Why aren't poster photos taken on set? The eternal mystery.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again has a new eye sore poster. Every single cast member has been photographed separately and then composited together like some Ensemble Frankenstein Monster. The poor beast is then tasked with imitating pure joy before it has learned to control its facial muscles.

It's easy to imagine some photoshop artist creating their own mini-narratives to keep them interested while hunched over their computer jamming all the stars together. Do I spot a romantic comedy between Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård whose eyelines are matching up?

Why does this type of poster keeps happening? Why aren't poster images and promotional photoshoots done on sets on the days when busy actors are already all assembled together? If you want to see the full poster just click on Cher's sassiness to your left. I didn't want to sully up the front page.

Oh and go ahead and tag yourself in the comments. I am Lily James' left foot that's eager to jump into the water. 

What a Cast of Character (Actors)

by Deborah Lipp

Has anyone else noticed the enormous overlap of faces in Oscar buzzing movies this season? It’s like they ran out of character actors in Hollywood. For the record, I love everyone listed here, but surely there are other talented thespians who need work! Here are the actors I spotted in multiple awards movies, in alphabetical order. If I left any off the list, jump in to add them (for the sake of having a touchpoint, I was including any movie that appears anywhere on Nathaniel’s Prediction Index):

Alison Brie: The Disaster Artist and The Post

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Tribeca 2017: Sex Games and Ticking Clocks in "The Exception"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival yet again!

Let me just be clear about his right up front: I like thinking about Black Book. Paul Verhoeven's sexy 2008 Holocaust thriller with Carice Van Houten is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it at least a dozen times by now. And so it turns out that enthusiasm is open to re-interpretations, because a full half of The Exception plays like an off-Broadway re-staging of that earlier movie, and I still liked it plenty. No, director David Leveaux doesn't have nearly the handle on making moral hay of human contradictions so deftly as Verhoeven does, but who does? Leveaux makes a go of it, at least...

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I'm linking out... ♫ I want the world to know, gotta blog it so...

Guardian Carrie Fisher is doing an advice column? What happy potentially hilarious news
Salon They're prepping a Rumi biopic and the filmmakers want Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr for the leading roles of Rumi and his mentor Shams. Those were real people and Persian muslims. Here we go again with Hollywood's tone deaf casting imperatives... (sigh)
Coming Soon Jennifer Lawrence to star in a movie about Elizabeth Holmes, once estimated to be worth $4.5 billion and now nothing. Adam McKay to direct so we're guessing he got a taste for Oscar with The Big Short and wants more.

MTV Teo Bugbee looks at the career of James Wan from Saw (2004) to The Conjurer 2 (2016)
Village Voice Angelica Jade Bastién on the female gaze of American Psycho
Pajiba gets vicious with a list of 'female equivalents of Sam Worthington' (i.e. generically attractive & completely unmemorable but they keep getting big roles) including Zoey Deutch, Britt Robertson, and Lily Collins (who Warren Beatty will try to make happen again soon in his Howard Hughes movie). But I have to admit Lily James is growing on me so I wouldn't have included her   
Pride Source actress Lea Delaria (Orange is the New Black) thinks "LGBT" needs to go and be replaced by Queer. Actually we're kinda for it as there are more and more letters attached "LGBTIQA"
/Film Helena Bonham Carter and Mindy Kaling are joining Bullock & Blanchett in that Oceans Ocho movie we were fantasy casting earlier 
The Tracking Board ... and speaking of Oceans 11, that movie's director Steven Soderbergh is making a new heist movie himself called Logan Lucky. The cast will include Hilary Swank, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig, Katherine Heigl, Channing Tatum, and Riley Keough. 

Tony Season
Playbill in counterprogramming for the Tony Awards, TCM will play Alexander Hamilton (1931), the biopic starring George Arliss. Haha.
Gothamist good god, I'm seeing Hamilton just in the nick of time. They're upping the price of premium seats to $849 each and orchestra seats to $179-199. That is insane. I sometimes wonder what would happen if everyone just refused to go to theater priced over $50 for an entire year. It might make the art more accessible / popular. I'm seeing the show next week 

P.S.
And look, two of the greats met each other! President Obama and Madonna. As Madge points out they're both Leos so it's "a cosmic convergence"

A meeting of the Leo's! 🦄. A Cosmic Convergence!! . 2 ❤️#rebelhearts @jimmyfallon

A photo posted by Madonna (@madonna) on Jun 9, 2016 at 1:24am PDT

Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This review originally appeared in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...

Lily James, from Cinderella to Zombie Slayer

“Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s classic novel about the Bennet sisters and their suitors, has one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an adaptation Jane never could have seen coming despite her gifts, twists the opening line so that we’re no longer talking courtship but hunger; zombies in want of brains. So let’s twist the line again. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that pop culture, possessed by the love of fanfic, must be in want of works in the Public Domain!’

more...

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