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We promised a grand total of 15 "Best of "2015" Lists (apart from the awards -- yeah, we're overplanning crazy) so here's the second to last. Diversity is the hot topic of the week and regardless of any one particularity (like an Oscar nominee list) thing are getting better on television (obviously) and at the movies, too, though you have to look a little bit harder. Still, if you go to a lot of movies and attempt to draw up lists like this you'll find you're spoilt for choice. There are so many more films these days directed by women, for gay audiences, for people of the color and the like. You just have to look beyond Big Hollywood and keep your eyes open for intriguing surprises if you do regularly hit the all wide releases multiplex.
Since 15 is a finite number (damn you math) not every film with an LGBT character can make the list. Some I didn't see only because you can't see everything (Legend, Duke of Burgundy, Cut Snake, Eastern Boys) and some just didn't make this particular list (Tom at the Farm, Saint Laurent, Gerontophilia, Ricki and the Flash, Mr Holmes, The New Girlfriend, Boulevard, Stonewall, Match, and The Danish Girl) though that shouldn't reflect on the film itself because that group has everything from terrible to great movies within it. The most high profile miss is Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmaybe) but that's mostly because The Danish Girl needed to be queerer and because there are several women that were far more fetching on this list.
Without further ado...
15 Best LGBT Characters of The Movies of '15 from Nasty Baby through Star Wars (???) and on up to Carol
15 Freddy (Sebastián Silva) in Nasty Baby Silva, one of Chile's best known filmmakers, doesn't usually star in his own movies, but this time out he gifts himself the lead role. Freddy, an artist working haphazardly on a new project involving adults pretending to be babies, desperately wants to be a dad and is continually trying to make it happen between his boyfriend (Tunde Adebimpe from Rachel Getting Married) and his best friend (Kristen Wiig). Silva's a fluid filmmaker when it comes to gender, ethnicity, and genre and Nasty Baby is a fluid movie, freely hopping from genre to genre without much warning: drama, comedy, character study, art world satire, and even thriller. (Bonus points for the cat-loving.)
/Film the first footage from Disney's Moana Playbill Rapper Daveed Diggs on getting his shot on Broadway's smash hit Hamilton expanding the world. (I hope to one day see this show. C'mon lottery gods!) Gizmodo an exo suit from Edge of Tomorrow constructed from junk! MNPP pic of the day Matthias Schoenaerts in A Bigger Splash
Comics Alliance apparently director James Gunn says Captain America: Civil War is awesome and this has excited the internet for some reason. Next time someone OUTSIDE of Marvel's employ enthuses about one of their movies early, get back to us? The Envelope thinks that Mad Max Fury Road and Carol will lead Oscar nominations (with 9 each). I dare not hope that this is true because that's just so much fabulousness in one Oscar year. /Film claims that the breakout character of Star Wars is TR-8R -- this shows how well we've been following Star Wars stanning because who knew? Cinema Blend Joss Whedon talks about why he's done with Marvel Reverse Shot a deeply insightful look at Star Wars: The Force Awakens - it's possible that f I've linked to this before but even so, it's a must read. Towleroad Matt Bomer covers Men's Fitness credits Channing Tatum for his current peak physique
Hateful Tangents Interview talks to Demian Bichir about his first gig with Tarantino. Bichir gave the second best performance in it if you ask me because he realized in the absence of being given a real character to play, play a Real Character. Slate the Movie Club is in session and it's hilarious and thoughtful as always. They argue over whether The Hateful Right is "ineffably evil", share the joys of Spy and Carol, and observe tricky critical duties as with Tangerine and The Danish Girl. Bonus points for the "f*** this thing" cat gif. Cinematic Corner on her issues with the heroism of rapists and murderers in The Hateful Eight.
I'm trying to let hate for Hateful Eight go, I really am. But it's like an exorcism. It takes time and I guess I've still got some pea soup to vomit up. I've made no secret that I personally despise this movie -- but I have been reading reviews with kind of a morbid fascination because of how much people try to say it's still somehow a good movie after lining up their lengthy issues with it. I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
It is not a good movie. In fact it's kind of a betrayal of Tarantino by Tarantino because it's him fucking up things he used to do better than anyone. There is zero depth to the characterizations beyond the most simplistic "What a character!" outline, the gore (such as exploding heads) adds nothing other than wank-bank material for sadists, the dialogue is severely lacking in his usual cleverness, and worst of all Tarantino displays none of his usual skill at that constant electric hum of "shit is about to go down!" that powers all of his best films. The only tension in this particular movie is wondering when the shit will finally go down so that it will end. If you think of all of his best films the tension is alive in every scene. The scenes repeatedly feel dangerous as if anything might happen. And something nearly always does. Here we basically have any of those individual scenes only they're now 3 hours long and the tension just goes out of it completely because who cares?
In short, stop justifying this work people; It's okay to think a movie is terrible when it is! Most great auteurs have a dud (or five) somewhere in their filmography. If we try to convince ourselves that every thing a single person makes is masterful, we are denying our own critical faculties and it also makes our love for their true masterpieces highly suspect. For instance here are a five filmmakers I regularly cite when people ask me for "all time favorites": Haynes, Almodovar, Cameron, Minnelli, Hitchcock. All of them have made a film or films that were not that great or that I could not personally connect to. That does not lessen their genius for me. That just means they're human and it helps me to appreciate their masterworks more because I know the love is true and not me trying to argue myself into fandom.
Try this at home. Realize that The Hateful Eight is a shit movie and go back to loving any of his much better films. And cry with me when The Hateful Eight takes Oscar nominations from far more deserving players in ten days time.
She did this in order to kill off a paparazzi's shot at making a ton of money off of creeping on her at the beach. Smart girl. We don't follow celebrity pregnancies so have no idea when she's due but it looks like soon... CONGRATS TO ANNIE & HUSBAND.
List-Mania Top Tens: Variety (Guy Lodge), The Telegraph (Robbie Collins); Slate (Dana Stevens); Pop Culture Crazy (Kacey Bange) Lists Lists Lists: Gothamist (Best Celebrity Subway Sightings); Pajiba (Seriously F*** That Guy - a retrospective of rage); Pajiba (5 Most Intriguing new Netflix Series. They don't mention Daredevil because it's about new series but season 2 kicks off in March, fwiw); Forbes releases their "30 Under 30" List which includes both of The Force Awakens new stars, natch, as well as all three Straight Outta Compton leads.
First Oscar Commercial of the New Year Chris Rock kinda sorta prophesies those annual nasty post-show reviews you read every year.
2016 is upon us. So far it's been a wash since a cold has attacked me without warning but while I sleep and stay hydrated (not simultaneously) and procrastinate here are some favorite tweets of the week. But the year started beautifully with two of our favorite film thinkers and Oscar historians Nick Davis and Mark Harris announcing new projects. Nick will be expanding his "Best Actress" section and Mark Harris will be celebrating 1966 movies all year as he preps for the 50th anniversary of those Best Picture nominees he celebrated in his first book "Pictures at a Revolution" which was on the Best Pictures of 1967.
Our first tweet is a perfect message for the "survey the greats" season we're in via filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Our friend Nick has an interesting solution to this favorites versus perfection equation. He has two top 100s, greatest and favorites. He just wrote a huge batch of new essays which you should really read. Recent pieces include two movies that are accidentallly perfect for New Year's week including Strange Days and When Harry Met Sally (on the "greatest" list) movies like Movies become "favorites" for so many reasons, whether that's great experiences at the theater where we saw them or, the ease at rewatching them, or just the slow dawning realization that this one you just love whatever its shortcomings (this is me with Burlesque which showed on cable in a loop in 2015 and I couldn't look away.)
Favorite movies don't have to be perfect movies. Like in any relationship, Love is what makes them stick around.
Truth be told 2015 was not the best year for horror movies. There were some smaller successes but only a couple of classics born, and out of those only one - David Robert Mitchell's It Follows would classify entirely as a genre exercise. But there were plenty of Scary Scenes, whether inside the horror genre or knock knock knocking on the door, and that's what we're here to celebrate.
The following moments aren't necessarily in hard order, save the top few, because What Scares Us is subjective to not just each individual person but to each individual moment that person is experiencing -- I might feel like "No thank you, Bugs" today but tomorrow it might be all like "I said NO THANK YOU, Cannibals!" instead. Fear's a funny thing like that.
Anyway beware spoilers below, as we'll be discussing in a little bit of detail the money-shots of the year in "Boo!"
The 15 Scariest Scenes of 2015 from all sorts of films after the jump...
Guardian has a piece on the 7 best financial films for the release of The Big Short. Confession: I'm always surprised when internet lists remember that films existed before 1990. And this list has 4 of them [gasp] CHUD Have you heard Radiohead's Spectre theme. The studio went with Sam Smith instead for the latest Bond Variety Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez On Me is coming your way (and filming already). Given the massive success of Straight Outta Compton expect more hiphop/rap biopics
Gothamist Oooh. AMC Village 7 has reopened in Manhattan with spiffy new seats and bathrooms. I haven't been there in years but will have to return now. Now if only Film Forum and Village East would get renovations and they'd burn down the Angelika, Cinema Village, and Lincoln Plaza and build new non-tiny, non-crappy, subwayrumble-free arthouse theaters somewhere else... wouldn't that be swell?! MNPP the only recap of the recent Tom Hardy junket journalist dustup that you need is right here. Seriously who cares?! Stars cancel or push back interviews ALL THE TIME. Comics Alliance prepare for your heart to melt with these photos of Chris Pratt visiting a children's hospital
Best of '15 Florida Film Critics went with Mad Max Fury Road as best of the year in 4 categories and gave Daisy Ridley Breakthrough for Star War: The Force Awakens Movie Scene Kyle Turner's top 15 from Appropriate Behavior (yay!) to Mistress America (say what?) Playbill 10 biggest social media moments for Broadway this year. Naturally Hamilton made the biggest splash Theater Mania names the 9 best Off Broadway shows... i dont understand this number 9? It has to be 10 or 15 this year. I mean, MATH. SYMMETRY. LIST RULES. The Film Stage names 50 "Overlooked" films... though the criteria for overlooked is sligthly murky. Tangerine and James White, for example, didn't get even a tiny percentile of the box office they deserved but they did win spirit and gotham nods and in Tangerine's case a lot of press... which has to count for something. Very happy to see Appropriate Behavior (which you'll remember I loved nearly two years ago at its festival debut) and Victoria on the list though. Hopefully Mustang's inclusion (Team Experience loves it) will look silly after the fact if the Academy nominates it and it proves a late-bloomer at the box office. But for now with only $100,000 in the bank at only 3 theaters, it deserves this list placement.
More Star Wars... The Force Won't Go Back To Sleep Digital Spy People will post ANYTHING about Star Wars for traffic. Here we consider the possibility of a gay Star Wars romance between Finn & Poe Gizmodo award winning interactive fan animations - Love the Grand Prize winner on Tattooine. Vulture polls several celebrities about the best order to view the 7 Star Wars films in. The correct answer is obviously 4,5,6,7 (ignoring 1,2,3) but there's a lot of variety in the responses /Film concept designs for BB-8 American Leather Jacket for only $209 you can try to look at cool as Finn or Poe from Star Wars with the jacket they trade off onscreen Academy Conversations the filmmaking team talks about production - I haven't watched it in full yet but it's nice to see Michael Kaplan represented there. He's one of the great costume designers and has had ZERO academy attention. That's probably because his best work comes in stylish contemporary film (Fight Club, Burlesque, Flashdance, Mr & Mrs Smith) or genre films (Blade Runner, Star Trek, The Force Awakens) and we know how Oscar feels about both of those kinds of pictures.
And if you haven't checked out the Emo Kylo Ren twitter page, do so. Laugh, you will. Know that it's more fun than a yub-nubbing Ewok treehouse party. This is my favorite but there were many many choices for that honor...
mom please don't even pretend you know what I'm going through right now also we are out of conditioner
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 at 9:06PM 
We promised a grand total of 15 "Best of "2015" Lists (apart from the awards -- yeah, we're overplanning crazy) so here's the second to last. Diversity is the hot topic of the week and regardless of any one particularity (like an Oscar nominee list) thing are getting better on television (obviously) and at the movies, too, though you have to look a little bit harder. Still, if you go to a lot of movies and attempt to draw up lists like this you'll find you're spoilt for choice. There are so many more films these days directed by women, for gay audiences, for people of the color and the like. You just have to look beyond Big Hollywood and keep your eyes open for intriguing surprises if you do regularly hit the all wide releases multiplex.
