Little Link on the Bloggie

Today's Must Reads
Cleo Journal has an excellent piece by Sara Black McCulloch on audience complicity, cat-fights, and star persona in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 
Grantland Mark Harris, typically brilliant, looks at this weird dispirited holding place (2015) before the next wave of superheroes are due to hit the movies for five plus years

Linkage
Variety Melissa Gilbert, that little girl from that Little House on the Prairie must have liked her role as SAG President some years ago -- now she's running for Congress in Michigan where she moved in 2013! Michigan politics are SO messy. Perhaps Laura Ingalls can help clean things up!
Gabby Sidibe loves Jussie Smollet cleaning her floors. LOL. Get all of that dirt, papi!
Criterion Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons look back on The French Lieutenant's Woman 
LA Times talks to the men behind Shaun the Sheep's dialogue free wonders
Rope of Silicon Angelina Jolie's By the Sea gets a hard "R" from the MPAA  

Empire Reese Witherspoon to produce and star in a supernatural thriller called Cold. She stays busy, that one
Defamer talks about the twist in Joel Edgerton's The Gift. I can't read this yet because I haven't seen the film but I love Rich Juzwiak's articles
The Hairpin "32 Things That Are All In Your Head" 
MNPP Gratuitous Miguel Angel Silvestre
The Film Stage PT Anderson made a music video again. This time for his Inherent Vice supporting actress Joanna Newsom
Uproxx a sequel to the one-off wonder Edge of Tomorrow is a possibility. Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossble - Rogue Nation) and Tom Cruise maybe thinking about it
Slate argues that the problems with the Fantastic Four might just be in the source material 
AV Club on the proliferation and pros and cons of the anthology format, post American Horror Story. Interesting but I dearly wish people would stop crediting Ryan Murphy with inventing a genre. Anthologies have existed since the beginning of television. He just popularized them again after a few decades when they went mostly extinct. It's like crediting Baz Luhrmann for inventing musicals or something.

ICYMI
Here at TFE we recently discussed that recent damning Miles Tellers profile in Esquire and The New York Times has now published "a brief history of the tough celebrity profile"  featuring Mira Sorvino, Cara Delevingne, Ernest Hemingway, and more. I thought I'd share it since we were just talking about Mira Sorvino at length in Mighty Aphrodite.

Stage Door
Playbill awww. Cyndi Lauper visited the stars of Fun Home backstage. Incidentally the show has been selling out houses for months now. That Tony win did good for a great musical. I keep wondering if anyone will dare make it into a movie?
CNN Benedict Cumberbatch is on stage in London as Hamlet but having trouble with fans who are filming him do it. Jesus, what is wrong with people? Just watch the thing you've paid to see. 

Precious

Linkpourri

Change.org a petition to get Lupita Nyong'o cast as Storm in the next X-Men movie. Too bad there's still one more round of Halle Berry!
Ellen TV somehow I hadn't see Cate Blanchett's post Oscar win visit to Ellen until just now. So funny and I love what she says about sleeping with her statue at the 4:30 mark 
Cinema Blend Kristen Bell planning to work with the Frozen songwriter team again. More musicals, yay! 

In Contention lessons learned from this Oscar season. I've been preaching the "don't open in December" thing for a long time but finally other pundits are coming round! 
Comics Alliance whoa. superhero figures are getting way more realistic than when I was a kid! Here's Black Widow -- I assume Scarlett Johansson gets a huge cut of this for allowing her likeness. Can you imagine the market if they could make sex dolls this realistic. Did I just type that aloud. My deepest apologies but it's Scarlett. She does things to people. 

small screen
Slate talks to True Detective's costume designer
The Guardian Lee Daniels and Gabby Sidibe of Precious fame are reuniting albeit not as spectacularly. This time she'll play the assistant to a lead character (Terence Howard) in a new TV series about a hiphop record label. 
The Week is there too much nudity on HBO?
TFE If you love Faith the Vampire Slayer than you must please stop goodie Buffy in this reader's poll. Buffy Buffy Buffy
Pajiba on dead TV characters they'd like resurrected
Comics Alliance Oh my Dark Phoenix. They're reviewing every episode of the 90s X-Men animated series
Salon the vague plans for Season 2 of True Detective 

Today's Watch(es)
For the adults... Strangers kissing for the first time, an experiment. (Weird that the gay guys are the most demure about it!)

)

For all ages... Sesame Street does Les Miserables with Cookie Monster taking up the lead duties

) 

Do you hear the cookies crunch?
It's really more than we can bear
That's the sound of Jean Bon-bon
He's the guy who would not share ♫ 

Link-Along

HuffPo Gabby Sidibe gets in trouble for using the word "Tranny" on television. It's hard to keep up. Gabby is not alone. I also didn't realize this word was now off limits since LGBT people have been using it for years and in names of clubs and dance nights and everything ("Tranny Shack" "Tranny Chasers" etcetera) 
Cinema Blend American Hustle will hit DVD Bluray on March 18th. I wonder if it will have any Oscar wins to tout on its cover? You think?
The Wire attends the Frozen sing-along

TV Blend poster for season 2 of Bates Motel (I wish I had liked that show, but nope.) 
In Contention Guy makes us want to go the Miami Film Festival 
/Film new trailer for Captain America: Winter Soldier includes Emily VanCamp

More on PSH
Slate Dana Stevens' tribute to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman
The Wrap catches us up on 5 current PSH projects and where they stand now that he's gone. Weirdly they leave out the sixth, Ezekiel Moss which he had planned to direct and which had recently cast its leads.
The Guardian on the double standards of drugs and drug laws. Some addicts are viewed empathetically and tragically and others as criminals 

Finally...
I keep meaning to share this really fun video of all the Best Visual Effects winners at the Oscars from Star Wars through Life of Pi. You've probably seen it already but isn't it a good watch?!

American Horror Story Coven: "Bitchcraft" & "Boy Parts"

So Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy have finally done it. After years of wooing me with meaty roles for actresses of a certain age (meat served bloody raw) in their American Horror Story anthology series, I am down for watching it as it airs. It's been clear for some time that the creative team's orientation is fully aligned with the Actressexuality™ named and promoted by TFE for several years now. Thus, a natural kinship exists even if yours truly is squeamish about horror. I have been mostly agnostic when it comes to Jessica Lange my whole life (though I thought her "Sister Jude" on Asylum was easily her best work since the 80s) but when it comes to two-time Oscar winner Lange paired with Sarah Paulson, Oscar winner Kathy Bates, Oscar nominee Gabby Sidibe, Lily Rabe, AND Oscar nominee Angela Awesome Basset? Uncle! I surrender to your casting voodoo. 

Kathy Bates in "Coven"

Please to Note: I did try to watch the first two seasons but in both cases, I eventually bailed after a few episodes from the gore and the, how to put this, unwatchable epileptic fits of lensing and editing and framing. Listen, I can live with frenetic editing (you kind of have to since the late 80s) knowing that when I need a fix of long takes that let me enjoy great acting, I can always seek out auteur films. (Odd that it would be auteurs, who so thoroughly OWN their pictures, that would be the only ones to just hand said pictures to the actors on occasion). But it's not just the genre or the typical short attention span in cutting that has previously made AHS unpalatable for me.

The show, or at least the first handful of episodes of its previous seasons, often appeared to have been shot and edited and framed by a group of wild, bug-eyed, A.D.D. addled 12 year old boys... albeit uniquely pervy pre-teens who were raised in asylums and jacked off to photos of grande dame actresses while horror movies were projected on continual loop on the grey walls of their prison. The only break in horror programming was obviously the complete filmography of Jessica Lange.

...or at least the lobotomy scenes from Frances (1982).

It wasn't just quick cutting but canted cameras, baroque flash cuts, inebriated camera swerves, you name it. But let's put that behind us and move on to Season 3's first two eppys after the jump. Spoilers ahead obviously.

Click to read more ...