I link. I die. I link again!

Daily Mail Tim Burton's type is hilariously permanent. Now he's on to Eva Green who fits it like a T
New Yorker The brilliant Emily Nussbaum on sexual consent and PTSD on Jessica Jones and its Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 6 reflections
DGA Chris Nolan interviews Quentin Tarantino about The Hateful Eight which will now enter wide release on January 1st instead of the 8th.
Slate reflects on what the Star Wars franchise is given that it's not "sci-fi"
Variety has a few old FYC and congratulatory ads for Star Wars from the 70s. Good stuff
Vanity Fair today's celebrities all want to be Han Solo

News
The Black List  If you've got some free time you can wade through Hollywood's favorite unproduced scripts. List was just announced today.
Collider Mad Max Fury Road may return to theaters in a black & white version -- Miller's original intention before they opted for super saturated color.
Variety Brad Pitt's satire War Machine wraps shooting in the United Arab Emirates.
Tracking Board Warner Bros is moving forward with a Speedy Gonzalez feature, date TBD. (He was my second favorite of the Looney Tunes as a child, after Pepe Le Pew... but they both have cultural stereotyping issues. How will they walk that line?)
Variety Melissa McCarthy is nearly free of Mike & Molly

List Mania
Slant picks the 25 best films of the year from 45 Years through Chi-Raq and on to Mad Max: Fury Road. But since Carol is way down at #19... What?
Los Angeles Times Brooklyn tops Kenneth Turan's otherwise alphabetical top ten
Indie Wire critics poll for the year with Mad Max & Carol fighting for supremacy. Fassbender & Rampling take the acting prizes
Pajiba celebrates the best 'comfort movies' of the year - not particularly challenging but great watches from your couch in your jammies: Cinderella, The Intern, and more...
AV Club on the best film scenes of the year including Creed's continuous shot boxing match and lots of interesting and unexpected choices -- yay for including "Summer in Ohio" from The Last Five Years

Today's Watch
If you've got a free two hours you can watch all six previous Star Wars movies at once?  It's an art installation. Click on the image if you wish to do this craziness.

10 Thoughts I Had While Staring at "The Boss" Poster

Manuel here. It feels like just yesterday we were talking about Melissa McCarthy’s poster for Spy (a film we ♥ here at TFE given our love for Rose Byrne’s Rayna “sad clown” Boyanov). But here we are again with the latest poster for the upcoming film The Boss. Sadly, it is not about Judith Light which is immediately where my mind goes whenever said phrase is used. It is instead about a business mogul, Michelle Darnell, hoping to rebuild her empire after serving time.

Take a look at the poster and ten thoughts it inspired after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Golden Spy

Manuel here bringing you an eye-catching poster to get this week going.

I love the random cartoony paws on her jacket.

I saw this golden poster for Melissa McCarthy’s upcoming Spy comedy and I couldn’t not talk about. It’s so amazingly silly yet self-serious. It’s precisely the type of eye-catching visual gag that this marketing campaign needs (better than the one-note poster Margaret discussed back in January). More importantly, it’s exactly the careful tonal balance the film will have to pull off if it’s going to succeed critically as well as commercially. I know it’s supposed to make me think of Goldfinger (and perhaps of Goldmember?) but all I could think was the posters for Dominic Cooper’s The Devil’s Double, a movie I know everything about exclusively from this (NSFW) post (thanks JA!)

They're clearly going for the Bond tie-ins with these character posters and why wouldn't they? If you're going to riff off the spy genre, there's really nowhere else to mine.

Perhaps it’s my affection for pre-Bridesmaids (ie. Gilmore Girls) McCarthy that’s getting to me, but I am hoping that her softer comedic side resurfaces at some point in her career. May Spy do the trick? Is the presence of real-life action figure Jason Statham and Jude Law in full-Bond mode enough to sway you to give Spy a chance this summer?

Yes, No, Maybe So: 'Spy'

Margaret here with an update on upcoming projects from Paul Feig, the bannerman for blockbuster female-driven comedy. He's following up the roaring success of Bridesmaids and The Heat with two more big-budget Melissa McCarthy projects due over the next couple summers. 

The buzzier of the projects is a female-led Ghostbusters reboot, whose main cast has just been announced. It's a wonderful lineup: Feig muse Melissa McCarthy, post-Bridesmaids movie star Kristen Wiig, the hilarious rubber-faced Saturday Night Live MVP Kate McKinnon, and comedy vet Leslie Jones, a recent addition to SNL as both a writer and a featured player. These choices, exciting on their own, are all the more gratifying when one considers all those rumors circa the Sony leak that they were looking at gamine young A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone.

 While we bask in the casting news (and speculate wildly on the movie's plot), let's take a look at the Feig/McCarthy project coming to us mere months from now: the espionage thriller parody Spy...

Click to read more ...

Who you gonna call? Linkbusters

Vanity Fair Melissa McCarthy and other funny ladies in talks for Ghostbusters reboot. I'm rooting for Jillian Bell myself who is mentioned. Yay.
Buzzfeed a definitive ranking of Disney Prince butts - as great as it sounds though I'd place Prince Phillip higher because my imagination works (I love that former Prince BD Wong even replied to his ranking on Twitter)
Vulture let us all worship Charlize Theron who has demanded (and been given) equal pay to her male co-star for The Huntsman. It's not like people went to the first movie for Hemsworth...Insane. Sexism by the numbers.
The Film Grapevine Birdman and the unexpected virtue of Contrivance
A Socialite Life Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone photobomb someone actually trying to take a photo of them

Slate on why Wes Anderson movies have never been popular with the Academy Awards before (presumably) now. Fairly good reasoning
MNPP Wet Hot American Summer will become a Netflix series and the original cast is all returning
RogerEbert.com on the women in Selma: the unsung heroines of the movement
THR Samuel Goldwyn Jr dies 
Theater Mania The Color Purple is coming back to Broadway (already?) with Jennifer Hudson as Shug 

Good Long Reads
IndieWire great piece on the definitions of patriotism and exceedingly pro-gun messaging of American Sniper. Please do not let this film be nominated for Best Picture. It's just not what we need right now...especially given how many people have been killed by guns lately in the States...and still no gun reform.
Grantland Wesley Morris on Selma. Love this sprawling, provocative review / thinkpiece. I've been totally appalled and confused myself at the way the media has latched on to the Lyndon B Johnson depiction but Morris makes a great point here that helps clarify, for me, the anger and nitpicking:

A quick survey of film history suggests that the depiction of racial themes in America has always been the province of white directors, whether it’s something as spectacularly diabolical as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation or the antebellum revenge of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. These great-man movies tend to reflect the aspirations and identities of the people who make them, which is how so many stories ostensibly about black life wind up with white interpolators. DuVernay understands the fraught, imbalanced legacy a film like this pulls her into, and she’s been as fair as she needs to be. This is not a film that undermines or questions Johnson’s ultimate contributions to the improvement of black life in this country. (It very easily could have mentioned the two decades in Congress he spent opposing civil rights legislation.) Inasmuch as there are villains, they are Wallace, Hoover, and Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. But because this isn’t Johnson’s story, those accustomed to seeing the president as hero (or protagonist) ultimately seem dismayed by how little of the president there is here.

The bold is mine, not Morris's. People who are angry about Lyndon B Johnson's depiction really ought to look beyond the myth and think about reality. And once they do, rather than be disappointed, they should be as generous as DuVernay is who depicts him as an imperfect man who makes a great progressive decision which changes history.