The Link Down

It's impossible to keep up these days. So herewith a bunch of news we haven't covered and other enjoyable places to go on the web today...

News
Baz Lurhmann has written a letter to fans about the cancellation of The Get Down, his Netflix series. My favorite bit because I like having him on the big screen in 2 hour doses:

All sorts of things have been thrown around for the future... even a stage show (can you imagine that? I can, concert version anyone? Next summer? Just saying.) But the simple truth is, I make movies. And the thing with movies is, that when you direct them, there can be nothing else in your life. Since The Get Down stopped, I have actually been spending the last few months preparing my new cinematic work...

Variety IFC is on a buying spree at Cannes, including Lars Von Trier's latest, a serial killer drama named The House That Jack Built starring Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman
BBC Star Wars' John Boyega hits the London stage in Woyzeck. Reviews are a bit mixed but everyone seems to love that he challenged himself to such an extent post stardom
Cartoon Brew Pixar has a new experimental shorts division without executive oversight. This sounds like a great idea for the company, fostering new creative visions without much investment or interference
Kenneth in the (212) Jeffrey Schwarz, who specializes in documentaries about gay or gay-interest historical figures (I Am Divine, Vito, etcetera) has a new documentary on Producer Allan Car (Grease 2, Can't Stop the Music)
Broadway World Glenn Close stops a performance of Sunset Blvd to address a rude audience member:

We can have a show or we can have a photo shoot

Variety Kirsten Dunst gets emotional at The Beguiled premiere
Variety Gina Prince-Blythewood (Beyond the Lights) tapped to direct Spider-Man spinoff Silver and Black  about the characters Silver Sable and Black Cat.
Angry Asian Man there's a Joy Luck Club tv series in the work and they're looking for Chinese American women

Good Reads
Vanity Fair on that new unforgivably hideous Spider-Man Homecoming poster
Jezebel on the terrible Dirty Dancing TV remake. (I have to ask though, why do people keep watching TV remakes of movies. They're all just t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e... remember that trainwreck that was Beaches recently?)

For Fun
Gay Comic Geek [nsfw site] Wonder Woman cosplay... by men
The New Yorker Joe Dator draws a comic about his fortieth anniversary with Star Wars. Cute.

Exit Video
Dynasty is getting a reboot.

I object that Krystle isn't a blonde and doesn't look that much different than Fallon (why does the CW have such trouble varying haircolors/styles and overall looks in their casts in all their shows?) but otherwise some of the changes are fun. The most potentially interesting touch being that trashy golddigger Sammy Joe (the Heather Locklear role) is a gay man this time but still after the same mark, Steven Carrington (the family's gay son). But, is this really the right era to idolize the super wealthy? Not sure it will sit as well in 2017 as it did in the 80s when people were more naive about the 1%'s havoc-wreaking on the economy of everyone else.

Matthias of Linkland

In Contention Lion is using T****'s unconstitutional travel ban its advertisements
Boy Culture 70s star and Battlestar Galactica hunk Richard Hatch has died
Awards Daily Jazz talks to Joel Harlow about the Oscar nominated Hair and Makeup of Star Trek: Beyond
Towleroad a close-up of Glenn Close returning to Sunset Boulevard

Cottages & Gardens the Grey Gardens estate is up for sale  
Variety Stanley Tucci has directed a movie about Alberto Giacometti starring Geoffrey Rush and Armie Hammer
Tracking Board the Coen brothers are polishing the remake script for Scarface (which was made twice already in the 30s and 80s)
Towleroad Finland is the first country to release their own national emojis and one of them is for the gay artist Tom of Finland 
MNPP "Smile like Trevante Rhodes"
New Yorker Oscar Spotlight: The Actresses
World of Reel a synopsis of Nicolas Winding Refn's new Amazon series
AV Club "Johnny Depp close to completing his transformation into mole person"
Interview Jay Baruchel talks Man Seeking Woman and his first time as director on the sequel to Goon
Comics Alliance weirdest Aquaman moments in comics 

MNPP How hot is Matthias Schoenaerts? So hot he's steaming.
빛나는 special Korean posters for Moonlight - Chiron drawn at all ages
Theater Mania Meryl Streep to present Stephen Sondheim with the PEN Award in April in NYC
/Film Mary Poppins Returns has officially startedc production with Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Dick Van Dyke, Emily Blunt as "Mary Poppins" and Meryl Streep as Mary's eccentric cousin "Topsy" 

Swing Tarzan Swing: Disney's 1999 Animated Take

We've reached the penultimate episode of our Tarzan series. Now sailing into Disney wilds...

by Nathaniel R

For over half a century in film and television storytellers didn't think Tarzan needed an origin plot but when the movies told it (Greystoke, 1984), it was as if everyone had always wanted to. Why not Disney then? Disney hadn't quite run out of classic fairytales to adapt by the mid-nineties but they were shifting their focus to boys. This was arguably due to their gargantuan back-to-back biggest-ever successes of Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), two animated features that deviated from their princess focus. Enter Hercules and then Tarzan. Neither were girly fairytales but both were still firmly embedded in fantasy and heightened enough for musical numbers.

Sort of.

By the time Tarzan rolled into town, Disney executives had clearly begun to wonder if audiences were done with the musical part of their Animated Musicals because Tarzan is only a musical in the sense that non-diegetic adult contemp ear worms keep popping up. They arrive without warning, with all the subtlety of a slasher movie jump scare.

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Glenn Close is "The Wife"

by Murtada

Close at the Tonys in June

Glenn Close is not going to be ignored. Anymore. Six years after Albert Nobbs she has signed on for a new part. It’s not a supporting authority figure (Guardians of the Galaxy) or an uncredited cameo (Warcraft) -she’s playing the title character! The film is The Wife in which Close will play Joan, a woman who gave up her own literary ambitions to support her successful novelist husband. On the eve of him receiving the Nobel Prize for literature she has a crisis of faith in him and in their marriage and starts re-examining her choices.

The film was first announced last February but it seems that whatever kinks they had then, have been smoothed out and shooting stars in a couple of weeks. The film is helmed by Swedish director Björn Runge and adapted by Jane Anderson (Olive Kitteridge) from Meg Wolitzer’s novel. Frances McDormand, Logan Lerman and Brit Marling who were previously attached, have dropped out. Now the supporting cast includes Jonathan Pryce (as the husband), Christian Slater, Elizabeth McGovern, Max Irons (Glenn’s Reversal of Fortune co-star Jeremy’s son), Harry Lloyd (Stephen Hawking’s friend in The Theory of Everything) and Glenn's daughter Annie Starke.

Sounds like a juicy part for Glenn. Hope she goes all Marquise de Merteuil on Pryce, that would be a fun battle of wiles to watch. Are you excited to see Glenn leading a movie again?

Smackdown '84: Glenn Close, Dame Peggy, Lahti, Crouse, and Page

Presenting the Supporting Actress Class of '84. The Academy looked way back in time for this vintage collecting characters from the 1920s through the 1940s: a British senior on an excursion to see "the real" India, a Depression era beautician, the ex-girl of a ballplayer, and a former singer working in a factory during World War II. The sole contemporary character was a chain-smoking furious mother from Greenwich Village...

Glenn Close and Geraldine Page were the regulars... about to lose again!

1984 
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN  

THE NOMINEES: The 1984 Supporting Actress list skewed more mature than usual. Lindsay Crouse, surely buoyed by the love for Best Picture player Places in the Heart, and the promising new star Christine Lahti who was the least familiar face to moviegoers at the time, were the youngest, both in their mid 30s. Glenn Close, on her third consecutive nomination in the category, and Geraldine Page with a surprise seventh nomination from a long and revered acting career, were the "names" of the category... and they were both about to lose again - this time to the stage actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft who had only rarely made films. 

Shut-Outs: There was very little consensus about supporting actresses beyond Ashcroft & Lahti who fought it out for the critics awards...

BAFTA & Globe nominees that failed to make the Oscar cut were many: Melanie Griffith (Body Double), Drew Barrymore (Irreconciliable Differences), Kim Basinger (The Natural), Lesley Ann Warren (The Songwriter), Tuesday Weld (Once Upon a Time in America) and Jaqueline Bissett (Under the Volcano); Other key women that voters could have chosen that year: Sigourney Weaver (Ghostbusters), Elizabeth Berridge (Amadeus), Polly Holliday (Gremlins), Sabine Azéma (who won the NBR for A Sunday in the Country), Holland Taylor (Romancing the Stone), Sharon Stone (Irreconciliable Differences), Dianne Wiest (Falling in Love), Amy Madigan (Places in the Heart) and Lonette McKee (The Cotton Club) 

THIS MONTH'S PANELISTS

Here to talk about the nominees are our panelists: Sheila O'Malley (The Sheila Variations), Noah Tsika (Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY and author of "Nollywood Stars"), Joe Reid (Decider.com), Nick Davis (Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern and author of "The Desiring Image") and your host Nathaniel R (The Film Experience).

And now it's time for the main event... 

1984 

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