Tilda Swinton talks of the nightmares of pigs

by Murtada

Why release a boring old trailer to sell Okja when you can get Tilda Swinton in character as a chilling corporate honcho talking abouts pigs? She’s falsely cheery Lucy Mirando of the Mirando corporation… and she’s trying to sell us something. Organic baking goods, happy pup treats or great tasting tenderloins? Let's find out.

We are definitely sold on Swinton and the movie, even if we want to run away as far as possible from Lucy Mirando. Okja is about a young girl and her best friend, the title character who is a kind big monster pursued by the Mirando Corporation for research, or likely something more sinister. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, its sprawling cast includes, in addition to Swinton,  Ahn Seo-hyun, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Giancarlo Esposito, Shirley Henderson and Lily Collins. Okja is playing in the main competition at Cannes and will be streaming on Netflix, and perhaps play a few out of the way theaters, on June 28. Are you ready to meet Okja?

Jack Linker

TIFF on the need for female film critics
The Guardian The Rock reveals he was turned down for the role of Jack Reacher in favor of Tom Cruise. Which puts that original quote that they couldn't find a tall enough actor to play the 6'5" fictional character to shame! (It's like when producers say "we couldn't find someone who can sing and dance for this musical"... it's just code for: 'we didn't really try because we liked Star A even though they were wrong for it' 
The Retro Set a look at Fred Astaire defying gravity in Royal Wedding for director Stanley Donen's birthday

Coming Soon after terrific 3rd season Grace & Frankie is renewed, will add Lisa Kudrow for a guest arc
/Film another disruption from Netflix. They're planning to focus more on Los Angeles as home for their productions. Might Hollywood follow suit and return home?
EW does a big promo push for Snatched with Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn
The New Yorker a profile of "the prophet of dystopia," Margaret Atwood as The Handmaid's Tale gets the miniseries treatment
Esquire 50 quote movie buff quiz. Listen and guess. I thought I'd get 100% but I missed a few toward the end. I especially liked the multiple choice quiz being difficult for once, like a Scarlett Johansson's elsewhere voice over a choice of three ScarJo movies and a fourth choice of a bunch of hazy blondes
MNPP Jude Law for Young Dumbledore. This opens up so many dirty thoughts 
Mother Jones a brief history of men getting credit for women's accomplishments
Variety The Magicians renewed for a third season at Syfy
Tracking Board has a series called "The Runway" in which they review all the pilot scripts and make bets as to what will make it to series. But first, a look back on what last year's winners were and what the hot trends look to be like this year
Tracking Board Aquaman's cast keeps growing Dolph Lundgren joins as the villainous King Nereus 

Noah Baumbach Heads to Netflix

Chris here. Consider me outright clamoring for whatever Noah Baumbach does next, even if Mistress America (and for that matter his DePalma doc) wasn't as long ago as it feels like. Time is a slow beast when you're waiting on beloved writer/directors. His next, The Meyerowitz Stories, is his most star-studded and it just got picked up by Netflix.

The film stars Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson (all hippied out to the left), Ben Stiller, and now Netflix mainstay Adam Sandler as a family reuniting in New York to celebrate their artist father. Baumbach's work has been an evolving array of comic tones, so where on his spectrum it will land from bitter pill Margot at the Wedding to the farce of Mistress America is anyone's guess. If nothing else, this could be his largest platform yet - especially if this noteworthy cast is also met with Baumbach's less misanthropic side.

Netflix, for what it's worth, already has confidence in the film: this will be one of their few titles that will also receive a theatrical release, along with this year's Oscar hopeful Mudbound. 

Baumbach's films have only been outside shots at best, aside from a screenplay nomination for The Squid and the Whale and some Globe-nominated performances. But if this could even be a comedy contender at the Globes, I suspect Netflix will need to put more than a toe in the theatrical waters to clearly mark its theatrical/television territory. Are you excited for Noah Baumbach's latest?

MST3K Returns For a New Audience

by Chris Feil

This Friday marks the return of cult favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000, the spoof equivalent of sharing a movie theatre with a patron who won’t stop talking back at the screen. This time the crowdfunded production heads to Netflix, with many classic episodes also back on the streaming service as well. For some the original series is more of an acquired taste, but for its devoted cult, there is much to rejoice again.

The premise was simple: painfully bad films are forced upon two robots (the gumball machine-like Tom Servo and metallic rooster Crow) and one human (Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, and now Jonah Ray) in a plot for world domination by some crackpot scientist...

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Doc Corner: Is 'Five Came Back' Netflix's Oscar Moment?

by Glenn Dunks

It can sometimes feel like we’ve seen WWII from so many perspectives that there can’t possibly be new ways to convey the weight of its tragedy. That Five Came Back, a new three-part mini-docu-series on Netflix, manages to succeed at doing this is just one of its many virtues. Adapted from Mark Harris’ book of the same name by Harris himself and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, this is a three-hour documentary about the work of five of Hollywood’s biggest directorial names of the 1930s who enlisted to support the American war effort the only way that they knew how: through film, and the personal battles they fought in order to do so.

They were Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler and John Ford – the latter of whom gets the biggest laugh labelling documentaries in the 1930s as “silly things that rich kooks made” – each of whom left behind successful careers without the promise of anything when they came back.

If they came back at all. The series charts their early efforts before America’s entering the war after Pearl Harbour in 1941 before digging more deeply in the works that they produced from the front lines on the ground and in the skies....

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