Emmy FYC: The Actresses of "Penny Dreadful"

Our Emmy FYC series concludes with Nathaniel's final plea for Penny Dreadful...

When Penny Dreadful aired its surprise series, not season, finale a week ago, the event felt as dark to fans as Vanessa Ive's increasingly fatalistic worldview. In its 3 short seasons the series grew quickly from a gimmicky concept -- all your favorite monster myths thrown together! --  with rich visual panache (Season 1) to a complex, increasingly focused, and confidently disturbing drama (Season 2) to a rushed and scattershot but even more thematically daring and superbly acted grande finale (Season 3). By the Season 2 premiere it had become abundantly clear that the blood-pumping heart of this gothic universe, belonged to its haunted, dangerous, three-dimensional women...

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Thoughts I Had While Looking at the Miss Peregrine... Poster

Just in time for the kiddies' spring break movie fever, we've started to see teases for the new teen-targeted Tim Burton feature Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Based on the young adult book series by Ransom Riggs, there's a feast of spooky oddities that fit right into Burton's sensibilities. However, the first looks suggest that he's playing into his current era's weaknesses. The trailer and some thoughts I had staring at the new poster after the jump...

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Eva Green's Peculiar Children and Geena Davis Returning to TV

Laurence here with a couple of juicy actress news tidbits. After a string of well-cast disappointments, we're all hoping for a return to Tim Burton magic this year with his new film Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. We finally have some images from the film, which has what might be Burton's most formidable (live-action) cast since Big Fish, including Judi Dench, Samuel L. Jackson, Allison Janney, Terence Stamp, Kim Dickens and Rupert Everett. Whoa.

Most importantly, though, here's Eva Green in the title role. [More...]

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Critics Choice TV Nominations 2015

The BFCA's sibling, the BTJA (Broadcast Television Journalist Association) has released their nominations for the 2014/2015 television season. Let it serve as your annual reminder that for as much as the world likes to complain about official industry-insider nominations each year, sometimes critics don't improve it a whole lot. I mean this is a whole separate organization and they still can't bother to nomination RuPaul for reality television categories? The Shade of It All. They're still nominating Jessica Lange for American Horror Story even though she looked fairly bored to be there this year doing the same ole thing (faded has been beauty desperate to hold on to her glory) in a show that's meant to give its actors new characters to play each year. They also skipped on Mad Men's final season which is pretty unforgiveable if you ask me given how excellent it's been. But perhaps with the nominations hitting this early, they voted before they had seen much of it. 

The best thing I can say for them is that they don't seem to be trying to predict the Emmys at all (witness the low showing for Game of Thrones and Modern Family for example) which we can only hope will happen one of these years with the BFCAs in relation to the Oscars. Their nominations, which you've already guessed horrify me beyond a surprise nod for horrified Eva Green are after the jump...

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A Dame To Shill For

JA from MNPP here. My boyfriend likes to tease me that he loved Eva Green first, and he did - he loved her the first time she showed up on some red carpet wearing long glamorous sleeves in a sea of bared skin. It's not that you can exactly call Eva Green demure - the first time any of us saw her she was taking a bath with her on-screen brother while pawing at Michael Pitt's genitalia after all, and earlier this year she toplessly mounted Sullivan Stapleton while swinging around a sword for god's sake. Not to mention the bizarre throwback moral brouhaha that's currently been greeting every piece of art-work associated with her Sin City: A Dame To Kill For character - hide the children, there are breasts!

So no, demure's not really the word for her. But dive as she does, time and again, into these depths of gorgeous depravity, she still always manages to keep her long glamorous sleeves clean. She's a class act. So my boyfriend might've been there first but am I ever there now - watching Penny Dreadful's first season was for me a contact sport. I cheered and threw my fists in the air like it was the World Cup I was watching whenever she was on-screen. (That seance!) I need to print up a jersey with her name on the back for when the show returns. That's where I am with her.

I figure some of you can relate. So with that Green-flecked giddiness on the tip of our tongue, we greet the news that she's going to work with Tim Burton again. She's set to star in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an adaptation of a children's book (anyone read it?) about a group of super-powered orphans battling evil creatures intent upon their doom. Eva will play the titular Miss Peregrine, the children's guardian.

I know Nathaniel was as big a fan as I was of her first performance for Burton in the otherwise notsomuch Dark Shadows - she brought it and then she brought it ten more times in that movie... far more than was called for, she was bringing it. And I think we all have high hopes for Burton's film Big Eyes with Amy Adams. If that one sticks, maybe he can swing around a dreary few years of movie-making, so let's keep our hopes up. Eva demands it!