My Fair Linky

• Los Angeles Times Black Panther wants the Best Picture Oscar. Is making plans to get it 
• Deadline If they want to keep Daniel Craig, the Bond producers have to move fast to replace Danny Boyle in the director's chair for the next Bond film. Here's the candidates they're considering. I love the idea of Yann Demange because '71 proved he can do propulsive nail-biting tension even without big stunts and budgets
• The Guardian fun report on the tragic lack of quality in Netflix's much-hyped romcom programming
• Awards Daily  Upcoming festivals and how they typically shape the Oscar race

• Broadway Blog Lauren Ambrose is leaving My Fair Lady early for a TV role so in steps Laura Benanti
• Variety New animated film in the pipeline called My Boyfriend is a Bear. Sadly it's not an animated gay romcom but what sounds like G rated beastiality for children.
• Coming Soon Elton John biopic Rocketman has a release date: May 31st, 2019. Bold move for a biopic, aiming for summer box office. Taron Egerton (Kingsman) stars
• Us Magazine Scott Eastwood is having sex "lots of it"
• EW Troye Sivan on his music and Boy Erased. When asked if Kidman is a fan:

I’m…not sure! She said in an article that she and Keith are fans. And I was really gagged by that. I just don’t know if it’s true or if she was just being really nice.

politics & showbiz
• THR how is the #metoo era affecting sex scenes and no-nudity clauses?
• The Cut tries to work out the complex contradictory feelings resulting from Asia Argento being revealed as both alleged victim and alleged harasser
• New Yorker "Crazy Rich Asians and the end point of representation"
• /Film on that Buffy reboot. "Talent of color do not need white tv show and film hand-me-downs" I like this article but this wave of 'diversity rebooting' has less to do with the white lens, I'd argue, than it has to do with Hollywood's typical modus operandi: regurgitate! regurgitate! regurgitate! That's what they know how to do.

Exit Track
Michelle Yeoh making the press rounds. Here's her interview w/ the HFPA (The Golden Globes).

West Side Story, Pt 1: Something's Coming at the Dance

Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca (1940), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966),  Rosemary's Baby (1968), Cabaret (1972), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), and A League of Their Own (1992). 

Team Experience is proud to present a three-part retrospective of Leonard Bernstein's masterpiece West Side Story (1961) to honor the composer's centennial. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in September 1957 (though a success, it lost the Best Musical prize to a bigger Broadway hit, The Music Man). Four years later in October 1961 the film version opened in movie theaters, becoming the the top-grossing film of its year, winning 10 Oscars and cementing the musical's place in the cultural consciousness forever.

Part 1 by Lynn Lee

There’s something about West Side Story that inspires obsession.  Blending high concept drama and musical theater at its very best, this classic American love story balances delicately between delirious romance and sharp-edged realism until the two collide in a tragedy so gutting it still reduces me to a puddle. What’s more, it’s all transferred so seamlessly to the screen, I’ve yet to see a stage production that equals the power of the film. What’s not to obsess about... 

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Tweetweek: "Eighth Grade" Causes All the Feelings...

Let's begin with a perpetually relevant tweet

yes, keep going, maybe you can post the entire fucking plot of the movie before it opens on friday, I believe in you

— Danny Bowes (@bybowes) July 24, 2018

And don't you love it when one celebrity says something on twitter and another turns it into a funny joke with a reply?!

Ansel, I’ve been sitting in this restaurant for 45 minutes already.

— edgarwright (@edgarwright) July 26, 2018

AFTER THE JUMP sound advice from RuPaul, a funny joke about the Thor franchise, Jeff Goldblum statue, and much more in a curated sampling of good tweets for you that ends with a ton of thoughts on Eighth Grade because the movie is a modern miracle. Go see it!...

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Months of Meryl: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 

#30 —Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, manipulative mother of a Vice Presidential candidate brainwashed by an international cabal. 

JOHN: The one regrettable casualty of this feature-film series is, of course, Streep’s Emmy winning performance(s) in Mike Nichols’ 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Perhaps we’ll have time to dig into that series in the future, but suffice it to say we rank her work in it quite highly. In 2004, Streep signed on to her first-ever remake, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, playing a role made famous by Angela Lansbury in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film. Demme’s version updates Frankenheimer’s film and Richard Condon’s 1959 source novel to contemporary times, made amid the the Bush/Kerry election and thematically enmeshed in the U.S.’s “War on Terror.” Denzel Washington stars as Ben Marco, a Gulf War veteran whose puzzling memories and twisted dreams of serving in Kuwait drive him to uncover the sinister forces driving fellow soldier and newly-selected, left-leaning Vice Presidential nominee Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) into national prominence. Shaw’s blandly robotic demeanor is operated by his manipulative mother, Virginia Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, heir to an American political dynasty but now working covertly for the ominous international private equity fund Manchurian Global...

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If only voodoo dolls were real...

Michelle Pfeiffer as the sorceress "Lamia" in Stardust... think of all the practical applications during this particular precipice in human history.