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Entries in Roald Dahl (5)

Tuesday
May122020

Horror Actressing: Anjelica Huston in "The Witches"

by Jason Adams

What's your favorite flavor of witch? Do you prefer a goth punk madwoman like Fairuza Balk in The Craft? A sexy hyper-stylish artiste like Tilda Swinton in Suspiria? A cackling crone like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz?

What if I told you you didn't have to pick just one? That there exists a witch out there already that snatches a dash of this, a dash of that, until her cauldron bubbles over with the cartoonish bombast of Cruella de Vil meets Helena Markos. I think you'd nod, say duh, throw your head back and holler, "Anjelica Huston as the magnificent Grand High Witch forever, darling-kk!!!"

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Tuesday
Jul022019

Showbiz History: Swimming Pool, The Secret of Nimh, and Margot Robbie

8 random things to celebrate from this day (July 2nd) in showbiz history 

<--- 1953 Children's book author Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, etcetera) and future Best Actress Oscar winner Patricia Neal (Hud) are married in New York.

1971 The original Shaft, an influential film in the blaxploitation movement and one of its biggest hits, opens in movie theaters. The next Spring "Theme from Shaft" takes the Oscar for Best Original Song. 

1980 Airplane!, a spoof of the then fading "disaster" genre, premieres. It becomes a smash hit and the fourth biggest grosser of 1980...

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Sunday
May142017

The Link Has Two Faces

Your Weekend Must Read
Emily Yoshida at Vulture gazes at Ingmar Bergman's Persona but she sees way beyond that, too, to the dream space shared by cinema's curious subgenre of female identity swapping

Two women talking: a recipe for witchcraft, an unnatural feedback loop, a cursed redundancy. Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona is a landmark for many reasons, but its legacy, which has show no signs of age in the 50 years since it was released in the U.S. and the U.K., is how it stared that anxiety in the face and opened up a loopy, meandering conversation that’s still going on to this day...

More Linkage
Keyframe 'The Year of Nicole Kidman' don't force her to prove herself all over again
Variety Cannes lineup is "high on "awards intrigue, low on safe awards bets"
/Film Aquaman is overflowing with villains, 3 already for a first solo film? (not a good sign) and a fourth may have been added
Coming Soon Antonio Banderas will headline Lamborghini -The Legend (working title) a biopic about the Italian entrepeneur of automobile fame. Alec Baldwin will play his rival Enzo Ferrari 

Boy Culture "STREEPSHOW" a drag comedy about "characters one played by Meryl Streep" living together in the East Village will be playing NYC in June. Sounds hilarious but I have to admit that it took me quite some time to figure out the characters in the photo (and there seem to be two Miranda Priestleys?) which is maybe not a good sign. Shouldn't they be instantly recognizable?
Guardian Mixed messages from Cannes as TV premieres from auteurs are happening but they've also banned Netflix from future competition unless they stop skipping theatrical releases
Variety Gay gasp! The BBC is producing a series of 15 minute monologues called Queers which is set to star Ben Whishaw, Alan Cumming, and Russell Tovey and others
Awards Daily Gypsy teaser, a new series starring Naomi Watts
Variety Hugh Bonneville will play Roald Dahl in a biopic set in the early to mid 1960s. This means they're going to have to cast someone to play both Dahl's wife Patricia Neal and her most famous co-star Paul Newman (see Hud) and both of those roles will be a Herculean casting task! 
The Guardian there's a documentary playing Cannes about Cary Grant's experimentation with LSD from 1958 through 196
Tracking Board Kenneth Branagh to direct himself in a movie about the father of Anne Frank The Keeper of the Diary

Not Remakes Though You Might Mistake Them For Such
/Film Martin Scorsese starts filming mob drama The Irishman this summer with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci
Gothamist Leonardo DiCaprio will star in The Black Hand about an undercover mob cop...
(Ummm, haven't all these people already made these movies? Why not mix it up with a romantic comedy or a sci-fi picture?)

Exit Video
Look it's the first clip from Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck. It may be impossible to follow Carol but we're glad that he got back on the horse so quickly after that long time away from us. How does this clip strike you?

Friday
Apr082016

The Big Not-So-Friendly Author

The full trailer for The BFG has dropped, and we’ve already looked at the teaser here which left us tingling with magic anticipation. Now that we’ve got more footage, including that of the big man himself we can feel as cosy and content Sophie under a big blanket reading a book that we’re in good hands. Spielberg was infamously interested in directing the first Harry Potter film, and perhaps this is the next best thing for him which has that splash of family friendly fantasy mixed with classic E.T. kids-on-an-adventure feel. That moment when the BFG is hiding in the shadows, obscuring the street light with his hand already feels classic.

It’s encouraging to see that Spielberg is taking the content seriously, and hasn’t resorted to making The BFG as a character a comedy act, which would have been the easy route for a kid’s film. Rylance seems to bring the soulfulness that makes the source material so rich. What is yet to be seen is whether Spielberg embraces the sneaky and dark side of notoriously prickly Roald Dahl’s writing which so many filmmakers have struggled with in the past. Dahls balance of the sinister and the joyously fantastic is what makes his legacy so beloved. Spielberg has a propensity for the earnest and sickly sweet side of cinema, so this may be a shiner version of the tale. Other filmmakers have had ranging success in capturing his style.

Previous Roald Dahl on screen after the jump…

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Tuesday
Oct282014

DreamWorks' 'BFG' lands its lead and a July 2016 Release

 Margaret here as your resident Roald Dahl enthusiast, reporting on the upcoming big-screen adaptation of The BFG from Steven Spielberg. 

The fantastical 1982 novel follows a precocious little girl named Sophie and the titular BFG (Big Friendly Giant) who whisks her away into his world of catching and distributing dreams. The story's elements of darkness and absurdity (horrifying man-eating giants and a surprising amount of flatulence) are typical of Dahl, though perhaps less prominent than in some of his other well-known works. 

DreamWorks has announced that revered British stage actor Mark Rylance will be taking the title role. The the winner of three Tonys, two Oliviers, and a BAFTA, Rylance is nonetheless relatively unknown in the film world. This left-field choice for the lead is heartening; to choose an actor whose bankability is so entirely off the map shows great confidence in his ability, and bodes well for an interest in serving the material.

Certainly Steven Spielberg, who will direct and produce, knows his way around a heartwarming family film. Yet for the work of an author as misanthropic and wicked as Dahl, my heart wants a filmmaker who's proven they can do fanciful children's stories with more of an edge-- someone more like Cuarón or del Toro than the man who brought us E.T. (Not incidentally, the team who brought us that Best Picture nominee are reuniting for The BFG: Melissa Mathison and Kathleen Kennedy are respectively set to write and exec-produce.)

Production will begin in a few months, and it will open in the United States on July 1, 2016. Let's hope that, as the BFG might say, they don't gobblefunk around with this children's classic.

Other Dahl fans among us: how does this look to you? Any theater-goers here willing to attest to Rylance's abilities? And the most important question of all: will the Queen make a giant-slaying cameo as herself?