Thoughts I Had... While Staring at This Poster for "Nebraska"

Behold the new poster for Alexander Payne's Oscar Bait, 2013 Edition. Thoughts I had... brought to you uncensored as they came to me while staring at it.

• This is why I shave my head.

• Gee, do you think this movie is in black and white? Black and White In Your Face

• Alexander Payne's ERASERHEAD

• DERNHEAD

poll by twiigs.com

• So proud of them for not caving to pressure to campaign Bruce Dern as supporting. Now let's hope they also admit that Will Forte is a lead as well (Fact: Road trip movies about two people travelling together have two leads. See also Thelma & Louise, Two for The Road, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Y Tu Mama Tambien, etcetera) 

• Recently I forced The Boyfriend to watch Alfred Hitchcock's last film Family Plot (1976) and halfway through (he's clearly hating it) whilst Dern is making a confused face onscreen he says "why is everyone in this movie so ugly?"

• The Descendants was Alexander Payne's worst movie (still puzzled by the avalanche of praise if not the Oscar nominations). Can he redeem himself and make another Sideways? 

• When the Best Actor Nominees are announced, if Dern is among them, I promise to mock up all their movie posters like this just for comparisons sake: PROFILE vs. PROFILE!!!

• How many people do you think type in urls when they see websites listed at the bottom of movie posters or at the end of trailers?  NebraskaMovie.com 

Your Thoughts?

P.S. Oh and the movie's new trailer

'I volunteer as tribute for Covergirl!'

In October just in time for Hunger Games: Catching Fire, CoverGirl is launching a new makeup line.

This reminds me of that 'what are they thinking?' time when Hilary Swank was trying to sell a fragrance or as i09 memorably puts it...

Want to feel like you're part of a decadent crumbling society that oppresses the working classes and forces children to kill each other for your amusement?

Hee.

But, bizarre morals aside (and, really, when have the fashion or beauty industry been interested in morality?) this got me to thinking about other films which really deserve their own cosmetic lines. I hereby submit to you three ideas. 

poll by twiigs.com

Trifurcated Link

actressssssssss
Buzzfeed Nine magical photos of Nicole Kidman's hair in the Eighties
/Film Kristen Wiig's new comedy film Welcome to Me gets a slew of new cast members including just-Emmy nominated Linda Cardellini (from Mad Men & Freaks and Geeks)
Jacket Copy Reese Witherspoon will play the leadiest of leads in Wild, (in that she'll be onscreen every second without much in the way of co-stars) based on the best seller about a woman hiking 1000 miles alone after her mother's death
Guardian on the climactic row between Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight and acceptance vs. resignation in relationships
i09 check out Hailee Steinfeld's geeky nail art for Comic Con

tv mania
Vulture Matt Zoller Seitz on the pleasures and brilliance of "Suits" and why critics ignore it
Pajiba on the 25 best series which were never nominated for best comedy or best drama series in their runs. (Honestly I still look it up every time I hear that Roseanne was never nominated for Best Comedy. It seems so patently absurd that I resist the fact every time and scurry off to fact-check. But a fact it is.)
Slate *TODAY'S MUST READ* an excellent piece, arguing as I like to and have right here, that it's stupid to argue that "tv is better than cinema these days" for a variety of reasons but mostly for the dishonesty of this ubiquitous context-free argument.

it's Comic Con time so it's all genre all the time
Timothy Brayton reviews Pacific Rim. Kaiju dig it? 
i09 on the first ten minutes of Terry Gilliams Zero Theorem which they memorably describe as "Blade Runner meets Sesame Street"
Superhero Hype huge gallery of cosplay photos from Comic Con - my favorites are these gender-flipped X-Men boys, The Princess Bride couple and this tiny Hulk
The Playlist shares the very inspired teaser poster for Gareth Edwards reboot of Godzilla
MNPP which is hotter: Lee Pace blonde or blonder?
Towleroad Jamie Foxx "Electro" teaser for The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Shit, guys, I was kidding about the looking like Mr Freeze part but now that I see more of him it's even moreso!
Coming Soon Character posters from X-Men Days of Future Past including Bishop (Omar Sy)
Cinema Blend the Sentinels design from X-Men Days of Future Past which will merge the superhero genre with the giant fucking robots genre at long last*

*that was facetious even though i'm a huge fan of that arc in the X-Men comics. 

Why Do Zombie Movies Never Win Makeup Nominations With Oscar?

This is a question I've never been able to fully answer but one that I've asked myself (and probably you) on occasion. Since "Best" quite often means "Most" when it comes to awardage of any kind, what does the Oscar's makeup branch have against the undead?  This question came to mind again while watching Warm Bodies, a minor hit earlier this year which is now on DVD.

Please consider this post an early FYC

After the movie I found myself watching the extras and especially enjoyed "Extreme Zombie Makeover" which charts the evolution of the makeup design by Adrien Morot (who was Oscar nominated recently for Barney's Wedding). It's easy to make Nicholas Hoult look beautiful but how do you make him look sexy AND undead? It's a silly question but the answer is crucial to the success of this particular horror/romance hybrid. Adrien had to make sure he looked like the same species as the other zombies but also sexier. Where do you place the scars? How do you keep the veins in the same exact spot every day? How do you keep your leading man's mouth looking unhealthy without making him unkissable? 

The answer to the latter question involves "zombie juice" --black food coloring with mouthwash! After the juice, the makeup artist would then fuss over Hoults mouth with a q-tip to clean his teeth so you'd still wanna makeout with him despite him being, you know, a rotten corpse. 

The inside of the lip being black is still considered to be sexy somehow but having green teeth that doesn't work!

Hoult preferred his zombie juice strawberry or vanilla flavored. The more you know... ⌒★

P.S. Since zombie movies are still all the rage I loved this little aside from the director when watching the big makeup team transform 100 or so extras at once.

You know it's funny because extras -- when they're playing humans, sometimes extras can overract a little bit. But when they're dressed as zombies and in zombie makeup, they're all like Meryl Streep. They're all just really in character and amazing. 

Early Bird Oscar Predix Nearly Finished !

Working as fast as I can through the first wave of Oscar charts. I realize 'fast as I can' this year is snail-paced but you have to agree that this year has been a slow-starter anyway. Not that things haven't started now. Cannes is in full swing and in addition to the awards speculation for the Palme D'Or, Cannes prompts film sales, too, and thus distributor shuffling. Stephen Frears Philomena (currently in post) was picked up by the Weinstein Company and given that they had a full slate already -- especially for Best Actress since they're also representing Streep & Kidman in August and Grace -- it must have been more than Judi Dench that prompted the high priced sale. I've added it to the previously completed charts because it's just one of those projects that felt right to me when I first heard about it. Isn't it about time for Stephen Frears to get his mojo back? I've added that new contender to the prediction charts.

But for now, let's talk about the visual and aural categories. What follows is not my predictions but just a few thoughts to kick off a conversation. You can see predictions on the charts here (for visuals) and here (for sound) 

Cinematography
It may finally be Emmanuel Lubezki's year. The truly great cinematographer has always been overshadowed by non-discriminatory love for competing films in his nominated years -- in fact he's one of the very rare frequent below the title nominees that does not require any degree of Best Picture heat to be in the conversation. In fact only 20% of his nominations come from Best Picture nominated films. So you know they really love his work and it's not just coattails from the movies. This year he has the now-important advantage (sigh) of working with a ton of visual effects with his frequent collaborator Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. For reasons that are still unclear to me Oscar voters now view Cinematography as an extension of the Visual Effects category; in the last four years the winners of both categories have been the exact same film. This is a terrible trend since cinematography is an art that's been producing myriad breathtaking works long before anybody had ever heard of CGI. Still... if this is what it takes to finally get Lubezki the Oscar... [more]

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