Chris Gives Thanks !

Greetings from Chris, lovely readers! This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for our faithful readers, our feisty team, and our relentlessly kind and passionate leader Nathaniel. In my estimation, this has been a great enough year to just be thankful for such a bevy of riches - but here's a few of the things earning my gratitude:

... the many unsung ensembles hosting their own feasts but especially Don't Think Twice, Little Men, and Love and Friendship.

... André Holland smoking in Moonlight. It's the hottest sex scene of the year and it's between camera and actor. May we all find someone that looks at us the way that the camera looks at Holland...

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Have You Caught Up to Amazon's "Fleabag"

Chris here. Of all of the season's new series, one that you certainly haven't been hearing enough about is Amazon's Fleabag. Debuting quietly around the time of the third season of Amazon's flagship Transparent, Fleabag deserves so much more than getting lost in the shuffle. Written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the show is a scabrously funny and sad take on a London woman's coping through grief, sex, and being "a bad feminist". If all that sounds too familiar, you may not be prepared for the freshness and frankness of Waller-Bridge's voice.

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AFI Fest: 5 Reasons to See 'The Lobster'

Margaret here, reporting from AFI Fest in Los Angeles..

The Lobster is the first English-language film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, Academy Award nominee for unsettling black comedy Dogtooth. The buzz since it debuted at Cannes (where it won the Jury Prize) has largely focused on its eyebrow-raising premise: in a society where being part of a couple is mandatory, the perpetually or recently single are rounded up and sent to The Hotel where they must either pair off or be turned into an animal. It's offbeat and biting and not for everyone, but it's also captivating and dryly hilarious. Here are five reasons you should check it out:

1) A bonkers premise improbably well-executed. The setup is so very odd that its ambition alone would make it worth seeing; the fact that the movie sells it without ever straining under the weight of exposition is masterful. In Lanthimos' bizarro world, where existing social rituals around courtship are both flattened and taken the extreme, lonely people scrutinize and reject each other with laughably trivial reasons and deadly serious consequences. Interactions are stilted, and many scenes sound for all the world like they've been dubbed over with a foreign-language translation, except what we're hearing are the actual words coming out of the actors' mouths. But the universe feels fully realized: odd as the relationship dynamics are, they're both internally consistent and recognizably human.

four more reasons after the jump...

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NYFF: The wonderful absurdities of "The Lobster"

About five disorienting minutes into The Lobster, all pretense of disorientation for disorientation's sake is stripped flatly away as the headmistress of the hotel (a terrific Olivia Colman) where Colin Farrell's character has found himself lays out the movie's premise. And oh how small the word "premise" seems in relation to what The Lobster has up its sleeve: Singletons will be turned into an animal (meaning a literal non-human creature) if they cannot find a mate in an ordained amount of time! 

It's a moment as surprising as it is funny (her notion of what is and what isn't absurd is the definition of absurd itself). While director Yorgos Lanthimos' previous films Dogtooth and Alps both reveled in their inscrutable rules, forcing the audience to pick up the fragments of what's offered and chase behind the film, trying to cram them together, everybody in The Lobster instead can't stop telling us exactly how this insane world works ("Didn't you read the guidebook?" is asked multiple times), and the more they lay it out the funnier and funnier it all gets.

And The Lobster is a very very funny film, seemingly finding all new ways to be funny that have never been found funny before - I wouldn't want to spoil its dark surprises but let's just say some of its punchlines got several audience members at my screening up on their feet and right out the door with madcap quickness. 

But for all of its laugh-out-loud cynicism about the way our own world works, refracted through the not-so-fun-house mirrors of how its own world works, Lanthimos' film has a heart, maybe black but beating hard, under its strange shape. He manages to make the old-fashioned obstacles of another sad love story hum with newness, scraping the gunk off romance and holding this bright shiny new thing high and proud. It's a marvel, like nothing else, singular from every single stupefying angle.

Alchemy will distribute The Lobster in the US. No date has been announced. For previous posts on the Lobster click here. Follow Jason on Twitter and read his blog MNPP

Musical News & Tom Hardy in London Road

Manuel here. I’m still drunk on showtunes after last night’s Tony Awards (so glad I finally bought my tickets to Fun Home yesterday, anticipating its various wins!), so what better way to keep the mood going than continuing to talk musicals!

And while I could point out NBC’s The Wiz cast Stephanie Mills (the original Dorothy) as Auntie Em, or that Paul Dano’s Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy opened to respectable reviews this weekend, or that we should all be actively anticipating that Dolly Parton TV movie musical, "Coat of Many Colors," or that Spike Lee’s Chiraq (a musical comedy adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata set in Chicago) has cast Jennifer Hudson, Kanye West and Dave Chappelle (with rumors of Common joining the cast), I realized I needed to talk about London Road which opens this Friday in the UK:

London Road, which includes Olivia Colman and Tom Hardy in its ensemble cast, is an adaptation of the award-winning National Theatre production about the arrest of Steve Wright, an Ipswich man who was convicted of murdering five sex workers in 2008. Rufus Norris's film uses the dialogue from the real townsfolk who were interviewed by author Alecky Blythe as they came to terms with the fact that a serial killer had been living in their community.

I mean, you had me at “Olivia Colman and Tom Hardy” but it sounds like a fascinating show (anyone catch it in London?) and an intriguing film adaptation. Check out the trailer below:

There’s no US date set for this yet, but I can’t be the only one looking forward to seeing Tom Hardy sing (he must sing though the trailer gives me no indication that he does), can I? It just makes me confident that more challenging musicals may make it to the screen. Last Five Years already made it, but what other unorthodox musicals do you think would be well-suited for the screen?