but is it a link post?

Awards Daily takes on the unfortunate phrase "but is it an Oscar movie?" in relation (partially at least) to Gone Girl.
Empire Leonardo DiCaprio continues to have a bajillion movies in development. He's now bought the rights toAmerican Wolf which Robert Zemeckis wanted, too
i09 Be careful what you wish for. We've always wanted Christopher Walken in another movie musical. But this picture of him as Captain Hook is TERRIFYING
The Stake good piece on the casting of Vince Vaughn in True Detective 2 and what has happened to the actors original gifts
/bent 10 great queer films by straight directors. This was not prompted by Pride -- which you should totally see in theaters now -- but that also applies 

My New Plaid Pants Frankenstein is so hot right now
Telegraph Profile of Luke Evans who headlines Dracula Untold. This time he actually acknowledges that "Noted Homosexual" business albeit in a very Jodie Foster way
Salon suggests that Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight (which I weirdly have not yet seen) could have been way more fascinating based on the real life magician that inspired it
Guardian so many film festivals happening at the same time. This is a recap of Fantastic Fest in Austin
BadAss Digest investigates why some trilogies will never split up their last film into two parts as is currently the trend. For this we must profusely thank The Four Musketeers?
AV Club really smart scathing review of the new series Stalker and the general problem of victim exploitation on television
/Film The film adaptation of Y: The Last Man is still in Development Hell. Here's what's going on...
In Contention the only SNL actors to win Oscar nominations - can you name all 9 without looking? 
The Guardian on Emma Watson. She continues to have the press hopeless enamored. And I heard random old ladies on the street talking about her UN speech the other day.
AV Club celebrates incest! Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. They're selecting famously incestuous pairs from recent movies & tv from Game of Thrones to August: Osage County

Viola photographed by Graeme Mitchellicymi
Last week the New York Times had fine ass profiles of two of our favorite creatives, director P.T. Anderson and  actress Viola Davis who is our unofficial 'star of the week' since she keeps inadvertedly being brought up in every post lately. Love her quotes in this piece, like...

“I always got the phone call that said: ‘I have a great project for you. You’re going to be with, hypothetically, Vanessa Redgrave, Julianne Moore, Annette Bening. Then I get the script, and I have a role that lasts for a page or two.”

I wish I'd written this
I was trying to voice my frustration about a new terrifying age of lost old movies post-streaming technology on twitter then other day but this KQED Arts article is way more articulate than I was being "For Cinephiles, Netflix is less and less an option." If anyone has a solution or a silver lining to any of this, please speak up! 

Three Quickies: Caesar, Victor, Jared

Caesar
Have you ever considered the job of Location Manager? I can quickly confess that I have not despite often considering plentiful jobs that go on behind the scenes on motion pictures. The Credits discusses the complicated work with Catou Kearney the Location Manager of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It's a technically challenging movie, not least of which because they shot so much outdoors and needed a lushly overgrown forest.

The apes ... have created a vast forest utopia. Finding such a place, one that looks as abundant as the script demands, but that could also support a large crew and a ton of equipment, takes months of research, legwork, and a few thousand phone calls. Kearney is a seasoned location manager, and relishes the opportunity. “It’s like putting a ten-thousand piece puzzle together,” she says. “When that last piece falls into place, there’s nothing like it.” 

As it turns out the Vancouver rainforests got the job of portraying futuristic California wilderness.

Igor (Marty Feldman) in "Young Frankenstein"Victor
Since we're in an era wherein everything that is enormously familiar is being regurgitated nonstop, we're going to get a new Victor Frankenstein movie shortly after getting a new Victor Frankenstein on TV in Penny Dreadful. Next October to be exact. The new angle this time? The story will be told from the perspective of Dr Frankenstein's assistant Igor who will be played by Daniel Radcliffe. The mad doctor is James McAvoy. I've always felt a little bad for the Frankenstein Monster because of the classic monsters, he's the least popular... though that never stops Hollywood. My theory on this is because he's not thematically easy like the self-generating metaphor machines that vampirism and to a lesser extent lycanthrophy are. Maybe when science evolves to a point where we all have organ transplants and articifial limbs and cyborg parts and we worry about what we've become everyone will be really into him. 

Jared
Remember when I interviewed Jared Leto last year for Dallas Buyers Club and he was all 'don't expect me back in the movies anytime soon'. Liar liar pants on fire! He's being talked up for Doctor Strange. I think Cumberbatch & Hardy are great actors but I honestly like the idea of Leto so much more in that particular role. That's partially because he's less familiar as a screen actor and feels 'other' already which would help -  and he's just replaced Will Smith in the lead role in Brilliance.

As In Contention astutely points out

To those who say winning an Oscar makes no difference to one's career, here's evidence to the contrary. This time last year, news of Jared Leto replacing Will Smith on a major commercial project would have seemed like crazy talk ...

Brilliance is a thriller based on the novel by the same name by Marcus Sakey about a federal agent chasing a deadly terrorist. They're both "brilliants" which is a sort of human being with 'extras' if you will. Everyone's gotta be superpowered these days whether they get it honestly by mutations, under duress via bags of leaky drugs implanted in their stomachs, or they're airlifted in from other planets. 

A brief history of faux-Frankensteins

Tim here. All this talk of the great-looking movies we can’t wait to see, and the Sundance crop of interesting (or semi-interesting, or bad) indie films is pulling focus from the reality of filmgoing as most of us live it. Which is that it’s January, and unless you’re still cleaning off the last end-of-year films as they trickle out into medium-wide release, the options for seeing a movie in theaters right now are dire.

Case in point, tomorrow finds the release of I, Frankenstein, which, if I’m being honest, is very much I movie I’ve been looking forward to as much as anything on my official We Can’t Wait ballot, though for entirely different reasons: the combination of Frankenstein, demons, and chiseled abs promises bad movie awesomeness of a sort that I don’t expect to be replicated anytime soon.

It’s not the first nominal Frankenstein adaptation to go so far afield from the source material, either; not even the first outrageously bad one. There is a grand tradition of Frankenstein-derived films so utterly bizarre and off-the-wall and divorced from Shelley that they make I, Frankenstein look dull, sedate, and conventional. After the jump, let's take a quick look at some of the strangest.

Click to read more ...

I, Linkenstein

Big Screen
Artsbeat Alfonso Cuaron talks us through a dizzy-making scene in Gravity
Flick Filosopher "Hollywood, you are 300 movies away from making me want to marry you" The manic pixie dream guy bit is fab. It's so hard to imagine... which is the point. 
Guardian Olivier Hirschbiegel reacts to the terrible reviews to his Diana biopic 

David Poland 22 weeks to Oscar. He correctly sees that there are very few locks but bizarrely thinks Forrest Whitaker is a lock for Best Actor for The Butler
BuzzFeed live action footage (and actors) that helped created The Little Mermaid 
i09 thinks I, Frankenstein might be the most insane movie of 2014
Movie City News asks a great question about Amy Adams in American Hustle 

Small Screen
Salon interviews Adam Scott on his television breakthroughs and his new film A.C.O.D.
i09 Honestly I did not see this coming. Halle Berry, whose big screen career is still going well (consider how much her ermegency call center movie made), will headline the tv series Extant about an astronaut whose baby might be half alien

Look! A new Halloween opening for The Simpsons courtesy of Guillermo del Toro so naturally there's a fair amount of Pan's Labyrinth up in there. Lots of movie referencing but the funniest bit I think is that misanthrope naughtiness of the Alfred Hitchcock cameo via The Birds. 

Finally, can I just say "amen" to this Vulture piece requesting a moratorium on anti-heroes as the leads of television series?  I mean you're not going to top Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White, Carrie Bradshaw (yeah, she was one. deal with it) and Nurse Jackie... so let it die a natural death now instead of death from ubiquity. Mark Harris has also wisely noticed that this trend has now poisoned the broadcast networks without the antidote of the artistry that made this type of protagonist so popular on cable television in the first place.

If the original Frankenstein Monster had looked this good...

Aaron Eckhart in I Frankenstein (2014)

...he wouldn't have had to ask for "frieeeennnd?"

... he wouldn't have had so much trouble finding a Bride.