Waiting For Link Man

efilmcritic Erik Childress's wonderful annual list of Blurb Whores of the Year
THR August Osage County wins big at the Capri festival in Italy, winning four prizes. Harvey Weinstein and Chris Cooper were also honored at the festival. In non Weinstein awards they honored 12 Years a Slave, Saving Mr Banks, and The Great Beauty as well as Valeria Golino (remember her?) as European actress of the year
EW Downton Abbey on the cover. Can't wait for its return this weekend
Variety 3 time Oscar winning producer Saul Zaentz (Amadeus, Cuckoo's Nest and The English Patient) has passed away
i09 Disney Princess themed lingerie from Japan! 

MNPP vicious but true takedown of Ron Howard's Rush
Cinema Blend The Rock for a new iteration of Green Lantern? There are worse ideas, casting-wise I suppose but DC movies are so hopeless!
The Guardian finds that The Wolf of Wall Street uses the naughty F word 506 times, which "breaks down to Scorsese giving 2.81 fucks a minute." LOL. But who spent the three hours counting? That's what I want to know.
USA Today Character actor Joseph Ruskin (Prizzi's Honor, The Magnificent Seven) has passed away
The Wire as we move into the dumping ground of each film year (that'd be new January releases, not platformed holdovers) Joe Reid looks back at ten January releases that didn't suck
Vanity Fair funny Proust questionnaire with T Bone Burnett whose latest movie music work I can't stop listening to. That'd be Inside Llewyn Davis

Hitchcock with Barbara Harris on "Family Plot"Finally...
My friend Matthew Rettenmund who writes Boy Culture has compiled a list of all of Hitchcock's leading ladies who are still alive. (Make sure to note the punny captions). I found this list of ten surprising even though I recently made that oldest 100 screen actors of note list. He's right though that at least two of the major leading ladies (Doris Day & Julie Andrews) don't seem like Hitchcock heroines at all. I forget every time that they headlined one. Those moments were just so atypical in their careers, don't you think? 

Curio: Boudoir Beauties

Alexa here. Rachel Corcoran is a Dublin-based illustrator with a distinctly actressy vibe. She specializes in editorial illustration, especially portraits that have a baroque, boudoir-ready style. She often takes pen (and pixel) to paper in the service of film and television, with great results.

Here are some of my favorites involving Breaking Bad, Dowton Abbey, and more from her pop culture portfolio. 

Click to read more ...

Saving Mr Link

Towleroad the new men of Dowton Abbey. So excited to see Weekend's Tom Cullen in the mix!
The Kind of Face You Hate on David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) and John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966, newly released from the Criterion Collection)
Guardian Xan Brooks loves non-professional film actors. Someone has to.
Variety says Snowpiercer is doing great business in its home of Korea, though it can't be their Oscar submission given that it's in English. Unfortunately the Weinstein Co still plans to cut 20 minutes before the US release
Amiresque looks back at the filmmaking of 12 Angry Men

Dial P For Popcorn (in Portuguese) riffs on an old article I wrote in 2008 about actors who were overdue for Oscar wins and at the time everyone (not just me) thought Johnny Depp was next. My how time/choices change everything.
TV Blend Juliette Lewis, Matt Dillon and The LEOgend will all be appearing in M Night Shyamalan's TV series Wayward Pines based on the book series "Pines" by Blake Crouch. 
MNPP Which is hotter Mark Strong or...? 

D23 Buzz
Awards Daily Saving Mr Banks is still fanning Oscar flames with clip debuts at D23, will the current buzz heat turn into a bonfire?
FanVoice Angelina Jolie also promotes Maleficent at the same expo, and the clip shown was the scene where she curses baby Aurora to the horror of the fairies 
Hero Complex Awesome director Brad Bird (the filmography! The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) is still playing coy with what Tomorrowland is actually about. But this is a good thing. More mystery in film promotion, please! 

Box Office
Elysium, which we've just reviewed, topped the box office. Meanwhile World War Z (Reviewed) is just inches away from $200 million domestic despite all the negative buzz before its opening - the film aged well for me (its best passages really stick) and now my review is looking too harsh. Blue Jasmine (Reviewed and Podcasted) is still going strong nearly cracking the top ten box office without the aid of thousands of theaters. Fruitvale Station (reviewed and podcasted) didn't turn into the crossover talking-point hit that The Weinstein Co but it's at a respectable $13 million plus and will undoubtedly use its DVD release to recharge its Oscar buzz later on this calendar year. 

WHAT DID YOU SEE THIS WEEKEND? 

TV Character Mashup Fantasies

Andrew was kind enough to poll Team Experience about their joy, bafflement, and dreams regarding last week's Emmy nominations but we saved one question for last since their was so much to read and parse already. We asked one final question of the team and we thought we'd share it with you here. Bonus points to the reader who comes up with the best spec script to make any of these fabulously impossible unions happen!

Which Emmy-nominated TV characters would you love to see paired up?!? 

The Dowager Countess was a constant presence in the answers...

mashup fun after the jump 

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Team Experience: (More) Emmy Reactions

Now that we've had a few days to process the Emmy award nominations, do we have any outrage left over?Though we’re a film site, it’s unwise to ignore proclaimed golden age of television we’re living in -- even if the arguments that TV is greater than film is wholly suspect --  especially when so many movie stars keep on crossing over. So we surveyed Team Experience with the following questions:

• win you're most rooting for?
• most baffling nomination?
• most compelling category?
• better luck next year?
• which Oscar-winning actress?

Which Oscar Winner Are Your Rooting For For Emmy: Helen, Jane, Jessica, Maggie or Melissa?

Read our collective responses and answer the same questions after the jump. No small screen coverage is complete without your comments, TV being so communal.

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