Happy 50th to Julia Roberts!

by Nathaniel R

The biggest female movie star of the 1990s hit the half-century mark today. Happy 50th pretty woman. Herewith my personal votes as to her ten best screen performances. Yours? How will you celebrate this milestone?

1. Erin Brockovich (2000)
2. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997)
3. Closer (2004)
4. Pretty Woman (1990)
5. The Normal Heart (2014)
6. August: Osage County (2013)
7. Notting Hill (1999)
8. Duplicity (2009)
9. The Pelican Brief (1993)
10. Mystic Pizza (1988)

An Ode to Julia for Julia

To get to The Oyster Club in Mystic Connecticut, you take Main Street into Historic Downtown Mystic and turn left on Water Street. If you reach "Mystic Pizza," made famous in the 1988 sleeper hit of the same name that first won Julia Roberts attention, you’ve gone too far. If you start thinking about Julia Roberts on your way to a totally unrelated assignment, your first-ever restaurant review, you’ve also gone too far...

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DVD review - Smurfs: The Lost Village

Tim here. 2017 is shaping up to be a less-than-inspired year for movies in general, but particularly dire for animation (apologies to the Cars 3 superfans, I'm sure there's at least a couple of you in this world). The bar has fallen low enough that I even managed to convince myself that there might be some merit to checking out Smurfs: The Lost Village, which arrived on DVD this week. The first of three Sony Picture Animation features to come out in 2017 (the second, The Emoji Movie, is mere weeks away, and boy does it look like it will be bad), The Lost Village is the latest attempt to keep the small blue woodland homunculi called Smurfs in English, Schtroumpfs in the original French, viable as a marketable brand.

In an astonishing twist, it is not very good.

At least we can say this in favor of the film: it's entirely animated. The last two Smurfs features made by Sony (otherwise unrelated to The Lost Village) were live-action hybrids, in which little animated Smurfs came out to horrifyingly deal with the real New York City. Now, they're where they belong, in a busily designed magic forest, facing a proper cartoon villain and his cartoon cat. So far as that goes, honestly, The Lost Village is even a pretty nice film to look at...

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Julia Roberts Returns to HBO

Chris here. Add another high profile limited series to the mix - Julia Roberts has signed on to lead an adaptation of Maria Semple's novel Today Will Be Different for HBO. While this would be Roberts's first season-length run on television, she did scoop up an Emmy nomination for HBO's The Normal Heart.

Today should be a more lighthearted pairing for Roberts and the cable giant: the series (which Roberts will also executive produce) will follow a single day in the life of Eleanor Flood as she attempts to be her best self despite what lies ahead. Messy hilarity and existential crisis follow.

Semple will be writing the script from her novel but I'm already curious at who might direct the adaptation. With prestige director-chasing production company Annapurna at the reigns, we can expect a significant directing talent to come on board as well. Semple and Annapurna also have Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (a delightful read, if you haven't picked it up yet) from Richard Linklater and Cate Blanchett in the pipeline, so clearly they're already creating intriguing projects sight unseen.

Will we have another Big Little Lies-level hit on our hands?

Yes No Maybe So: Jacob Tremblay is a "Wonder"

by Nathaniel R

From a distance the forthcoming film Wonder (2017) looks like Mask (1985) for the junior high set. The film is based on the novel of the same name by RJ Palacio about Auggie, a boy who enters school after years of home schooling due to his many surgeries and complications with a rare facial deformity. Jacob Tremblay, in demand post Room, plays the main character Auggie. The film is directed by Stephen Chbosky who already has some experience with transferring YA novels to the screen since he transferred his own for his directorial debut The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). Wonder is his sophomore effort though this time he left the screenwriting to another. Steven Conrad, who previously adapted The Pursuit of Happyness and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to screen, adapts. 

Let's compartmentalize the first trailer with our Yes No Maybe So™ system after the jump...

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