfully) very much with us, but which nonetheless tell their subjects’ stories in wildly different ways. Bad Reputation is clearly the more traditional of the pair, a fairly standard bio-doc that charts the life and career of Joan Jett, while Matangi / Maya / M.I.A. is more a work of artistic Jenga that roams and rummages through its subject’s life with the anarchistic spirit of her music.

What strikes me as interesting about both films is how Joan Jett and Mathangi [sic] “Maya” Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) directly instruct the narrative of ‘their’ films...

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