Saturday, November 25, 2017 at 12:30PM Anjelica Huston and Liza Minnelli on a road trip in Mexico c.1975 pic.twitter.com/7tyRMpQaDY
— Wendy O. (@wendyOrourke) November 20, 2017
Did this really happen? If so how are we just seeing it/ hearing of it? An abbreviated tweet roundup today because everyone's been travelling and gorging and not tweeting. But tweets ahead on Aquaman, Thanksgiving, Lady Bird, and baby Bergman fans after the jump...
Friday, November 24, 2017 at 9:50PM by Nathaniel R
from left to right: del Toro, Guadagnino, Wright, Peele, Jenkins, Rees, Nolan, McDonagh, Aronofsky, Baker, Spielberg, Gerwig, Scott, Bigelow, Coppola, Villeneuve
While I was updating the Oscar charts for Picture and Director it occurred to me that the Academy's directing branch could well come up with their most diverse shortlist ever. Generally speaking when the Best Director lineup has had some variations from its usual five middle aged white American directors it's been with older white European auteurs. But in the past twelve years things have been shifting for that category quite a lot despite frequent complaints that they aren't changing at all. Or at least that they're not changing fast enough.
Consider that the following things have all happened in the past twelve Oscar races:
Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 12:21PM Chris talks the nostalgia and nuance of Lady Bird's soundtrack...
“I mean, what can I say? You’re Justin Timberlake.” Have you seen Greta Gerwig’s personal letters asking for song rights for Lady Bird? As if we needed these requests to Timberlake and Dave Matthews to prove that even Lady Bird’s music comes straight from the heart.
The film presents an incredibly specific pre-adulthood existence: Catholic high school in “the midwest of California”, and economic depression in the immediate psychological fallout of 9/11. Gerwig’s music choices are just as layered, presenting a nostalgia familiar especially to those who grew up during the era. Musically, Lady Bird lives in a time when school dances played childhood hits like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” and even your dad had Alanis Morissette references. Every horned up party was backed by Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River,” the kind of song built to instigate sexy revenge-plot daydreams with the person you are currently making out with.
If their inclusion in the film don’t spark you as razor sharp, you probably didn’t grow up in that time. But I’d like to think this is just one of the ways that Gerwig makes Lady Bird’s experience come alive.
Sunday, November 12, 2017 at 10:55AM by Nathaniel R
Varda & Jolie dancing
As you surely know by now the Academy held the annual Governor's Awards last night honoring directors Agnes Varda and Charles Burnett, actors Donald Sutherland, and cinematographer Owen Roizman who we've been celebrating here on the blog this past week. The giddiest moment was surely Angelina Jolie and Agnes Varda doing a little dance when the Mother of the French New Wave was presented with her statue, complete with spins and everything.
As something of a surprise to yours truly (did I miss a press release somewhere?) they also honored director Alejandro González Iñárritu with a special Oscar for an experimental VR project...
Wednesday, November 8, 2017 at 12:30PM Lady Bird is a hit, so Chris is dancing in the street with Greta Gerwig to Frances Ha's soundtrack!
There aren’t many films that use music to capture a state of transition better than Frances Ha, particularly growing out of immature idealization. The film uses its heroine Frances’s addresses as chapter markers, but the flourishes of music notate her waning optimism and intensifying self-actualization. It’s like a variation on Woody Allen’s Gershwin obsession, but here it’s the character glamorizing her life rather than the film itself.
Music is an integral part of creating her internal fantasy. The twinkling, carefree instrumentals provide the lens with which we experience Frances’s world - or at least a more gilded version of how she envisions herself living in it. In tandem with the film’s precise editing and Greta Gerwig’s tremendous performance, the music choices make her everyday life a daydream that’s headed towards an inevitable collapse.
