Beauty vs Beast: Blue Beauty On Velvet Beast

Jason from MNPP here wishing everyone a blue blue Blue Monday. When I tell you that it feels as if I've been having an awfully Lynchian series of months, I'm sure your first reaction is to 1) shudder and 2) to call the police on my behalf. But this is not a cry for help, don't worry - I haven't turned into a door-knob or anything.  It's just been a random confluence of events - I saw David Lynch speak at BAM a few months ago; then I read Lynch on Lynch (a terrific book of interviews with the director); then there was the news about the Twin Peaks revival; then I met Laura Dern at a party and told her she needs to get herself into the Twin Peaks revivial; then I went to Philadelphia and saw an exhibit of his paintings. It's been Lynch up the wazoo, basically.

And since tomorrow is Mr. Lynch's 69th birthday it seems a heck of a good time to give him the "Beauty vs Beast" treatment. I mean, what other director works in such extremes of dreamy beauties and nightmare beasts after all? Laura Palmer and the BOB at the end of her bed, for instance. And when the beauty & beast meet, watch out - you could argue that Laura Dern's become the perfect muse for him since she can so effortlessly stretch her sunny beauty out out out way too far for comfort. Those examples aside, it was pretty clear where we needed to mine this week's competition from...

poll by twiigs.com

Treat yourself to some cherry pie, climb inside a stranger's closet, do whatever it takes, and then hit the comments to tell us whose disease you want put inside of you in the next seven days, and why and how. And here's to your...

Supporting Actress: The Chart, The Poll, The Stats

It's funny how little news coverage there is now each time Meryl Streep breaks her own Oscar records. With her 19th nomination she's just 5 more away from DOUBLING the previous record holders (Jack Nicholson & Katharine Hepburn) whose record of 12 nominations she broke a dozen years back with Adaptation (2002), her 13th. Five would seem like a ridiculous number remaining to even mention (only roughly two dozen actresses have managed five nods in entire careers in the history of the world) but it's Meryl and she's nominated each time she makes a movie and makes them (almost) every year. Maybe she'll reach that big number before her 75th birthday in the summer of 2024?

Supporting Actress nonsense, The Arquettes, and more trivia after the jump...

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Linkless

Whoa we're getting behind on the linkages... here ya go

The Babadook order the pop-up book so that I have someone to commiserate with when it keeps us awake at nights in 2015
NYT looks at Ava DuVernay's direction of Selma
MNPP Continually undersung TFE favorite Alessandro Nivola celebrates the shortness of his shorts and how it helped A Most Violent Year win NBR's Best Picture. Hee
The Credits on the makeup work on Wild. How to keep Reese dirty?!

Hey U Guys interviews the always welcome Judy Greer on Men Women and Children and Ant-Man
Dissolve Sundance announces its titles for 2015. I should probably go again but haven't committed yet
Carpetbagger interviews costume designer Albert Wolsky on Birdman's briefs and super suit
In Contention Kris interviews TFE's communal husband, cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma / A Most Violent Year) 
Awards Daily mad scramble of wide open Oscar year
Heat Vision Suicide Squad, which I guess is a Batman movie without Batman (isn't TV's Gotham already covering that beat), gets an all star cast: Smith, Hardy, Robbie, Jai Courtney and Jared Leto as the Joker risking Heath comparisons less than a decade later. Yikes.
Boy Culture on Madonna's much talked about new Interview photoshoot 
The Atlantic Joe Reid thanks the NYFCC for expanding rather than narrowing the Oscar conversation this year (may other orgs and associations and circles do likewise)
/Film everyone is talking about the Fantastic Four synopsis which I find incredibly strange since its the vaguest thing ever and everyone already knows it (four young people are cosmically transformed in super odd ways and have to face an enemy that was once a friend - duh!)
Variety a bunch of major screenplays are ineligible for the WGA awards this year including The Theory of Everything and Selma
Daily Mail Kathleen Turner profiled for Dumb and Dumber To

I don't look like I did 30 years ago, get over it.

Sorry Kathleen, I'll never get over you! Then or now. (Though I'll skip this type of cameo and wait for the next great stage performance)

Absolute Must Read of the Day
Garden & Gun 98 year-old two-time Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland gets sassy remembering her career and Gone With the Wind (1939). On working with some of the greatest directors of all time from George Cukor to William Wyler...

They didn’t get the performances out of me. I gave the performances to them.

Videos o' the Day
Louis Virtel details all the reasons why Madonna is the greatest celebrity of all time. And David Ehrlich countsdown his 25 favorites of the year with a neato montage with wonderful music choices

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2014: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from david Ehrlich on Vimeo.

Top Ten / List Manic Season Begins
John Waters the inimitable director does his annual duty for Artforum. It's always refreshingly eclectic and this year he loves Maps to the Stars and Nymphomaniac
Washington Post from Boyhood to Under the Skin 
AV Club kicks off it's best & worst of the year with comedy albums, least essential albums (heh) and worst tv. ouch.
The Film Stage looks at the best of 2014 according to Cahiers du Cinema from Under the Skin to Love is Strange
Sight & Sound from Boyhood to Mr Turner

THE FILM EXPERIENCE's YEAR IN REVIEW begins Dec 11th
[Lee Pace doesn't believe us! ------->]
I've seen nearly all the films one has to see (but I have about 10 more I'd like to screen or rescreen before the list-making proper). We'll have a couple of days of "Cinematic Shame" beginning on the 11th to cleanse the palette and from December 14th through January 14th is when "everything is awesome" and we celebrate the Best Ofs. But, as you know it's tough to keep up 'in the season' so some lists/categories from Year In Review will obviously trickle out after the Oscar nominations on January 15th. Stay tuned!

Interview: Is Laura Dern Still "Wild" At Heart?

Happy Thanksgiving! What better gift for you on this weekend of celebrating abundance than an interview with one of the most gifted actors in the world. Laura Dern has been shocking and stirring moviegoers with finely carved and often daringly dramatic or weirdly comic performances for the past thirty years.

Laura Dern as "Bobbi" in Wild

Born into showbiz (her parents are Oscar-nominees Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd) she grew up onscreen and around film sets. Her breakthrough came early at the age of eighteen. Her first hit as a blind girl in Mask was shortly followed by a revelatory performance as a young girl treading into dangerous sexual waters with an older stranger in Smooth Talk. The very next year she worked with David Lynch on Blue Velvet beginning a long collaborative and rather genius director/muse duet. Nearly thirty years later she's still delivering buzzy performances. On paper her new character Bobbi in Wild, an incongruously positive dying mother who we meet in wisps of memories as Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) attempts a soul searching hike on the PCT, seems far removed from the reckless spirits that made Dern such a fascinating screen presence. But that's not the way Dern sees it, describing this woman as "wild" and "a pioneer". 

When we sat down to talk in Los Angeles it had been the third time I'd seen her in the past year, since she was such a regular presence on the Oscar circuit last season for her father's nomination. "You were practically his campaign manager," I say, fondly remembering her indefatigable enthusiasm for his work as we settle in sharing memories of a Nebraska reception a year back.

"I mean... I'll always be." she says, beaming, ever the devoted daughter now promoting her own film that happens to be about a deep parent-child connection.  The back-to-back award campaigns seem like a good place to start...

NATHANIEL: Did all that time with your father last year make you hungry for an Oscar yourself?

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Thoughts I Had... While staring at THR's Actress Issue Cover

Yesterday morning, while running out to a screening and party for Al Pacino's awards run with The Humbling (more on that soon), what did I find on my doorstep but the new issue of The Hollywood Reporter, just casually dropped there. "Close call," I thought, imagining greedy scruple-free actressexual neighbors I haven't met, stealing it before I even knew it was there.

I threw it back in the apartment and dashed off and now I return to it, staring at its cover.You know how this works, herewith my immediate thoughts uncensored as they come. 

Is it weird that I don't read the article (essentially clips from the roundtable) but just wait for the full video so I can hear it all?

I don't understand the set and art direction of this photo. Why is Reese behind a gold bar? Why isn't God herself reclined on that uncomfortably stiff chaise lounge chair while the other actresses fan and feed her? (Let the coronation begin!)

Is Amy Adams a silent partner in THR? Will she impale me with that crazy stiletto for spreading that rumor.

She's like Terminator Adams here. So severe! "Don't fuck with me fellas" Or rather "I'LL BE BACK" because you know she will next year (sigh)

This is her 4th roundtable in 5 years suggesting that someone at THR is either obsessed with her, has dirt on her, has zero imagination, or is weak-willed when it comes to standing up to Amy's formidable publicists/management.

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