3 Hateful Links. 16 Nicer Ones.

As you may have heard The Hateful Eight expanded a smidge early today into nearly 2000 theaters after the success of its roadshow weekend. So here are 8 links about the movie because we're feeling masochistic...

Variety The Hateful Eight is leading current movies in spending the most for TV ads
Deadline an interview with Hateful Eight's costume designer Courtney Hoffman. (Everyone knows I hate the movie but I actually liked her work in it a lot!)
Awards Daily Sasha struggles to suss out what Tarantino is doing with Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Hateful Eight and tries to make sense of the many journalist opinions on whether its an inherently "misogynist" work. I'd love to defend Tarantino on this front personally but I have to face facts. He hasn't written a good female character since Inglorious Basterds. He's lost that particular skill. But I don't think he's misogynist so much as betraying his ultimate misanthropy with his ugliest most masturbatory movie.

Escape From Minnie's Haberdashery (for more hospital climes)
Gothamist Russell Crowe throwing tantrums again -- this time about hoverboards 
Guardian I'm eager to hear what our resident Australian Glenn thinks of their choices for best Aussie films of the year 
Gawker "the year in Gay"
Empire first look at Michael Fassbender in Assassin's Creed
Vanity Fair picks the best new TV characters of the year from series including Daredevil, Empire, UNReal, Fresh Off the Boat and more
Antagony & Ecstasy Tim's razor sharp review of 45 Years is a must-read but then so is his...
Antagony & Ecstasy ...review of Carol. Basically he continues to be one of the web's most underappreciated frequently inspired film critics.

Meanwhile on Jakku...
Variety Carrie Fisher on her body shamers 
imgur "how BB-8 works"
NPR Nigerians are getting excited about Star Wars... in large part thanks to John Boyega 
i09 going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time? i09 has a list of 23 things to watch out for
LA Times talks to the designers of Mad Max, Star Wars, and Mockingjay sequels on their dives into genre work
LA Times and here's a dissenting voice on the cultural phenomenon if you're not feeling the love 
Reverse Shot has an amazingly insightful lengthy review of The Force Awakens that grapples with the film only speaking its own Star Wars language and impatiently exploiting old adventures to venture out on new ones.  

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are "Nice Guys" - Movies are make believe! 

2016?
We're so not ready to go there. It's not really our practice at TFE to look ahead to the following year before the Oscars wrap (the true end to the film year) but I have bookmarked this article "61 Original Movie We're Dying to See in 2016" because it's cute on the rare occasion that people realize that non-sequels exist. The Guardian has no such anti-sequel slant in their "75 films we're excited about" and they go full in for any movie that drives traffic so say hello to the superhero films even the ones that are daring us to agonize over how bad they might be like the scowl-a-thon of Batman v Superman. 

Cinematic Lumps of Coal: 15 Worst of '15

They've been naughty. So we shan't be nice. Rather than choosing the 15 worst movies (we skip a lot of stuff that looks atrocious), here are 15 matters of annoyance within the movies of 2015, whether the movies were decent or terrible. Vague/light spoilers ahead.

15 Lumps of Coal From '15
Links go to past articles about the film or reviews if they exist

15 Grab Bag of Undelights
Afew I couldn't fit in below: Chris Hemsworth's wandering accent in In The Heart of The Sea often within the same scene. Is this First Mate Australian, British, or from the Bronx?; The way Mother Malkin's (Julianne Moore) red hair stays that way when she shifts into dragon form in The Seventh Son. That was cute with Madame Mim in The Sword in the Stone but in "realistic" cgi not so much; and, the perpetual agony of trailers that take you from the beginning to the end of a movie (Room and The Revenant are the latest victims) spoiling every story beat.

14 Longwindedness
In nearly great movies (Clouds of Sils Maria 124 min), good movies (Saint Laurent 150 min.), divisive movies (I'm still making up my mind about The Revenant okay? 156 min), and arthouse curiousities (Arabian Nights, Vol II 131 min., Love 135 min.) alike the tendency in contemporary cinema is to let the camera linger here and there and everywhere and also to include entire sections that add nothing particularly new to the plot or our understanding of character or theme if narrative isn't the movie's main thrust. Don't misunderstand: a good lingering camera can be among the greatest of things but if you're running over 90 minutes please justify it with new information. Shave 10 minutes (or a lot more in some cases) off any of these movies and they're instantly improved. 

13 more after the jump...

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Batman v Running Time, Ex Machina v Blockbusters, and More

Can you believe Christmas is just 3 days away? Eeep how fast the month has gone. Let's jump right into news & links...

Women and Hollywood well, this is good timing. Charlotte Rampling is getting an eight film retrospective in NYC starting Wednesday... just in time to remind East Coast AMPAS members of her brilliance before balloting. Do NOT miss The Night Porter (1974) or Under the Sand (2000) if you haven't seen them.
THR looks at make or break moments coming in 2016 from Batman v Superman to MTV's Shannara Chronicles
Comics Alliance Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is apparently 151 minutes long. Yikes. Here's an idea: cut the death of little Bruce's parents because how many times we gotta see that origin story. The entire world knows it. No need for "previously ons" at this point.
The Wrap Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant are working together again post-Milk. The new project is a miniseries When We Rise about the gay rights movement kicking off with the Stonewall riots

Variety Guy Ritchie's untitled King Arthur movie has been pushed back to 2017 
Variety Star Wars pay scales... back end bonuses don't kick in until the film grosses one billion dollars. Not that it won't pass that in record time (it's already over half a billion globally after that first weekend)
Slash Film modern movies getting the old VHS cover treatment
W Magazine the most provocative fashion photography of 2015. Miley Cyrus, Jessica Chastain, and Cate Blanchett among the subjects
W Magazine Bryan Cranston does a dramatic reading of Drake's "Hotline Bling"
AV Club charts the 24 times 2015 totally lost its shit. Outrage culture is exhausting! 

/Film Cuteness. You can sit in a BB-8 chair (row BB, seat 8 in the balcony) while watching movies in the El Capitan in Los Angeles through February 7th.
The Guardian on the Bechdel Test's origins and Star Wars. Good history feminist politics piece but for the very odd suggestion that gays aren't interested in seeing heterosexual romance onscreen. What the what now? History (and LGBT culture) does not remotely support this notion.
i09 on the devolution of the fan fiction trope "the Mary Sue" with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens 
Gawker the complete history of Quentin Tarantino's use of the N word, used 65 times in The Hateful Eight which is second only to its use in Django Unchained  

Prize-Giving. Tis the Season
Playbill The Sydney Theater Award nominees for 2015 have been announced for fans of Aussie actors (i.e. everyone). Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving are among them
St Louis Film Critics chose Spotlight as Best Picture and Leo & Brie as best leading actors
Nevada Film Critics Society gave those exact same top 3 prizes but since The Revenant won four prizes it feels like the defacto winner

And Finally...
The Academy has announced the 10 finalists for Best Visual Effects, chosen from that longlist of 20 we shared earlier. The 5 Oscar nominees will come from these 10 pictures...

• Ant-Man
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Ex-Machina
• Jurassic World
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• The Martian
• The Revenant
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• Tomorrowland
• The Walk

The most surprising miss among the earlier semi-finalists is probably Spectre since James Bond films generally make the finals in the Daniel Craig era, don't they? But this category gets more competitive every year. I'm suddenly less confident about my current predictions (Avengers, Jurassic, Mad Max, Martian, Star Wars). Might Ex Machina, which hasn't left the awards conversation despite an April bow and is 1000% deserving of this particular nomination, actually make it despite not being of their preferred size and with the effects actually in a supporting role for a change? 

SAG Ensemble. Which films get the honor of losing to Spotlight?

The Screen Actors Guild nominations are just one week away. Who do you think will be nominated for Best Ensemble? Spotlight is the only sure things since it screams "ENSEMBLE!" Or at least it whispers "Ensemble" with grave concern and sobriety standing with arms akimbo with rolled up sleeves and khakis. The Martian is probably in since it's well liked, hard to avoid, has a big cast, and it's long been speculated that actors sometimes vote for movies that they wish they could have been in (i.e. movies wherein a bunch of people look to be having fun making it)

But that's only two slots. So where do the other three go? More after the jump...

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NBR takes Fury Road... but to where?

The National Board of Review used to be the unofficial kick off to awards season / best of year honors but though it's still early, the race for "first" got so ridiculous that we've crept into November of late. They lost that distinction but they're still doing their thing super early in December. The first day of it. Welcome to month twelve!

THEY LOOKED AT ME. THEY LOOKED AT ME.

This year they named George Miller's feminist action epic Mad Max Fury Road as the year's best and we salute them since we love it so and it's peak spectacle filmmaking. But Furiosa will be pissed to hear that they mostly ignored the other big female driven films this year.

Let's investigate after the jump...

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