Linkbug

Before we get to the links please click on this photo to your left, the teaser poster for Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer. (Lanthimos last brought us the incredible The Lobster so we hope he's on a roll.) The poster is so beautiful we don't even mind that Nicole Kidman isn't on it! That's high praise if you haven't been paying attention.

Links 
Los Angeles Times Jimmy Kimmel will return to host the Oscars again in March. Same team this year, producers too.
Interview Ethan Hawke talks to his friend Alessandro Nivola (easily one of the best stars among the under-famous and under-celebrated division) about his current hot streak
Fathom Events will broadcast the current London production of Angels in America to select US movie theaters in late July. Click there for ticket sales in your area
Awards Daily keeping Oscar buzz alive all year for Cannes contenders is a tricky feat - I agree with most of this but disagree with the example of Midnight in Paris. I'd argue it wasn't the Cannes launch that made that film an instant Oscar contender but its big box office at home (for Woody) the month after the festival --another reminder that it can be really advantageous to strike while the iron is hot though few films dare and instead let their Cannes hype dwindle into nothingness before theater launches half a year or longer later. 
Playbill ABC will air a live Little Mermaid special on October 3rd which combines the 1989 classic with live celebrity performances with "cutting edge technology." What the what now? This sounds potentially awful and disastrous but also, because of that, a 'must see'

Script Notes, a writing podcast, talks to Chris McQuarrie about moving from being a writer to a writer-director and the difficulties of moving from indies to tentpoles
Criterion Corner David Hudson aunched his new column "The Daily" which I will surely be stealing links from at some point for these roundups unless I got to them first. Let's start now with these two...
Reverse Shot has a new series called Executive Order which takes a deep dive into the individual  T****'s EOs and fuses them with a film that is in conversation with those ostensible ideas or power plays. This link is about the Muslim ban and segueways into a discussion of the fine gay drama Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
NYT how action roles have changed for women (with Theron, Jovovich, Yeoh & Rodriguez)

I object!
/Film "Why Marvel Can't Fail" I'm linking this piece not because I like it but because I have to take issue with it. There has literally never been a long-running franchise or a single studio that has never failed. James Bond had flops. Tarzan had flops. Disney was once dying! Superman eventually fell out of the sky (though he's flying again). Marvel and Pixar, the current studios who inspire this type of article/argument, will not change that. It is an impossibility to always succeed. It's wiser to understand this because one of the quickest ways to insure failure is to assume infallibility. (Also I take issue with the use of "stickiness" here. Sticky as a concept in business may be morphing but it didn't mean 'traps you into brand loyalty' originally. I know because I bought a whole book on the concept when "sticky" became a thing ten years ago.

TV
New York Magazine (classic link since Roseanne is topical again) Roseanne Barr on the addiction of fame, her eponymous show, Hollywood sexism and Charlie Sheen
Esquire Corey Atad ranks every episode of Twin Peaks. This brought back so many memories and it's true that the show's quality varied wildly
Coming Soon Netflix is adapting the fantasy novels The Witchers Saga to series 

Off Screen
The Atlantic "My Family's Slave" incredible long read about slavery, shame, family demons, cultural norms, and more

The Link Has Two Faces

Your Weekend Must Read
Emily Yoshida at Vulture gazes at Ingmar Bergman's Persona but she sees way beyond that, too, to the dream space shared by cinema's curious subgenre of female identity swapping. 

Two women talking: a recipe for witchcraft, an unnatural feedback loop, a cursed redundancy. Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona is a landmark for many reasons, but its legacy, which has show no signs of age in the 50 years since it was released in the U.S. and the U.K., is how it stared that anxiety in the face and opened up a loopy, meandering conversation that’s still going on to this day...

More Linkage
Keyframe 'The Year of Nicole Kidman' don't force her to prove herself all over again
Variety Cannes lineup is "high on "awards intrigue, low on safe awards bets"
/Film Aquaman is overflowing with villains, 3 already for a first solo film? (not a good sign) and a fourth may have been added
Coming Soon Antonio Banderas will headline Lamborghini -The Legend (working title) a biopic about the Italian entrepeneur of automobile fame. Alec Baldwin will play his rival Enzo Ferrari 

Boy Culture "STREEPSHOW" a drag comedy about "characters one played by Meryl Streep" living together in the East Village will be playing NYC in June. Sounds hilarious but I have to admit that it took me quite some time to figure out the characters in the photo (and there seem to be two Miranda Priestleys?) which is maybe not a good sign. Shouldn't they be instantly recognizable?
Guardian Mixed messages from Cannes as TV premieres from auteurs are happening but they've also banned Netflix from future competition unless they stop skipping theatrical releases
Variety Gay gasp! The BBC is producing a series of 15 minute monologues called Queers which is set to star Ben Whishaw, Alan Cumming, and Russell Tovey and others
Awards Daily Gypsy teaser, a new series starring Naomi Watts
Variety Hugh Bonneville will play Roald Dahl in a biopic set in the early to mid 1960s. This means they're going to have to cast someone to play both Dahl's wife Patricia Neal and her most famous co-star Paul Newman (see Hud) and both of those roles will be a Herculean casting task! 
The Guardian there's a documentary playing Cannes about Cary Grant's experimentation with LSD from 1958 through 196
Tracking Board Kenneth Branagh to direct himself in a movie about the father of Anne Frank The Keeper of the Diary

Not Remakes Though You Might Mistake Them For Such
/Film Martin Scorsese starts filming mob drama The Irishman this summer with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci
Gothamist Leonardo DiCaprio will star in The Black Hand about an undercover mob cop...
(Ummm, haven't all these people already made these movies? Why not mix it up with a romantic comedy or a sci-fi picture?)

Exit Video
Look it's the first clip from Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck. It may be impossible to follow Carol but we're glad that he got back on the horse so quickly after that long time away from us. How does this clip strike you?

The Real Link Deal

Today's Must Read
"I am Diane Keaton's Crisp White Shirt" an imagined monologue by Charlotte Barnett. I can't even describe how much I love this, guys. I love it as hard as Diane Keaton's crying jag in Somethings Gotta Give is long.

I am immaculate, woven by gods from fibers of cotton and Nancy Meyers’ discarded screenplays...

Movies
EW talks to Cate Blanchett about Manifesto but works in a Carol bit, too, bless them.
Interview talks to Tracy Letts of The Lovers about his dual career as acclaimed actor and award winning playwright

Go Fug Yourself Elle Fanning on the cover of Vogue
Tracking Board Jeff Goldblum's career is busiers than ever. Now he's signed on for a thriller called Hotel Artemis with Jodie Foster and Sofia Boutella
EW Anya Taylor-Joy and Maise Williams will play Magik and Wolfsbane in the New Mutants movie. (But it's still so diappointing that the rumor is that the movie is leaving out the Asian member of the original comic book group, Karma. Who also happened to be an LGBT character. Hollywood just loooooves gay erasure and whitewashing. They cannot get enough.)
Variety Thom Yorke, of Radiohead fame, hired to score the remake of Suspiria from director Luca Guadagnino
NYT Michael Parks, Tarantino favorite and prolific character ever, dies at 77
THR Kenny Miller, B movie actor of 1950s drive-in classics dies at 85
Variety talks to the costume designer of Snatched, dressing for laughs
The Playlist remember that Michelle Williams movie Suite Francaise that had Oscar buzz but then sat on a shelf for years? It's now going to Lifetime TV

TV
BuzzFeed is thankfully keeping this handy list of cancellations and renewals on TV up to date. I'm so sad about The Real O'Neals . I expected American Crime  but anthology cancellations hurt less since they come to a natural end each year anyway.
Vulture 13 shows that defined dystopian TV before The Handmaid's Tale
VF Hollywood Scandal probably ending next season. But will ABC shift their drama strategy away from wealth porn?

And the teaser FINALLY for Top of the Lake Season 2 starring Elisabeth Moss and Nicole Kidman. We couldn't be more excited about it. If you missed season 1 with Elisabeth Moss investigating the disappearance of a young girl and finding a much larger crime that she wasn't expecting you really must catch up with it. Jane Campion's still got it and she still makes riveting human drama rife with feminist implications.

Stage
WAMC Will Swenson talks about Waitress
Theater Mania Tina Fey on her new Mean Girls musical
Playbill Glenn Close remembers her Broadway debut, going from understudy to star
Playbill Lin-Manuel Miranda to fund O'Neill Theater Center Scholarship for artists of color

Link Blog Repeat and Repeat

The Muse another movie that believes shark lives are worth less than dumb humans endangering themselves
Coming Soon The Glass Castle sets a release date for August. YAY. We love a counterprogrammed adult drama in the summer
Film School Rejects on the proliferation of streaming services. A bursting bubble?
Gothamist Rooftop Films in NYC announces their summer lineup which includes buzzy titles like Beach Rats, Menashe, and The Big Sick
MNPP Who wore it best? Darren Criss or Max Greenfield
EW First images of Naomi Watts in the Netflix series Gypsy

Film School Rejects on highlights from the Godfather 45th anniversary reunion -the original cast showed up!
/Film Edge of Tomorrow is getting a sequel (with both Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise returning) and its riffing on the original film's tagline for its title: Live Die Repeat and Repeat
Collider why Rian Johnson asked JJ Abrams to make a small switch to the ending of The Force Awakens to help out The Last Jedi
The New Yorker Anthony Lane reviews Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. This tossed off line about Kurt Russell's character honestly made me LOL but I think it's only funny if you're old enough to know Yes albums.

Ego has built his own planet, apparently after consulting the covers of Yes albums.

Off Screen
AV Club Pepe the Frog dies, killed by his cartoonist creator who was upset that his initially harmless creation had been turned into a symbol of hate by Neo Nazis
EW Nicki Minaj went on a spending spree for fans for an hour on twitter, paying their student loans and tuition
Boy Culture congrats to Dustin Lance Black and Tom Daley who reportedly married
Towleroad a rave review of the London production of Angels in America
Jezebel leaked tracklist for a deluxe reissue of Prince's masterpiece Purple Rain 

Exit Video
I almost never post SNL videos because frankly I never understand why people think that show is funny. It's always such a long slog with just a couple of laughs. Chris Pine hosted and did an opening number about how he's not Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth or Chris Pratt but Chris Pine. It included one little similarity I hadnt even though of: Evans and Pine both play guys named Steve in superhero pictures that also double as World War period pieces. But this Chris Pine's guested skit about RuPaul's Drag Race is sneaky funny and super up-to-the-minute.  

Links: Born Sexy Yesterday, Acting as Self-Actualization, and More...

Pajiba gird your loins - Dan Stevens is in everything
Tracking Board Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, and Candice Bergen to co-star in a comedy about a book club reading 50 Shades of Grey? This could be awesome or terrible...or both. Whichever way it turns out, we're there!
Coming Soon Focus has acquired the new Jason Reitman / Charlize Theron collaboration Tully but we'll have to remove it from the Oscar charts. It's not coming until Spring 2018 now

AV Club NBC greenlights its first two series of the new year, one of them that used to be called Drama High (and sounds like it has potential) is now called Rise. Why does Hollywood love to go from specific to generic titles? Are their studies that show that generic titles do better or is it fear of specificity?
/Film the first cast photo of Marvel's The Inhumans has been released and boy is it underwhelming. I've always loved Medusa but you really shouldn't be able to tell that it's such an obvious and stiff looking wig since the character is so tied up in her hair! I mean, couldn't they have gotten RuPaul's wig designers to do it if they wanted something both outlandish and real looking?

Tony Season
Theater Mania hoping to dominate the original play Tonys next year, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has announced an opening for the tail end of eligibility in 2018
Playbill did you know that Audrey Hepburn won her Tony Award the same WEEK as her Oscar? Isn't that crazy? She won the Oscar for Roman Holiday on March 25th, 1954 and then the Tony for Ondine on March 28th!
Deadline Amélie, a New Musical, based on the Oscar nominated French classic, is the first casualty of the Tony nominations, announcing its Broadway closing date for May 21st after a short run and zero nominations.
Broadway World Despite a disappointing Tony showing (2 nominations) Anastasia, based on the 90s animated movie musical, announces a world tour. It helps to have that known "brand" going in. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was savaged by critics and received zero Tony nominations, is still doing well and the box office and is already working on the tour)
THR Tony nominee anecdotes including Laurie Metcalf on the proposed Roseanna revival and Sally Field discussing the release she felt when she found her calling as a young girl:

It isn't something that I just decided one day or backed into it one day. I found a stage when I was 12 when I was lucky enough to be in a school that still had a theater arts department. And something inside of me changed, woke up, I could hear my own voice for the first time when I was onstage, and then when I would get offstage I had to be all the things that little girls in the '50s had to be, and all of that went back in the box. But when I got onstage I could be all the things I wasn't allowed to be anywhere else, so I could hear my own self.

Love ya Sally!

Exit Video
Got 18 minutes? That might seem like a lot but this video essay really is compelling. It names a sci-fi fantasy trope that I haven't personally seen named before but which is as familiar as they come. He calls it "Born Sexy Yesterday" and it's all about the way genre fiction infantilizes women so that men are their natural superior.

At the very least it will make you rethink mermaid and sexy android movies, The Fifth Element and Splash a little bit.