That Linking Feeling

Go Fug Yourself riffs hilariously on a photo of Noomi Rapace & Charlize Theron at the Prometheus premiere. Guldbagge!
Film Studies for Free "all that pastiche allows" looks at Far From Heaven, All That Heaven Allows and other examples of pastiche
The Kid in the Front Row discusses "the scene that made it all worth it" in Friends With Kids. I still haven't seen this one but love the cast. Same deal with Salmon Fishing... What's keeping me?
Liz Smith on all that's riding on the product known as Jeremy Renner who'd rather be "a good human" 

The Guardian Darth Vader and son. Tee hee
Indiewire wonders if Matthew McConaughey could be an Oscar contender for Magic Mike. I wish I had done a post about this last week. It occurred to me and I even wrote a wee note about it on the supporting actor page but my then original thought will now be lost in groupthink.
Clutch have you heard this shady catfight rumor re: Michelle Obama vs. Kerry Washington?
Metro on Kathleen Turner still touring with the play High. Love this quote from her on her many health problems and continuing on through all of them. I wish one of my other favorite actresses [ahem] felt similarly committed to her gift:

There has been a lot of work that had to be done to be able to continue and carry on and I can’t imagine not being able to act. It’s what I set out to do when I was a kid and I love it so much... I know that I would find another work for myself if I really couldn’t (act), but until I’m completely, physically incapable of acting. I am not giving it up.

Cinema Blend has a gallery from the digital artist TXE (name?) which illustrates 93 (!) characters from the Game of Thrones franchise
The Mary Sue has a piece on actors who have starred in multiple franchises. "Get Over It"... I know most people enjoy this but I can't be the only person who hates hates hates the same actors starring in everything? I am too much of a polyamorous film slut? I need some variety up in here! I really do. I don't like the idea of Storm being Catwoman and Iron Man being Sherlock Holmes and so on. 

Randomness: Here is the new poster for Rust & Bone. J'adore Jacques Audiard movies. I mean Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet...

What a roll, huh?

If Rust & Bone is as good as those it'll be one of 2012's highlights for sure.

offscreen just for kicks
Monkey See "I died on the Titanic" a personal memoir 
Boooooom shows you impossibly tinyfood sculpture
The Mary Sue animal mating rituals described in humanoid cartoons. Isabella Rossellini is surely sporting wood reading this.

The Girls With the Lisbeth Tattoo.

Jose here to talk about a movie and performance that The Film Experience hasn't spent much time with.

A little over eighteen months ago, I - like many of you I'm sure - found myself completely revolted by the fact that Hollywood had decided to remake The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a few months after the Swedish version had come out in our continent. Some people adamantly took sides with the "original" before the "remake" arrived. And not so surprisingly, almost every review of Fincher's version compares it to the one directed by Niels Arden Oplev.

These comparisons brought the two actresses who played Lisbeth Salander to the center of the discussion, with people debating who was better and why, pitting them against each other. I've even heard some say that AMPAS should be embarrassed for nominating Rooney Mara for the Best Actress Oscar when they denied Noomi Rapace of a nomination a year ago.

The truth is that Rooney and Noomi play very different versions of the same character. You want proof? Continue reading, but be warned, this article contains spoilers.

Click to read more ...

Yes, No, Maybe So: "The Hobbit" and "Prometheus"

Just a short time after similarly DRAMATIC (!) black and whiteish teaser posters for the new Batman and Spider-Man movies arrived, posters for the two other 2012 event movies, Prometheus and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey also emerged. Each poster gives us a character's back spotlit as they enter the fantastical of their movie which awaits us too. It's easy to project yourself into the image as you walk into the bright light of... the familiar unknown?

The weird thing about event movies is that they're promoted as if there was only one ONE MOVIE TO RULE THEM ALL but they all seem so interchangeable from a distance. Maybe that's because they're always sequels so the journey we're about to take isn't so unexpected. Even Prometheus is a sequel. Sort of.

The movies all seem interchangable until the trailers arrive to differentiate them. So let's break down Prometheus and The Hobbit after the jump with our "Yes, No, Maybe So" Expectation Management System.

Click to read more ...

Oscar Submissions: Japan, Sweden and Germany's "Pina"

Three more films have been announced for this year's foreign film Oscar competition, and all are from countries with a fairly large degrees of success with Academy's foreign nominating committee. Though the Academy always has a veritably orgy of films to choose from (usually sixty-plus) for its five-wide profile boosting arguably hit-making honors, they do tend to prefer European pictures. They also tend to prefer Japanese films to other countries when it comes to Asian cinema. Will they choose any of these three pictures?

JAPAN (12 noms, 1 win, and 3 honorary awards before the foreign category existed)
Postcard, an anti-war film about a soldier (Etsushi Toyokawa) returning home from World War II to see his family devastated, comes from the 98 year old director Kaneto Shindo. He has already stated that this will be his last film. 

SWEDEN (14 noms, 3 wins)
Beyond is the directorial debut of the actress Pernilla August (More and more actresses are making the leap: see also Vera Farmiga and we're loving it. Why shouldn't they?) The actor-centric heavy drama stars Noomi Rapace as the adult survivor of alcoholic parents in the 1970s. Noomi's real life husband Ola Rapace co-stars. Beyond opened at last year's Venice Film Festival but didn't premiere in Sweden until December 2010, placing it safely within the eligibilty period for this year's submission.

Wim Wender working on his documentary homage "Pina"

GERMANY (18 nominations, 3 wins)
Pina is a high profile 3D documentary on the work of the influential German dance artist Pina Bausch who died two years ago -- it was not intended, originally, to be a posthumous film. Dancers convinced the acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders to continue with the project which is now an homage to Bausch featuring several of her most acclaimed pieces performed by dancers onstage and outdoors.

Honestly dance is a great use of 3D if you must use 3D at all. Unfortunately the dance movies that have used it previously have rarely understood that to get 3D to work its spatial relations magic and what that means to choreography (a lot), you need to actually not cut every second to a different camera angle so that the eyes can observe the physicality, distance, and depth. I haven't yet seen Pina (very soon I hope) but I'm assuming Wim Wenders understands this in a way, say, the makers of Glee the 3D Concert Movie would not. Just a hunch.

This is not the first time a filmmaker has been inspired by Pina or used that inspiration to really heartbreaking affect. Remember the way Pedro Almodóvar used Pina to set the stage for the ineffable emotional pull of Talk To Her?

My guess right now is that the documentary Pina may have enough acclaim and novelty interest to make the finals (at least). But documentaries have a tough road for Oscar acclaim in any category other than Documentary. To my knowledge no documentary -- and at least one is submitted each year in this category -- has ever been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. (Unless you count Waltz With Bashir which you could; it strikes me more as an uncategorizable hybrid film.)

Foreign Film Oscar Chart -NEW & SPARKLY!
Foreign Film Articles