'Til Link Do Us Part

The Film Doctor usually finds interesting angles. For Hope Springs he interviewed his signifant other on the depiction of marital turmoil and therapy therein.
Final Girl this one is for you horror fans, a funny mashup of The Human Centipede with slasher icons.
The Playlist 15 new stills from P.T. Anderson's long awaited scientology drama The Master
Coming Soon Life of Pi will open the New York Film Festival and...
Awards Daily Flight will close it. (Will Robert Zemeckis and Denzel Washington and Ang Lee all be returning to Oscar's good graces?)

In Contention You've probably read Guy Lodge's Sight & Sound top ten list by now but in case you haven't it's interesting from top to bottom. Somehow I hadn't completely registered that Guy shared my love of Colorogy. So much green and red happening here!
Guardian so Jennifer Aniston is engaged and there's a whole new round of false romcom press narratives happening
NYT interesting observations on the trainwreck spectacle of online confessional blogging
AV Club Jodie Foster to direct a female-led mob drama on Showtime. Interesting... but I sure wish she'd rediscover her love of bigscreen acting instead. There are a lot of directors who are good at helming TV series. There are very few actors who can be Jodie Foster on the bigscreen.
/Film lately I actually forgot Ron Howard existed but they've reminded me that he is making a movie with Chris Hemsworth and the adorable Daniel Brühl called Rush
Film Junkie has behind the scenes photos from 12 Years a Slave 
Pajiba on 8 memorable marital fights on TV

Ruby Sparks and The Case of The Unintelligible Scribblings

Behold ~ my favorite piece of movie swag thus far this year.

Movie swag -- It isn't just for clutter anymore!

Nothing beats useful movie swag. When the notebook first arrived I thought, 'What a thematically appropriate gift and how perfect for the movie blogger. I can't wait to take notes on her about her own movie.' But then Magic Mike broke her hymen and strangely the invite to her own screening never came. Now even Total Recall has had its way with this formerly pristine book and I still haven't seen Ruby Sparks (!) despite really wanting to. 

Last night I saw The Odd Life of Timothy Green and its plot, like Ruby Sparks's own, involves a real human life springing from fantasized words on the page. If my own notes, scribbled in the dark of movie theaters, ever took human shape, the inky actressy monstrosity that emerged would not be pretty. She would sport bizarre squiggly features which occassionally reshaped themselves into rectangular recreations of movie frames. The ink monster would be weirdly silent but for Tourettes-like outbursts wherein she would shout out only half-remembered movie quotes or long unintelligible sounds (I cannot read these notes). Once every half hour or so she would achieve a moment of lucidity and, without so much as a 'spoiler alert,' she'd calmly reveal a major plot point of a movie she'd just seen.

The Way We Link

Yahoo Movies President Obama is a fan of Anne Hathaway as Catwoman
NPR details about Marilyn Monroe as a very profitable posthumous industry. Who gets the money?
CHUD Joss Whedon signs for Avengers 2. But he'll have enough time to do other projects first.
Unreality Indiana Jones is teeny tiny in these amazing posters for the Raiders of the Lost Ark trilogy

Los Angeles Times The Great Gatsby is delayed, and The Master rises. A shifting Oscar race (yes, we'll talk about all this in a couple of days with updated charts!)
Movie|Line the Hitchcock Birds making-of movie The Girl previews for television critics
My New Plaid Pants Paul Verhoeven 'quote of the day' on the original Total Recall's three titties moment. I have to say that the remake's nod to this made no sense whatsoever given the change in planetary setting.
/Film Brave co-director Brenda Chapman leaves Pixar after what one assumes was a troubled relationship and lands at Lucasfilms
Monkey See on the responsibilities of being "the greatest film of all time". 

At the top, you have to be able to play two cultural roles at once: punching bag and celebrated ideal.

Good luck, Vertigo!

Yay, Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln. First official photo.

poll by twiigs.com

 

More goodbyes
Hollywood Elsewhere RIP film critic Judith Christ
New York Times brilliant composer, EGOT winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient Marvin Hamlisch of A Chorus Line fame died at 68. Hamlisch was a frequent Oscar presence with 12 nominations over the course of his career but his 3 wins all came during the ceremony in 1974 for adapted score The Sting (1973) and song and score for The Way We Were. (1973). His last film score for The Informant (2009) won him lots of fresh praise and one assumes very nearly a 13th Oscar nomination since it scored other awards season kudos.

Link Highway

Scanners on the tributes to legendary film critic Andrew Sarris (RIP) who helped make the auteur theory the big deal it still is with movie buffs.
NPR Monkey See says goodbye to Matt Groenig's hugely funny and enduring "Life is Hell" comic strip (RIP... so many endings lately) 
The Playlist Aw, look at who's suddenly ambitious. Mr. Ryan Phillipe. He's planning to direct his first feature Shreveport (about a has been movie star who is kidnapped and tortured) and he'll star in it, too. We hope it's a metaphor for his actual career because what would be more awesome than a elaborated staged celebrity pity party in the shape of a "Riveting Thriller"
Rope of Silicon Pixar unloads Monsters University concept art 

24 Frames August: Osage County is really going to happen I guess. George Clooney is producing now and he gets things done.
Movies.Com unexpected appearances of Presidents in Movies 
In Contention Kris Tapley picks the 10 best Pixar films on the eve of Brave's release. It's as good a time as any though I might practically flip the whole rankings 180˚
My New Plaid Pants Barbarella as a TV series? I don't know what to say...
The Mary Sue fashion ilustrations inspired by The Avengers
Awards Daily has the winners of the Broadcast Television Critics Awards... i.e. the counterpart to those "Critics Choice" awards. Showtime's Homeland is the clear favorite this past year 
Comics Alliance What if Blade Runner (1982) were entirely animated in watercolor?  

And in another auteurial revision... "What if David Lynch had directed Rock of Ages?" Ha! Very well executed imaginings here, particularly the Paul Giamatti riddles.

...would you see that movie?

Burning Questions: What Is Your Stand Alone Film?

 Michael C. here to do his part to shake up the conventional wisdom.

It’s a big step for any budding cinephile when one learns to value one’s own opinion over the established consensus. If you were like me, when you were an adolescent film lover, you tended to take certain movie’s masterpiece status as gospel. If, for example, TV Guide said that Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was a four star movie than that's the way it was. After all, you could see how great it was just by counting the extras.

Hopefully one grows out of this and learns to approach pre-certified classics with healthy skepticism. As a college student working his way through the greats of cinema, I clearly remember concluding that Dr. Zhivago’s 200 minute running time was roughly 195 minutes longer than necessary, give or take a few beautifully framed shots of snow.

But it is not much of a challenge to poke sticks at the bloated reputations of certain “classics”. More daunting is defending work that has the majority of scholarly opinion aligned against it. Just as we learn to be wary of movies that come bearing the stamp of approval, at some point we all end up falling madly in love with a title that is greeted by the rest of the world with at best polite acknowledgment, or at worst outright hostility. So on this subject I am curious to know: What movie do you stand alone in considering a masterpiece?

Any true film lover has at least one minority opinion...

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