Link on, Pete

• Vanity Fair Johnny Depp still having legal/financial woes. Being sued again
• IndieWire very thorough wide ranging interview with Vincent Maraval of the French movie production company Wild Bunch and how the arthouse market and Cannes have changed
• IndieWire from the sounds of this article on the visual FX work in Infinity War, the Oscar campaign is already in effect!
• MUBI Notebook a reprint of a 1972 essay about Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows when it was being reevaluated
• Film School Rejects Black Panther blu-ray review

• Gr8er Days awww, i missed this news about Carol Burnett's would be new sitcom, she backed out when the suits wanted a less unique show
• THR Jeffrey Tambor's first interview since being fired from Transparent
• /Film In unneccessary sequels with bad titles news: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard is coming
• Dread Central Ana Lily Armirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Bad Batch) has annnounced her next film: Blood Moon set in New Orleans
• NYT Ermanno Olmi, director of Cannes-winner Tree of Wooden Clogs dies
• The Guardian an interview with Chloe Sevigny about her 'Queen of the Scene' past, being in her 40s now, why she didn't name names with the Me Too movement, and her new role in Lean on Pete
• IndieWire CinemaScore gets super touchy about Martin Scorsese saying that their polling devalues cinema
• The Hollywood Reporter on CW's renewed and cancelled shows

Offscreen
• The Atlantic "I'm not Black, I'm Kanye" a devastating piece by Ta Nehisi Coates on all sorts of things including: Michael Jackson, Kanye West, the 1980s, and American history.
• Deadline Olivia de Havilland trying to keep her Feud lawsuit alives. Has appealed the ruling against her
• Playbill Meet the cast of Broadway's Moulin Rouge!

Nick's Foreign Film Take, Pt 1: Sheikh Jackson, First They Killed My Father...

by Nick Davis

There’s niche-marketing, and then there’s micro-targeting, and then there’s saying to your friend Nathaniel, “I hope you’ll still keep an eye out for Shahrbanoo Sadat’s Wolf and Sheep, even though Afghanistan didn’t select it as their Oscar submission.” We really do live in a weird bubble, but that is why one is grateful for The Film Experience, where folks are all the same kind of different as you. And as we all know, this site has been a longtime devotee of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in all stages of curation and competition. So, seizing the opportunity of a sympathetic audience, and amidst a season where many of the 84 movies put forward by their home countries as Academy Award contenders are floating around at festivals—big and small, rural and urban, American and elsewhere—I thought I’d weigh in on the titles I’ve caught.

Argentina, Zama
It’s an amazing vote of artistic confidence for Argentina to choose Lucrecia Martel’s deeply demanding, deeply rewarding colonialist-bughouse period drama as their contender. They passed over all three of her previous features as their submission, and as always, they had plenty of viable possibilities this year, including Santiago Mitre’s The Summit, an absorbing drama of North and South American political machinations. That movie’s somewhat televisual style might have made it palatable to some voters. Zama, by contrast, is as cinematic as they come. In fact, “they” don’t really come like this: a movie almost without establishing shots or hand-holding narrative cues, aggressive with its weird ambient sounds and literally eccentric frames. The movie telegraphs the protagonist’s escalating madness but without letting him go Full Aguirre and without entering the kind of outsized, Lynchian vortex that unmistakably makes the point: it’s easy to watch and think that you, not Zama, are failing to keep up. This seems like a Shortlist prospect with Oscar at the very best, but it’s also guaranteed to be among the year’s most extraordinary movies. Talk about a summit!
My grade: A 

Austria's Happy End, Cambodia's First They Killed My Father, and Egypt's Sheikh Jackson are after the jump...

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OTD: Who's "Bad"?

on this day (August 31st) in history as it relates to showbiz

1897 Thomas Edison patents his movie camera the "kinetograph"

1987 Michael Jackson's video "Bad" directed by none other than the master Martin Scorsese premieres. It is 18 minutes long (!) because Martin Scorsese never saw a lengthy running time that didn't make him salivate. The short gave Wesley Snipes one of his earliest gigs prompting the short's switch from black and white to color as Wesley riles Michael up with a "you ain't bad!" burn.

Princess Diana, Brokeback Mountain and more after the jump...

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We link up again... over and over

So hard to keep up each December! But we get by with a little help from our links...

Variety we hadn't noticed this but it's true - Major studios were nearly entirely shut out of the Best Picture lineups. 
TFE in case you missed it our SAG Ensemble predictions... they announce tomorrow morning
AV Club talks to 80s funny lady Terri Garr of Tootsie and Mr Mom fame
Screencrush forever undervalued Patrick Wilson just got a possibly big deal role. He'll play the villain of sorts Orm in Aquaman

Lots more after the jump including the NAACP Image Award nominations, Madonna, men's tuxes on the red carpet, and The Accused...

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On This Day: Merry Murderers, Obsessed Seafarers, and Noir Stars

On this day in showbiz history...

1719 Leopold Mozart, Amadeus's father is born in Augsburg Germany. In the 1984 movie phenomenon, one of the biggest hits of its year and the winner of 8 Oscars, he's played by Roy Dotrice and factors in heavily to the film's haunting imagery (and poster). Or to quote Salieri as played by F Murray Abraham:

So rose the dreadful ghost from his next and blackest opera. There, on the stage, stood the figure of a dead commander. And I knew, only I understood that the horrifying aparition was Leopold, raised from the dead! Wolfgang had actually summoned up his own father to accuse his son before all the world! It was terrifying and wonderful to watch. And now the madness began in me. The madness of the man splitting in half. Through my influence, I saw to it Don Giovanni was played only five times in Vienna. But in secret, I went to every one of those five, worshipping sounds I alone seem to hear. And hour after hour, as I stood there, understanding how that bitter old man was still possessing his poor son even from beyond the grave. I began to see a way, a terrible way, I could finally triumph over God.

Uff such a great movie.

Classic screen beauties, unforgettable musical moments and other Best Picture nominees after the jump...

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