Linkomaniac

Pajiba Frozen/Star Wars poster mashup
Total Film now that the Weinsteins have access to their Miramax back-catalogue expect sequels. Shakespeare in Love 2 is coming at you (no, this is not a satirical Onion style post)
Variety Disney is planning a Jesse Owens biopic centered around the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Rich subject though it will obviously be easy to slide into pandering "inspirational"
/Film at press conference James Cameron compares his Avatar sequels to The Godfather trilogy. Oh Jimmy. I love you more than just about anyone but less talking (you're no good at it!) and more filmmaking (you're great at it!)
Cinema Blend first teaser for Gregg Araki's White Bird in a Blizzard with Eva Green and Shailene Woodley
In Contention Kris Tapley's top ten list featuring Mud, All is Lost, The Place Beyond the Pines and more

small screen and miscellania
Towleroad first images from Ryan Murphy's adaptation of The Normal Heart
Slate on the big problem with Masters of Sex. I absolutely agree with this but for me the show is great enough to overcome it... which is saying a lot since Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) is the lead
BuzzFeed 24 reasons why Cher is the Queen of Twitter 

Today's Best Movie Anything!
God bless Screen Daily for uncovering this gem...

In a week when American film critics organization have been tripping over each other to bestow awardage which, even when thoughtful can feel totally boring, a Danish Film Critics group have shown the world how it's done. They've mocked themselves up in character posters a la Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac to promote their awards (on February 1st) - note their outlet instead of character name on the posters. Nymphomaniac will be eligible for their prizes since it opens for Christmas in Denmark. This makes me want to read every single damn one of these critics weekly so a job well done!

Oscar Horrors: Bringing the Aliens to Life

Here lies... the alien queen, expelled into space using strings, pulleys and dummies. 

Amir here to look at the Oscar-winning Visual Effects of James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Cameron’s films have an extraordinary record with the Academy when it comes to this category. His first two features were unrecognized – and let’s be honest, anyone who’s seen Piranha II: The Spawning will surely side with the voters – but he’s enjoyed five nominations and four wins from his next five attempts. The public has come to accept him as a revolutionary director too, a man whose every work will “change the language of cinema.” Cameron’s built his career on these visual spectacles and his upped the ante with every new film, but it all started back in 1986 when Aliens was released.

Long before he became a powerhouse Hollywood director, Cameron began learning his craft on the sets of the legendary Roger Corman. For the production of Aliens, Cameron brought in the Skotak brothers, visual effects supervisors and collaborators from his Corman era, to create a whole new world surrounding Ridley Scott’s Alien mythology; a world that was wilder, gorier and more expansive than Scott’s...

More after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Stripper of the Day: "Helen Tasker"

While Magic Mike is in theaters we're celebrating memorable cinematic strippers

Beau here to discuss a reluctant exhibitionist, Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies.

It is one of the strangest of all strip scenes. Strange in the sense that, in less than five minutes, it accomplishes so much more than titillation. It anticipates that expectation, and rises above it; it is a telling of a woman looking at the walls she's built in her life and slowly, awkwardly, gracelessly pulling them down, like a feral animal. That she grows in confidence is only fitting, since by revealing herself physically, it's also a striptease she's performing for herself. Layers and a multi-faceted persona that surprise even her. It is the funniest striptease of the last twenty years (intentional, before I get hordes of Showgirls comments) and it is performed by the long underrated Jamie Lee Curtis in James Cameron's True Lies.

Curtis' Helen Tasker begins as a simple housewife, an estimation both the audience and the character accept from the get go. With a ninth grade math teacher's haircut and eyeglasses that would send Edith Head into a conniption fit, she is neo-Dowdy - Clarissa Brown removed and brought to the nineties, sans the lesbianism and suicidal tendencies. (Brat child still intact.)

[Helen unleashed after the jump]

Click to read more ...

Linkopolis

Movie|Line Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams take over for Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in the insta-remake of Love Crimes (read my Ludivine interview) now dubbed Passion 
Self Styled Siren and friends are hosting another For the Love of Film blog-a-thon (May 13th-18th) to raise money for a recently discovered fragment of White Shadow which was assistant directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I shall try to write a Hitchcock piece to join in.
NPR worries that James Cameron will be stuck on Pandora forevermore with Avatar sequels. I wouldn't worry. It takes him so long to make a movie, we'll be lucky if we get even two more narrative movies -- of any kind -- out of him.  

Animation Magazine Guillermo Del Toro will be co-directing a new Pinocchio movie and presumably be given all the credit for it (sigh). His soon to be unsung partner will be the Fantastic Mr Fox whiz Mark Gustafson so this should look lovely.
Stale Popcorn is working on a 1994 retrospective and has already covered Reality Bites, Blink, and Nell... all movies I loved back in the day. 
Hollywood and Fine has had its fill of Zooey Deschanel. Is she overexposed and overquirked now? 
Pajiba proof that every rabbit in the history of cinema has been evil.  Yes, even the boiled one in Fatal Attraction.
John August first person account of a year on the writing staff of Ringer. Interesting behind the scenes glimpse 

Avengers Mania
The Atlantic terrific piece on Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in The Avengers and the challenge of being a woman in male entertainments
THR The Avengers sequel confirmed (duh) so it's 3 solo sequels over the next two years (Iron Man, Thor, Cappy) followed by another group effort. Why not a Black Widow / Hawkeye movie just to keep things just a tad fresher? I know there are people clamoring for a third Hulk movie since he stole the show but there's a reason he stole it. It's called "leave them wanting more"... something Hollywood is not good with once something's successful.  
Vulture times the six heroes to see who has the most screen time. They seem surprised by Black Widow's showing but I wasn't at all. It's Joss Whedon and he always makes room for strong women.

Cannes is Coming
In Contention Cannes Check Jeff Nichols' Mud (and the McConaughey Renaissance continues)
Little White Lies has predictions from four of their contributors. Good read. So much to think about. 
The Playlist amazing photoshoot of Robert Pattinson styled after older Cronenberg movies like Dead Ringers and Videodrome. 

My Magnificent 'Aliens' Obsession

Kurt here.

Some boys of a certain persuasion – which is to say young gay cinephiles – may have found themselves a kindred, tuneful spirit in Fanny Brice, or fed their fabulous longings with [insert stereotypical icon here]. More power to 'em. For me, though, it was always about Ellen Ripley, Lt. First Class. For my boundless Ripley love, I have to at least partially thank a cocktail of deep-seeded denial and flamboyance rejection, as I was much more prepared to accept an angry woman with a gun as my savior than a ballad-belting showboat. I didn't want Schwarzenegger, but I wasn't ready for Cher. And I certainly have no regrets.

Since I wasn't donning feather boas, I'm sure my parents didn't think much of it when I began strapping toy rifles together with all manner of black plastic tubes and electrical tape, so as to recreate that shell-firing, flame-throwing, grenade-launching monstrosity that Ripley uses to resurface the industrial spaces on LV-426 (if memory serves, a black snorkel was even used as an extra gun barrel). I doubt I tripped their gaydar when I put two four-legged ottomans flush against the living room chair, then proceeded to crawl on the floor, weapon in hand, through my improvised air shaft.

Was I in drag? No. But make no mistake – I was diva-channeling.

Aliens, far and away my favorite action movie of all time, was also a liberating gay outlet long before I knew I was gay. That inherent gay need to fall headfirst in love with glorious females of outsized character was more than fulfilled by this watershed movie of womanly badassness. And my obsession with it spread well beyond playacting with plastic rifles. I regularly whipped up drawings of Ripley and those H.R. Giger beasties (I dug up some of them for this post).

I was close with these twin brothers at one point, and our friendship was pretty much based on our mutual Aliens enthusiasm – that, and the fact that they had all the action figures, even the yellow power-loader thingie. The twins' backyard was home to many an Aliens reenactment, with each of us alternating the role of James Cameron (“Okay – you be Hudson, and you be Vasquez!”). The guys never knew I was actually getting my Barbie on.

Her highnessMy mother was pregnant with my sister when she went to see Alien with my dad in 1979 (needless to say, she henceforth had a nightmare-filled pregnancy). This story has never made much sense to me, as I'm certainly the one who seems to have been psychically willed into Alien Saga obsession from the womb, not my sister. My sister doesn't even like SigWeavie. “She's ugly,” she says. (Oh yes, she did.)

Of the many gifts I've received from this franchise, the most cherished is a lifelong interest in Sigourney (who is not ugly, Heather). You'll see in the doodles that I was particularly fond of her jawline, which, by my hand, is ridiculously pronounced. I like to pretend that this masculine feature had a hand in getting Siggy the job in the first place, and I don't even know where to begin in addressing the sexual themes I suddenly realize it might represent for me. That's a lot of implications for one little post...

All this, and I haven't said a lick about Aliens's greatness as a film. I have no idea how many times I've seen it, and it's a long movie to have watched so repeatedly. I can honestly say there's not a single part that bores me, not even the mess hall conversations or the Ripley-can't-sleep prelude. This is a film that gets up, gets going and keeps going. It is notable for so much more than its titular nemeses, yet I can't pick a better creature feature (for Best Shot, which I sadly didn't participate in, I choose the pan that reveals the enormity of the alien queen, in her lair, on her throne – it's absolutely jaw-dropping). I think the best way I've ever heard Aliens described is that it has a beating heart – a racing pulse that's palpable. I'd say that it's certainly close to my heart, but that might sound kinda gay.