Podcast: Once Upon a Time ... in Listener Questions

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R

 

Index (59 minutes)
00:01 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: stars, tension, pacing, violence
27:00 Skin starring Jamie Bell: Murtada hates it
Listener Questions...
30:00 Feelings about Renee Zellweger playing Judy
35:00 Our favourite Brad Pitt roles
37:00 Alternative history movies
39:00 Best cats in movies?
41:45 Who is the next Nicole Kidman? 
49:00 Smackdown scheduling
50:20 Sharon Tate's legacy 
51:30 What happened with Mask (1985) at the Oscars? 
55:00 Is 2019 a weak film year? 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Articles referenced in this recording
• Jason's review of Once Upon a Time...
• Murtada on the Judy trailer
• Nathaniel on Mask 

Once Upon a Time in Listener Questions

Happy 50th to Renée Zellweger

by Eric Blume

It seems crazy, but today marks the 50th birthday of Oscar-winning actress Renée Zellweger.  Zellweger is a bit of a divisive actor (even within this site!), but I loved her the second I first saw her onscreen, loved her through her big decade of success, and will proudly love her forever.

I fell for Zellweger for the first time the way most of America did:  as assistant Dorothy Boyd opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire in 1996.  Even though that film features Cruise’s best performance (he should have beat Geoffrey Rush for the Oscar), I walked away from Jerry Maguire thinking, who the hell is Renée Zellweger?  It takes major presence and considerable skill to not be blown off the screen by a star like Cruise at his most commanding.  Not only did Zellweger hold her own, she brought out new things in him: a comic warmth, a quality of genuineness, something softer and more open.  He listened to her and didn’t anticipate everything, because she was off-center...

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25th Anniversary: "Reality Bites"

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Sandwiched between (and oft-overshadowed by) the so-called Baby Boomers and Millennials, Generation X, those born between 1965-1980, seems to get little attention from Hollywood — or from anyone, really. In fact, just last month CBS infamously omitted Gen X in an otherwise comprehensive chart, “Generation Guidelines Defined by Birth Year.” For Gen Xers (of which I am one), this was generally considered as simply par for the course. Of course, of course, of course! 

But 25 years ago this week, we got our cinematic Valentine in the form of Reality Bites, the seminal film of a “forgotten” generation...

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All You Can Link Smorgasbord

Instagram Actor Garret Clayton (Hairspray Live!, King Cobra, The Fosters) has officially come out of the closet
/Film a rejected 1998 pitch for a Catwoman solo movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer
AV Club Danny Boyle has dropped out of Bond 25. The longer the film delays production, the more I suspect Daniel Craig will bolt, too.
Variety Asia Argento sure has had it rough lately. In addition to her own rage about Weinstein, and the suicide of her boyfriend, she herself is denying claims that she sexually assaulted a minor.

More after the jump including the dying YA movie boom, Madonna docs and criticisms, Sebastian Stan, Crazy Rich Asians, and more...

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Months of Meryl: One True Thing (1998)

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

 

#26 — Kate Gulden, a suburban wife and mother dying of cancer.

JOHN: Here’s one true thing: Carl Franklin’s One True Thing is neither a Lifetime movie, an extended soap opera, nor a “chick-flick.” One True Thing is, in fact, a melodrama centered around a middle-aged woman dying of cancer, embellished with music and openly soliciting your tears. The maternal melodrama, a genre which Streep has revisited frequently, remains near the bottom of the genre totem pole, regularly maligned and dismissed by critics for all their attributes: it is proudly emotional, scored and scripted to produce waterworks, and an undisguised movie, unconcerned with presenting realism through its formal elements. One True Thing, like most contemporary maternal melodramas, is familiar and stylistically plain, and the film is admittedly hampered by a hackneyed framing device, but it also takes seriously issues central to women’s lives, exploring a mother-daughter relationship and issues of long-term marriage, especially the concessions made and female labor expended in keeping a household running smoothly. One True Thing deserves to be taken as seriously as Saving Private Ryan or any other masculine meditation on violence released in 1998. To immediately write off the film, and the genre to which it belongs, is to devalue and belittle the feminine concerns it explores...

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