Too Tired To Link

Gothamist the first look teaser at Martin Scorsese's new HBO series Vinyl starring Bobby Cannavale (just how many tv shows are going to be about the music business post Empire? it seems like there's at least 3 new ones on the way from reports. This, Baz's, and Lee Daniel's second). Speaking of...
Coming Soon Empire Season 2 has a teaser
i09 Agent Carter's villain in seaon 2 will be Madame Masque -- and get this... they're modelling her on movie siren Hedy Lamar! 

Playbill Shoshana Bean singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings" - she's starring in the pre Broadway stage musical adaptation of Beaches
Yahoo "Kirsten Dunst is tired, you guys"
THR What if Werner Herzog directed Ant-Man? HAHA
FSR 44 Fantastic Foursomes because the Fantastic Four aren't 
Signs and Sirens has a mean girl astrological note to Jennifer Aniston
Variety Josh Trank blames studio for Fantastic Four's abysmal reviews 
E! Awww, matching foot injuries for Kelly Ripa and Marc Consuelos 
Coming Soon Black Mass just got a bunch of character posters
Playbill talks to Mamie Gummer about working with her mother and her recent stage appearances 
THR What if Werner Herzog directed Ant-Man?! HAHAHA

He can lift things 100 times his body weight but what does this achieve but to increase his burden, his capacity for suffering?" 

Edward Norton Once Turned Green When You Made Him Angry...
He is also angry about Oscar turning green. I know I know. I did not say anything about Edward Norton's rant against the monetization of awards season at IndieWire and surely you expected me too. So here we go.

While there is definitely too much politicking / campaigning and Oscar might do well to cut off a few of its competitors at the knees with tighter rules about campaigning, do we really want to lose a great deal of the Oscar coverage in the world? Again, as a reminder, it's the only time of the year when the media pays attention to films made for adults. I believe that the media frenzy would die down if there were less money to be made. And then were would movie culture be? Superheroes, dumb comedies, franchises and summer blockbusters already hog movie culture for the rest of the year. It's nice to have four months where people think about dramas and dramedies and ambitious auteur vehicles and traditional star vehicles and such. (Some of us -- the craziest ones -- would still obsess without money to be made as we have always... but most outlets would reduce coverage on these films if there were less money in it).

That said, I do understand why actors get frustrated; It's a huge chunk of their year when they would surely rather be acting or vacationing on their private island or whatnot. But there are easy solutions to that one like not showing up at every event but picking and choosing key ones. Everyone seems too afraid to miss anything which is silly because there are only a few essentials. Everything else is like cumulative effect and going to 7 things instead of 10 won't kill people's interest in you or your film or your chances at winning gold. That's my belief at least. 

Yes No Maybe So
Here's the red band trailer to Deadpool. I don't have the strength for a YNMS but perhaps you do for the comments section? I think I've been burned by Ryan Reynolds too many times and anything originally born from that awful X-Men Origins Wolverine risks being inexcusable from conception but bless him/them/someone for that joke at Green Lantern's expense

Women's Pictures - Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette

Who knew a period piece about Marie Antoinette would be Sofia Coppola's most controversial movie? Basically, whether or not you like Coppola's 2006 Marie Antoinette boils down to how you feel about anachronisms. Anachronistic details - modern fashion in a period piece, pop music played at a ball, a much-maligned pair of lavender Converse sneakers - are by design attention-grabbing. Like equally flamboyant directors Baz Luhrman and Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola’s purpose is to jar audiences in the present, setting up a stylized world where (hopefully) audiences can relate more closely to people who lived decades or centuries ago. Coppola uses anachronisms to help the audience appreciate the rebellious streak of Marie Antoinette’s hedonism.

Surprisingly, the first half of the film plays along the standard genre rules of the period piece. 14-year-old Marie (Kirsten Dunst) is introduced as a child playing with puppies, stripped - literally - of her Austrian possessions at the border of Austria and France, and quickly married to the equally immature Dauphin Louis (Jason Schwartzman). Coppola’s ability to make the foreign both exciting and isolating is powerfully used during these early scenes. The lavishness of the receiving tent turns claustrophobic when Marie is forced to disrobe for examination by a cold courtier. Likewise, the beautiful bustle of Versailles’s court becomes ridiculous and invasive. In a cringe-inducing scene, Marie is left standing naked as the same courtier explains that dressing involves half the court and a lot of ceremony. After she is publicly shamed for failing to produce an heir (the Dauphin has intimacy issues), the contradiction of Marie’s life as a monarch is clear: she has no privacy, but she is alone.

Under such heavy scrutiny, it’s no wonder Marie rebels...

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Women's Pictures - Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides

Welcome to Sofia Coppola month! Over the course of this series, I’ve noticed a pattern. So far, the first films our directors made have been smallish, personal movies; unpolished films that carry the seeds of themes and images that will grow as the directors do. The Virgin Suicides is not that movie. Sofia Coppola’s 1999 first feature film is neither small nor unpolished. While the film carries themes of isolation and adolescence that Coppola will continue to explore throughout her career, this is not the unpolished or underfunded first film of someone still learning the business. Starring two stars on the cusp of breakthrough (Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett), as well as several well-loved actors (Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Danny DeVito), and shot by a cinematographer with 20 years of experience (Edward Lachman), this may be the most well-varnished first film we’ve seen.

Adapted by Coppola from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, The Virgin Suicides is a nostalgic suburban gothic. Set in 1970s Detroit, an unnamed narrator reminisces on his high school crush on the girls next door, five sisters who committed suicide for reasons he still can’t understand:

Everyone dates the decline of our neighborhood from the deaths of the Lisbon girls.

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T-T-T-Torrance!

I sizzle
I scorch
But now I pass the torch

The ballots are in
And one girl has to win

She's perky
She's fun
And now she's number one

K-Kick-It...Torrance!
T-T-T-Torrance!

Review: The Two Faces of January

Michael Cusumano here to review the latest stylistic throwback based on the writing of Patricia Highsmith.

When people gripe “They don’t make ‘em like they used to” films like Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January are the kind of movie they mean. It’s adapted from the work of an acclaimed novelist whose books were the source of such beloved films as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. It features big stars in sumptuous foreign locales. It is made with a careful attention to detail. It doesn’t dumb things down or clutter the plot up with needless action. It is fair to say I was primed to love this movie, yet it never quite jolts to life. At some point my investment in the story passed from suspense to impatience. It never went so far as indifference, but I was pretty far from the edge of my seat. Rather, I was leaned back in my chair, head in my hand, thinking what a classy job everyone involved was doing and admiring the sumptuous visuals and thinking how this was going to end up being one of those reviews that used the word “sumptuous” a lot.

The key problem is that foreign intrigue of the Hitchcock variety requires storytelling that stays a few steps ahead of the audience, and it's easy to keep leaping ahead of January’s characters. Far too much time is spent with characters sitting in cafés, smoking, drinking, and eyeing each other suspiciously, when they should be trying to have sex with or murder one another, preferably both. [More...]

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