Recommended Instant Watch: "Pit Stop"

Just a heads up that one of last year's best festival titles is playing on Netflix Instant Watch. Yen Tan's Pit Stop unfortunately never saw theatrical release but it won a few festival prizes along its way including from my jury at the Nashville Film Festival (Best Screenplay) and we've mentioned it a couple of times her via Glenn at New Fest and my interview with Yen Tan at Towleroad.

The romantic drama follows two lonely gay men in rural Texas named Gabe and Ernesto (Bill Heck and Marcus DeAnda) who are both struggling to move on with their lives after painful breakups. Their paths occasionally cross but they aren't aware of each other -- it's not exactly a visible or social gay community -- until the final act of the movie.  

If you've ever seen Yen Tan's Ciao (2008), which has a much different plot but a similar romantic trajectory, you know that he favors slow simmers to boiling drama. Those types of films are always easier sits in movie theaters when you're less distracted by other screens but I'm hoping people give it a shot for home viewing because by the end its generated strong and cumulative emotions. And bonus points, most of the actors are very good (indie darling Amy Seimetz is typically fine as Gabe's ex-wife). All that and it contains one of the hottest yet modest and emotionally moving sex scenes in recent years.

Plus this cut from Ernesto to Gabe, both cuddling with their pets, made my heart melt.

The cut is actually in reverse but I had to lead with the cat. 

Best Pictures for Home Viewing

all links in this article go to my favorite post about the movie in question

For those of you who live too far from major markets  to see everything before the Oscars, or who love watching a movie over and over and over again, you won't have to wait too long to fulfill every viewing impulse you have for this year's batch of Oscar nominees. Almost every single Oscar nominee will be on DVD and BluRay by the end of March except of course for the handful that don't have to follow the normal rules of release like foreign film and animation: Omar, Ernest & Celestine, The Wind Rises, The Missing Picture which have just started their theatrical runs or are coming soon. There's no word yet on late arrival The Invisible Woman, nominated for costume design. The only Best Picture that hasn't announced a BluRay release date is Spike Jonze's Her which is slightly surprising since its competitors, which are mostly still going stronger at the box office, have. 

Coming Tuesday!
Best Picture nominees Gravity & Nebraska hit stores the day Oscar voting ends. So they won't be able to tout any of their potential wins on their jackets

Already Available. Will you have seen them all by March 2nd?
Best Picture nominees: Captain Phillips & Dallas Buyer's Club; Screenplay nominees: Blue Jasmine & Before Midnight; Animated Features, Visual Effects and Craft nominees are often available before the other shortlists since they're less reliant on Christmas releases to win gold. So you can already get: The Great Gatsby, All is Lost, Star Trek Into Darkness,  Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, The Lone Ranger, The Croods; Plus: the grim thriller Prisoners, about child abduction nominated for Best Cinematography, and Denmark's Foreign Film nominee The Hunt starring Mads Mikkelsen as a man accused, and thus presumed guilty, of child abuse which is suddenly and uncomfortably extra topical. 

Coming in March

March 4th
Best Picture nominees 12 Years a Slave &  Philomena plus costume & cinematography eye candy kung fu in Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster 

March 11th
Two musically-focused nominees: Inside Llewyn Davis, nominated for Sound Mixing, and The Broken Circle Breakdown Belgium's Best Foreign Language Film nominee is a cancer drama but it's also one of the best performance musicals of recent years; moving bluegrass family drama. I don't plan on buying either movie but my god the music. Gimme the soundtracks!

March 18th
Best Picture nominee American Hustle plus two Best Original Song features Mandela and Frozen. I find the Disney behemoth's home video date surprising. It's still in the box office top five. You can make money on home video forever but theatricla revenue comes just once (until the next technological breakthrough for which you can retrofit it and rerelease) so why cut off that money? 

All the Best Pictures will be on blue ray by March 25th (except Her)

March 25th
A cushion-your-ass double feature. Got a free five & half hours? Best Picture The Wolf of Wall Street (180 minutes) and Best Foreign Film The Great Beauty (142 minutes) arrive on the same day. 

April 7th
That's the day you get the three fire breathers: Smaug from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Violet and Barbara Weston (Meryl & Julia) in August: Osage County.

CHECK OUT THE OSCAR CHARTS 
And make sure to vote for your favorite Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor and the like.

DVD Review: The Act of Killing

Tim here. As Team Experience’s representative lover of The Act of Killing above all other movies in 2013 (if “love” is the right word for such an bleak portrait of humanity’s worst side), it naturally falls to me to trumpet the Good News that one of the year’s best-reviewed films that you probably haven’t had a chance to see yet is now on DVD and Blu-Ray. At just the right moment, too, in advance of the Oscar nomination that I’m honestly not expecting it to receive; the Documentary branch hasn’t been in the business of making me that happy, and it’s not fair to expect otherwise.

It’s not the kind of film that readily lends itself to breathless statements of the “you HAVE to see this!” sort. For it is, after all, a documentary about mass political killings, one of the unlikeliest subjects in the world to produce a frolicsome entertainment that everyone will enjoy. That being said, you probably do have to see this. It is unlike any other cinematic analysis of its subject that I’ve ever heard of, let alone seen, with the filmmakers (those being director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and another co-director remaining anonymous for reasons of personal safety) going straight to the men who headed the anti-Communist death squads in 1965 and ’66 (regarded as heroes in Indonesia), and offering them a chance to make their own cinematic interpretations of their past deeds.

Click to read more ...

Blue Days... To Come

1 Day until... Today Blue Caprice competes for two Gotham Film Awards 
1 Day until... NYFCC, the oldest film critics organization (not to be confused with NYFCO, a much newer upstart) kicks off critics prize season and we get our first clue as to whether Cate Blanchett's Blue Jasmine is a steamroller (Dec 3rd)
2 Days until... NBR announces kicking off the not-critics-but-we-also-give-prizes prize season (Dec 4th)
5 Days until... Blue is the Warmest Color wins (?) the European Film Awards (Dec 7th)
6 Days until... Adele Exarchopoulus wins Best Actress at LAFCA for Blue is the Warmest Color. What? They always go foreign at LAFCA in that category (Dec 8th)
10 Days until... The Golden Globes make like Blue Balls... but how Blue? Nominations for Blue Jasmine are a given but Warmest Color could win nods, too. (Dec 12th)

All of this  might make our Oscar Chart Updates - currently in progress look instantly out of date

41 Days until... Cate wins the Golden Globe (Jan 12th)
45 Days until... until Blue Jasmine is nominated for [HOW MANY?] Oscars and Cate wins the Best Actress "Critics Choice" Awards (Jan 16th) 
47 Days until... Cate Blanchett wins SAG (Jan 18th) 
50 Days until... until Blue Jasmine hits DVD/Blu-Ray (Jan 21st)
60 Days until... Blue is the Warmest Color wins [HOW MANY?] César nominations in Paris (Jan 31st) 
89 Days until... all three Blue titles compete for Spirit Awards in Santa Monica (March 1st)
90 Days until... Cate Blanchett wins her second Oscar (March 2nd) 

All Links Day

Grantland Mark Harris on 12 Years a Slave and the Best Actor race
/Film Jonas Cuaron made a short film that will be a DVD extra for Gravity. It takes place on earth during one scene in the movie. 
Coming Soon The Addams Family getting a reboot. But I'm okay with this news since it's animated. If you're going to remake something, it's fine if you can do it in a new way. 

Deadline Dustin Hoffman and Kathy Bates for the musical education drama Boychoir
Shortlist Sandra Bullock extends the Feuding with Streep joke from their 2009 Oscar war
Popnography Sir Ian McKellens super short gay sitcom Vicious coming to American tv, also getting second season

Controversies
The Switch has an interesting update on what's going on with copyright extension laws. I do so hope the internet finds a way to collectively fight back because the laws are ridiculous. So many things that should be in the public domain are not
The Wrap the ongoing drama over Ender's Game and the Orson Scott Card boycott. All reports, including this one, which seems thorough end up being kind of misleading. Apparently true: he has no profit participation or creative input; Not true: he will not make a dime on this. Fact: He already made those dimes, years ago when the deal was signed. I wish people would point this out instead of pretending/saying he makes no money from this movie. He makes no "new" money, sure other than the rise in book sales, but Hollywood already paid him and probably handsomely. So yes he does profit from the movie.  

Halloween Hangover
I know I know. Halloween is over and as with all things people celebrate with excess you're probably a little relieved. But just in case it's your favorite holiday and you need a little hair of the dog, check out these horror-themed treats 'round the web...

Jessica Alba and friends as The Witches of Eastwick! Her best performance ever? (from her Instagram account)

Slant ranks the best "final girls" 
Empire famous horror film child stars all grown up from Haley Joel Osment to Daveigh Chase
MNPP's hilarious "ways not to die" series gets a pervy Halloween Sssssss (1973) edition
Pajiba Miley Cyrus is smarter than Julianne Hough (the proof is in the costuming)
Cinema Blend chooses 9 movies that deserve to ascend into "halloween classics" 
i09 the best halloween costumes from 'round the internet (I love the Peter Pan couples costume so much!)