When Meryl Met Anna... and Other Stories

Salon Sandra Bullock to play Texas senator Wendy Davis, who famously filibustered an anti-abortion bill for 12 hours. Oscar #2?
Variety interviews actor/playwright Tracy Letts who is really having a good year you must admit. Lady Bird is a hit in theaters and his new play just opened in Chicago
Hollywood Reporter has a good interview with Steven Soderbergh
Instagram Lupita Nyong'o loves her natural hair and is upset with a magazine for airbrushing it away
Variety Replacing Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World is going to cost at least 2.5 million
MNPP Do Dump or Marry: Thor Ragnarok edition

Stage
Deadline this is a surprise the Tony Awards have declared the recent production of "1984" ineligible for prizes. They have not stated why exactly.
Playbill reviews are in for Broadway's new musical The Band's Visit, based on the Ronit Elkabetz film of the same name if you remember that one
Theater Mania photos of Kelli O'Hara and Patrick Wilson rehearsing for Brigadoon. Hope it's swoon-worthy
Playbill Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters fame) joining Kinky Boots on Broadway next year. Damn, I guess I'll have to see it a third time

Harassment Epidemic Updates
AV Club on Hollywood's long overdue moral reckoning
New Yorker Emily Nussbaum has a terrific piece on Louis CK's comedy through the lens of recent allegations
New York Times Louis CK has confessed to the claims against him "These stories are true"
Medium Actor Anthony Edwards has come forward to say he was molested by a producer when he was underage
Guardian Ellen Page has detailed homophobic remarks director Brett Rattner made to her during the production of X-Men: Last Stand
Washington Post showing their utter depravity GOP officials are now citing the bible to justify Roy Moore's sexual assault on an underage girl. And just think, last month they were slamming Hollywood for its depravity with Harvey Weinstein.

Oscar Campaigns Heat Up
Awards Daily Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) to receive Rising Star award at Palm Springs
Variety Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project) to receive Vanguard award at Santa Barbara

And cheeky Meryl Streep met with Anna Wintour (who she sent up in her Oscar worthy work in Devil Wears Prada) to promote her new star vehicle The Post

Beauty vs Beast: Marriage Among the Prophets

Jason from MNPP here -- the great Mike Nichols would have turned 86 today if he hadn't passed away back in 2014, and yet even with him gone for three years now I've spent a good chunk of the year thinking about him. Specifically I've been thinking a lot about his 2003 adaptation of Angels in America, thanks to the most recent London production with Andrew Garfield & Co grabbing headlines before moving here to the US in a few months. What are your thoughts on Mike Nichols' miniseries now? Have you re-watched it lately? (The whole thing is available to stream on Amazon if you haven't.)

Anyway there are a lot of antagonistic pairings in Angels that I could have used for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" but in every iteration of the show I have seen it's always the fractured marriage of Joe (Patrick Wilson in the film) and Harper (Mary Louise Parker) that I come back to, so that's where we'll land.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we floated down through the storm-drain on a raft of red balloons and took on Stephen King's most recent blockbuster adaptation of It - y'all weren't in the mood for clown-time though, choosing The Losers Club over Pennywise by just a couple of points. Said catbaskets:

"Tie between Beverley and Pennywise. You can keep all the boys. They bring little to the table compared to those drama gals with demons."

Happy 'International Owl Awareness Day'

by Nathaniel R

Yes, International Owl Awareness Day is a real thing. For our purposes at The Film Experience owl awareness would be how those nocturnal birds are portrayed onscreen. They're hit-and-miss on celluloid and television. For example, we always needed more personality from Hedwig in the Harry Potter series, that damn mechanical owl in Clash of the Titans is an anachronistic disaster, and is it sacrilege to say that 'Owl' in Winnie and the Pooh is the least engaging Hundred Acre Wood denizen?

The following list is dedicated to the Twin Peaks owl(s) and Archimedes in The Sword and the Stone (1963) who didn't quite make it but we love them. TFE's five favorite screen owls are after the jump

Click to read more ...

I'm so glad we had this link together

Decider Joe Reid on the repetitive lie that Oscar shuns popular movies
Interview shared a Winona Ryder interview from 1990. I can't tell you how formative this was for me. I had the photoshoot plastered all over my bedroom. I was obsessed with her quotables.
Playbill Broadway aimed Moulin Rouge! will be trying to cast its Satine (!!!), or at least a temporary Satine for readings and such, on February 17th at an Equity-only audition
MNPP Great Moments in Movie Shelves visits The Royal Tenenbaums game closet 
AV Club IMDb is shutting down its message boards 

 

Deadline file this under "it's about time" - Sarah Paulson is finally getting lead roles in features! She'll headline Lost Girls, a serial killer drama in which she plays a mother searching for her daughter
i09 revisits Suspiria before the remake by Luca Guadagnino
The Guardian we need to be listening to Middle Eastern cinema right now 
Variety Leslie Mann and John Cho to host this year's Sci-Tech awards for the Academy 
Tracking Board Whoa. Carol Burnett, who is 83, might be coming back with a new sitcom. Come on Octogenarians! (See also: Rita Moreno, who is 85 and great on One Day at a Time)
Variety Oh, this is so sad. Sunday in the Park with George won't be eligible for the Tonys so no Jake Gyllenhaal for Best Actor despite the raves 
Boy Culture Patrick Wilson didnt get paid for this advertisement
Variety The Weinstein Co will distribute a new Diane Keaton / Brendan Gleeson drama Hampstead from the director of Last Chance Harvey
The Guardian "why I love Emma Stone" 

Shine On, Beautiful Murder

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on "A Kind of Murder" and "Always Shine"

I know it's blasphemy in these parts to speak ill of Mad Men (cue 90% of you automatically clicking away in disgust) but I could never really get into it because it felt too slavishly obsessed with 60s posturing - I love Mid-Century Design as much as the next Eero Saarinen disciple but I couldn't ever see the forest for the tulip chairs. That said, the new Patricia Highsmith adaptation A Kind of Murder (from the 1954 book The Blunderer, kind of a suburban copycat criss-cross of Strangers on a Train) makes Mad Men seem positively restrained in its period affectations - how you manage to turn a walking talking charm like Patrick Wilson into a walking talking turtleneck I'll never figure.

The turtlenecks! The martini glasses! The heavy salmon drapes and stone fireplaces! There were moments of such monumental airlessness, as if a plastic sofa cover was wrapped over every scene, where I felt it might be purposeful - where I thought of Todd Haynes' [safe] and the way that movie was built to make the audience hyperventilate while watching it... but A Kind of Murder is no [safe]. What it is is is an occasionally jazzy low-key thriller, with Eddie Marsan skulking about effectively making his case as our modern day Peter Lorre or Raymond Burr. But it ends up more of a put on, a face of perfectly applied make-up cast halfway in noirish shadow, than any sort of artful smear. Grade: C

Part of me wishes I had seen Mackenzie Davis and Caitlin FitzGerald in Sophia Takal's Always Shine before having seen Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth last year, because while I'm more inclined towards Takal's smoky and sinister edged film... that's a whole lot of Persona riffing in the space of twelve months.

Always Shine tells the tale of two actresses in one of those friendships so fraught with complications it would have doctors reaching for the defibrillation paddles - the pendulums of success and resentment, professional jealousy and personal affection, flinging through space so close that something's bound to rub off and muck up everything. 

And inevitably, muck. In this case the the muck under the misty cliff-faces and mossy canyons of Big Sur, California, an L.A. getaway close enough that when the sun sets the shadows from the Hollywood sign are yet still the first harbingers of nightfall. Here these ladies make their escape, a weekend coffee klatsch under the guise of nursing emotional distance, their carry-on's stacked with comedy and tragedy masks, plus sundresses. Inevitably, tragically, the two women end up flashing their SAG cards in each other's faces instead of laying bare their hearts, a battle of wiles not wills.

You know, actresses. And who doesn't love a movie about actresses? I think I'm preaching to the choir here. The performative commingling of these two still fresh talents is a blast - Davis I've already fallen head over for on Halt and Catch Fire (please tell me you're all watching that show) and FitzGerald is always fine despite a frustratingly written role on Masters of Sex; here these two fold into and under each other in smart - and, in this movie's true blessing, in unexpectedly funny - ways. Grade: B+