'Jack & The Beanstalk... on Steroids'

I can only imagine the pitch meetings for Jack the Giant Slayer...

The Royal Family, Their Trusted Ewan, and Jack the Farmboy

It's like 'Jack and the Beanstalk' on steroids. not one giant but hundreds, not a farm to save but an entire kingdom, not just treasure but a princess's heart to win. Oh, and minus the golden harp since harps are for sissies!"

Okay, yes, the harp does make a cameo appearance but the story has been greatly altered in an attempt to reach today's kids boys. Which is fine. Fairy tales are always morphing with the times and in this case why the hell not? There's a reason that Jack & The Beanstalk is a second tier fairy tale. [more...]

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A Proposal For Kathryn Bigelow's Next Picture

I snapped this pic in my last hotel room and forgot to share it.

I lol'ed like a crazy person at the time alone in a hotel bathroom because my brain immediately went here:

Breaking: KATHRYN BIGELOW to direct Invitation To Tea starring Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Joan Plowright and Dame Julie Andrews. 

No matter what the plot is. I'm in.

Oscar likes to reward people for 'playing against type' but they wouldn't reward Bigelow for doing so in a million years. There's a reason she's the only woman who ever won Best Director (Jane Campion & Sofia Coppola movies are way too girly for Oscar wins) and will be the first to win a second directing nomination as soon as this Thursday.

(Do You Know) What It Feels Like For a Girl?

Variety 10 Directors to Watch gets very international this year including the Norwegian directors behind Oscar submission Kon-Tiki and the Argentinian Andres Muschietti who directed Jessica Chastain in Mama.
Pretty Dead Hair dreams up alternative terrible Spielbergian endings to Lincoln. 
Drawn A short history of the GIF. Super cute animated film 
MNPP "today's mood" god, i only wish that had been my mood this weekend! The second gif maybe. At least the stage is set for my weekend of the sick. 

Atlantic looks at beautiful storyboards of classic films from Psycho to Spartacus. And speaking of... happy birthday Kirk Douglas!
The New York Times looks at Working Title and their hunt for awards and a new beginning with Les Misérables
MovieLine becomes obsessed with a supposed Michael Cimino twitter account 
In Contention on the BIFA winners 

List Mania
The Popcorn Reel Middle of Nowhere, Compliance, Lincoln and more... 
Mix Tapes for Hookers Songs of the Year 
Pajiba chooses the Best Posters of the Year. Lists like those are always fun but what the F on The Dark Knight Rises. That rainy Bane poster is SO boring.
Time Magazine's Best and Worst of the Year in Everything has a hundred things to recommend it. My favorite bits are James Poniewozik on Mad Men's "At the Codfish Ball", Richard Corliss on Anna Karenina and Mary Pols on Cloud Atlas.

Today's Must Read Part 1
The New Inquiry has a sensational thought-provoking piece on Pixar's Brave which seeks to rescue the movie from the extremely lazy criticism it suffered upon its release.

"Brave" Sketch by Matt Nolte 2007. From the book "The Art of BRAVE"

A stranger to our film industry might reasonably suppose, reading those sentences, that the American cinemascape is littered with “spunky princess movies” that center around the main character and her mother...

It’s a well-worn genre, the Spunky-Princess-Who-Doesn’t-Get-Married-(Or-Experience-Any-Attraction-To-Anyone)-And-Her-Mother story.

I recently watched the movie again to prep for an interview with one of its directors and it was only on this second viewing when I realized how thoroughly new it is when it comes to its mother/daughter focus. It's well worth a second look as animated pictures go and deserves to be in the mix of answers to the question of "Which are the Best Animated Features of 2012?" 

Today's Must Read Part 2
Some of you will already have read this but I can't in good faith not sing its praises. A.O. Scott has written a wonderful comprehensive essay about the problem of gender imbalance in this era's film narratives touching on the glorious exceptions of a handful of this year's most talked-about films including Beasts of the Southern Wild, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Hunger Games. Scott doesn't mention it but an interesting trivia note that would have fit perfectly within the context of this article is that the character of Hushpuppy was originally a boy. The film's screenplay was adapted by the director and original playwright and they reassigned Hushpuppy's gender. 

Jodie Foster in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"

For Jodie Foster Week I invited guests to talk about favorite Foster films. Here is one of my favorite authors Manuel Muñoz ("What You see in the Dark," "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue") on a pre-Taxi Driver Scorsese/Foster collaboration. - Nathaniel R]

Coming up with another word for “precocious” is hard, since its precision begs no real qualification. The word bothers me a little as a go-to choice to describe Jodie Foster’s brief appearance in 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. What are we seeing in her portrayal of a girl who dislikes her real name (Doris) so much that she ditches it in favor of another (Audrey)? I thought my pleasure in rewatching Alice would come in getting to see Foster in that vulnerable adolescence where few of us had learned to mask, moderate, or amplify our sexual identities. How much more apparent would this be on camera, especially when we, as viewers, sometimes willingly blur the lines between performer and performance?

I’m happy to come away from Alice seeing Doris/Audrey as more than a thinly written tomboy role... [More]

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LFF: Wadjda, A Miracle Debut

David here with words on a milestone in film history showing at the 56th BFI London Film Festival.

Waad Mohammad as 'Wadjda'

Miracles do happen. Haifaa Al-Mansour’s debut feature Wadjda is one of them. The first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, where movie theatres are illegal, Wadjda is also the first film ever made by a Saudi woman. As the film shows, gender equality is still non-existent in Saudi Arabia – Reem Abdullah’s working mother relies on a driver to ferry her to work every day and Wadjda (Waad Mohammad) is omitted from her father’s family tree. Despite these socio-political outrages, Wadjda is never aggressive or dogmatic about getting any agenda across to its audience. Focusing its energies on the “spunky” young heroine of the title, Wadjda stitches the injustice and sexism that’s at the heart of Saudi Arabian society into the larger canvas of Wadjda’s rebellious spirit and complex engagement with religion. [Continue...]

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