AGLIFF: "Saint Frances" gets an encore screening, lives up to its hype.

by Nathaniel R

After winning SXSW in Austin this spring, the festival darling Saint Frances returned to the film-friendly Texas city for an encore screening at AGLIFF. We were initially perplexed at the inclusion since we hadn't heard that it had LGBTQ content. But, then, we don't read reviews until after screening films so sometimes these details slip by. The film has been picked up by Oscilloscope for distribution (we presume in 2020?) but they have a challenge ahead in marketing it. The film has no name actors, no easy marketing hook (more of a character study than a plot film), and is a debut festival hit from a white male director. We only mention the latter, and half in jest, because the film actually has quite a fresh voice and inarguably feminine POV...

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Yes No Maybe So: "Bombshell"

On the heels of Showtime’s unheralded miniseries The Loudest Voice, Lionsgate and director Jay Roach are diving into the zeitgeist with Bombshell (formerly titled Fair and Balanced). The film details the #MeToo fallout at Fox News and stars three of today’s greatest working actresses. For whatever reason, Bombshell is being mostly ignored by many early Oscar prognosticators.

This despite, well...let’s dive into that teaser shall we?

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The New Classics - Meek's Cutoff

The New Classics is a weekly series by Michael Cusumano, looking at great films of the 21st century through the lens of a single selected scene. 

Scene: Emily takes charge
The lost pioneers in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff travel with a bird in a cage dangling from the back of a covered wagon. It is a token of happier days, when nature was an ornament that decorated your home, not a force that drained the life from you with its punishing distances and barren terrain.

More than a sad joke, the little yellow parakeet also functions as a poignant symbol for the codes of society the pioneers carry with them into the wilderness, codes which become increasingly absurd in the context of their predicament. Lost, dying from thirst, and led by a guide who is either a charlatan or a mad man, the wagon train’s men still make sure to isolate themselves from their wives when discussing strategy.

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Links

• /Film RIP Peter Mayhew, Chewbacca actor in the original Star Wars films
• Film Comment a wonderful anecdote-filled interview with the legendary casting director Juliet Taylor Dangerous Liaisons, The Exorcist, Close Encounters, Schindler's List, and Broadway Danny Rose are among her many classics.
• Deadline It's official: Michelle Pfeiffer, Lucas Hedges and Tracy Letts to headline French Exit...
• TFE ...our earlier report about Michelle's interest in doing this movie
• Slate thinks the romcom Long Shot is actually pretty feminist (though it's initially strange to hear that claim about yet another movie where the schlubby guy gets the hot girl)

More after the jump including Lucy Liu, an 80s singer coming out, the Karate Kid, the German Oscars, upcoming stage musicals based on movies, and more...

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Stage Door: Hillary and Clinton

We're seeing a lot of theater in the run up to the Tonys. Here's new contributor J.B.

For the last twenty years or so, and probably longer, well-crafted stories about women in politics told on stage or screen have frequently been described with words like “timely” or “vital.”  These stories, in many cases, are ones we haven’t heard before, and to the extent we as a society want our art to imitate life (and indeed, vice versa), they are, now more than ever, ones we need to hear.

It is for this reason that Hillary and Clinton, a well-crafted story about the quintessential woman in American politics now playing at the John Golden Theater in New York, feels like such an anomaly. The play, written by Lucas Hnath and directed by Joe Mantello (his SEVENTH production on Broadway in just the last three years), takes place in a hotel room during the thick of the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary and offers an imagined glimpse into what exactly the titular characters (played by Tony-winners Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow, respectively) may have been thinking, feeling, and communicating to each other at that precise place and time in history...

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