The Linkers Grimm

MUBI James Benning is experimenting with John Cassavetes Faces (1968) for a "remake" installation.
Antenna has valid thoughtful concerns about both of the new fantasy series on TV, Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Many good points are raised but I can't take them completely seriously since Once Upon a Time is one of the single gawdiest and most ham-fisted things mine eyes have ever witnessed whereas Grimm was surprisingly rich in potential and beautifully made (yummy production design) and they imply that Once has more potential? Yikes.

"greens greens and nothing but greens..." Grimm's are alive. Once but dead props.

Towleroad cutest thing Zac Efron has ever done? He did Halloween as a Reno 911 officer
Go Fug Yourself Heidi Klum went as a cadaver! Heidi Klum is the most awesome Halloween party ever. Every single year she turns it out.

Dark Eye Socket this is really cool: 5 Scary Movie Masks in Non-Scary Movies
Ultra Culture the shortest review you will ever read of Tower Heist and also probably the best one; it's a Venn Diagram!
Movie|Line Naomi Watts to star in the most depressing movie indie ever. I guess she didn't read our Red Carpet Convo with Guy Lodge when we worried for the perpetual worry lines of her career.

‪Nathaniel: Naomi most certainly needs to shake off all the dour miserabilism. People have been filming her with grimy 'THIS IS DEPRESSING!' lighting for so long that I have no idea what she'd look like if she was having fun‬!
‪Guy: Well, at least Watts is coming up in J. Edgar. A Clint Eastwood movie is just the kind of fun frisky change of pace she needs.

Socialite Life Leonardo DiCaprio looking dapper on the set of The Great Gatsby. This will possibly be just what he needs after all the aging prosthetics of J. Edgar.
Hollywood Reporter interviews Michael Fassbender about his very sexual year with Cronenberg and McQueen
Cinema Blend Hilary Swank has fired most of her management team over the scandal that erupted when she attended (paid) that birthday party for the Chechnyan President.
South Asian Film Festival, about to kick off here in New York, will open with the  Oscar submission Abu, Son of Adam.
Broadway World Julie Andrews honored tonight in NYC
Threadless "one cookie to rule them all" [see pic below] LOL. I had to share since we were just talking about The Lord of the Rings here.

"cookie ringwraith" © rnlynam

Oscar in Brief
Today is the due date for all Animated Feature contenders to submit their paperwork for the Academy. So soon we'll know just how many nominees we'll get in this category which can range anywhere from 2 to 5 nominees depending on the number of submission. Meanwhile, The Wrap and In Contention both have new pieces up on the Academy's Best Foreign Language Film category. More from us here soon as we screen more entries ourselves.

Finally...  This commerical for The Immortals which I've never seen --and I've seen plenty of advertising for it -- it can't be real can it?

If so, hats off. Tellin' it like it is. I agree with everything Rich at FourFour says "Fucking Poetry"
 

London: "Coriolanus", NYC, and an Oscar reject

David here with another report from the London Film Festival. First up, a Shakespeare adaptation with even more pedigree than usual.

"Anger is my meat. I sup upon myself." So proclaims Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) halfway through Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut Coriolanus. In person at the press conference, the raggedly bearded Fiennes' couldn't be more affable, but Caius Martius Coriolanus (Fiennes, following Olivier and Branagh by directing himself in a Shakespearian lead) lives, and perhaps fosters, a world of fearsome aggression. In both the narrative and the extra-filmic reality of the cast, the hierarchy makes itself apparent: as Redgrave powers her way through her titanic final monologue, her terribly veined neck strained upwards as she spits and crows at Fiennes, she burns through Fiennes' schizophrenic celluloid, a scorch mark on a scuffed rug. Redgrave outacts everyone in sight because Shakespearean dialogue is part of her bloodstream, but also because she is so precise in how much of herself she commits to each moment. Redgrave's vibrant poise and direct anger are graciously straightforward without compromising on character depth.

The remainder of Coriolanus cannot be gifted with such lavish praise.

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NYFF: "The Skin I Live In" It's Alive!

Michael C. (Serious Film) here with one of my most anticipated titles of 2011.

Dr. Banderas and his monster?

Dammit, Pedro. I just can't stay mad at you.

Even as he never reaches the emotional impact you expect from an Almodóvar production - as is the case with The Skin I Live In - his filmmaking is so alive in every moment one can't help forgiving him his flaws. Is this a top tier work from the man who made All About My Mother? No. Was I still glued to the screen in every moment as I am with few films? Hell, yes.

To call The Skin I Live In "Almodovar does Frankenstein" is both an accurate description and wildly reductive. Accurate in that, yes, Antonio Banderes plays a mad surgeon with a creation of his own held captive in his mansion. It is reductive because Pedro is not about to be satisfied simply delivering his take on lightning bolts and things jumping at you out of the darkness. The horror in Skin is of a far more unsettling variety involving attacks not just on one's safety but on one's sanity. It touches on Almodovar's familiar themes of sexuality, identity, and stopping everything dead so we can watch a beautiful woman sing a beautiful song.

more sans spoilers after the jump.

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NYFF: 'Goodbye First Love'

Kurt here. Whereas the NYFF title My Week with Marilyn finds it necessary to blatantly announce that “first love is such sweet despair,” French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature, Goodbye First Love, offers the same sentiment in a kind of long whisper, stretching out its meaning over 110 minutes and eight long years. The film would be even stronger if the whisper were fainter still, and if Hansen-Løve (The Father of My Children) were a touch less eager to reach out a helping hand, but as it stands, it's an earthy, sprightly, intuitive expression of how an indelible romance can affect the shape of a life.

Its chief subject is Camille (Brittany Murphy lookalike Lola Créton), a shy young lass not unlike a number of girls I know, who've had to redefine themselves after leaving the man who defined them. At the start of the film, 15-year-old Camille is inseparable from Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), the boyfriend who rules her heart but, more importantly, helps her make sense to herself. Things start to rapidly unravel as the day approaches when Sullivan will leave Paris for a 10-month trek through South America, the kind of worldview-enhancing, coming-of-age adventure he wishes Camille would have on her own (he attacks her childish ignorance with married-couple tough love). But that's an unfathomable thing for the heroine at the outset, as is the thought of Sullivan leaving, which creates such fear in Camille it's almost as if she starts seeing the whole natural world around her as a threat, with wind and spiders and the buzz of insects cruelly heralding Sullivan's drift into the wilderness (much of the film, including almost all of the first act, takes place in a remote cottage surrounded by nature).

And drift Sullivan does, first physically, and then entirely, after giving up trying to communicate with a bitter and depressed Camille via snail mail (“I won't call,” he says in memorable voiceover, “because every detail hurts you, like my experiences are insults to us”). With one forcedly symbolic winter and a passing reference to Candide (“is this the best of all possible worlds?”), Hansen-Løve then shifts matters to a very sharply defined second act, wherein Camille gets a haircut, gets a new job, and goes to school. Supporting a running metaphor that yields many rewards despite (again) pushing a tad too hard, Camille studies architecture, and in her earlier classes, we see that her restrictive heartache is manifesting in her work – high-rises with tiny rooms, moat-like ponds that hinder exploration. But, of course, this also becomes Camille's outlet to rebuild herself and her life, and it opens up a world of opportunity for the director in terms of atmosphere, with Camille and her classmates visiting and examining all sorts of interesting structures.

And yet, nature keeps creeping in amid all the man-made marvels, specifically water, as Hansen-Løve makes swimming the ultimate pastime in an effort to establish an ongoing rinse cycle. Camille moves on, begins to make a name for herself in the architectural world, and even sparks up the old cliché relationship with a teacher decades her senior (she's nearly 23 as the film winds down). But Sullivan indeed returns to the picture, with feelings that are indeed still reciprocated, only to leave again. And with the recurring scenes of swimming, Hansen-Løve implies that Camille isn't continually baptizing herself anew, she's refreshing her tender, but also toxic, devotion to her first love, the one that “lives inside her like a disease.” When we finally leave Camille, she is, once again, taking a dip in the river. And though Sullivan's hat, which she brings along for the afternoon, is knowingly swept away and taken by the current, the scene expresses one thing most of all: Rinse. Repeat.

8 Short Docs & 63 Foreign Films Advance Toward Oscar

Ethan McCord's request to see a mental health professional after a terrible scene of carnage from which he rescued two children, was ridiculed by his superior officer. "Incident in New Baghdad"AMPAS has announced the documentary short finalists, eight of them to be precise which will then be whittled down to five, four or three lucky nominees, so as to make either three, four, or five of these finalists feel like absolute shite on Tuesday January 24th.

THE FINALISTS (links go to official sites if we could find)

• The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement 
  (civil rights doc about a barber and barbershop which was a civil rights hub)
• God Is the Bigger Elvis
  (37 minutes)
• In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution
  (38 minutes)
• Incident in New Baghdad
  (Iraq War and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
• Pipe Dreams
  (Environmental doc about a tar pipeline set to cross the largest fresh water resource) 
• Saving Face
  (About a plastic surgeon helping acid attack victims in Pakistan. Strangely the company's site has not been updated since March despite this big Oscar news!?!) 
• The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
  (Described as "a stunning visual poem about the ephemeral nature of life and the healing power of Japan's most beloved flower") 
• Witness

It is my humble opinion that "finalist" lists should always be at least double the amount of actual nominees, so that misery can love its company and not feel like the only girl in the room not invited to the dance.

Who can convince the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to change their unstable cruel ways? Categories should be set in stone: five nominees or three. Finalist lists, when necessary, ought to be double that. Five or Three should be the only Two options for shortlists for the great good of spreadsheets, statistical percentages, charts and the mental health of pundits everywhere or at least this pundit right here.

Nevertheless AMPAS continues with their "we might do this / we might do that" keep-you-on-your-toes ways. 

In much bigger news Oscar has also finally released the Official List of Best Foreign Language Film contenders. It's sixty-three wide this year. If you or anyone you know cares about this category, you'll want to check out The Film Experience's Beautiful Foreign Film Oscar Charts and please do share them with your friends. You can peruse the entire category visually instead of just reading this boring list of as-yet-meaningless names.

But we'll include the list here as well for SEO purposes. If the titles are in bold they're rather high profile as these things go, but keep in mind that high profile doesn't always equate with "future nominee" status.

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