Let's play the presenter game!

by Cláudio Alves

Over the past few weeks, we've heard news from the Academy about the 97th Oscars ceremony. For example, none of the Original Song nominees will be performed, a break with tradition that has caused some uproar within the industry. We'll also get to see the return of the Fab Five format for presenting the acting categories, where past victors introduce the year's nominees. In some ways, it feels like a welcoming of new faces to the Circle of Winners, though using these celebratory mini-monologues isn't to everyone's taste, especially when they came at the expense of proper Oscar clips. However, I confess that I am a fan, and just like last year, I invite you all to a game of conjecture. Let's see who'd be the perfect pairing for each nominee…

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Best Supporting Actor: Is double-dipping the new trend?

by Cláudio Alves

For decades, it wasn't unusual to see two thespians from the same film nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but the same couldn't be said about its brother category. That was until recently when double-dipping in Supporting Actor became fashionable. 

It started in 2017, with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri's Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. In 2019, it was Joe Pesci and Al Pacino for The Irishman, and then Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeit Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2020. The following year, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee did the honors for The Power of the Dog, while, in 2022, The Banshees of Inisherin got in with Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan. For comparison, in the same period, Supporting Actress only had two such cases, with The Favourite and last year's Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now, the question is whether the trend will continue at the 96th Academy Awards…

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I Dream of Park Chan-wook

by Jason Adams

If like me you've been hanging on every miniscule drop of news regarding South Korean masterpiece-maker Park Chan-wook's next film over the past six long, long years since The Handmaiden came out -- the film's titled Decision To Leave and it stars Lust, Caution powerhouse Tang Wei and it's been in some state of being filmed for the past two full years -- then consider today's random Park-related gift a gallon of delicious water in the desert. It doesn't have to do with that movie, but it is it's own worthwhile thing -- Apple commissioned Park to shoot a short 21-minute film on an iPhone as part of a series they're doing (selling phones, natch), and he came up with "Life is But a Dream," a martial-arts fantasy horror musical (yes, all of that) that stars the terrific Kim Ok-vin, previously so killer in his 2009 vampire flick Thirst. We love a reunion! Especially with talents this fine. The entire short's online now, watch:

This is actually the second time Park's made a short film for Apple on a phone -- in 2011 he directed a thirty-minute short titled "Night Fishing" which you can also watch right here. That won the Golden Bear for Best Short. Next up for Park -- after Decision To Leave, I mean -- is an HBO limited series titled The Sympathizer, an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book which will apparently star Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles, which all sounds very Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove to me. The lead, described as "a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy," has not been cast yet. I'd ask for casting suggestions but I have to imagine that the acting pool for "half-French half-Vietnemese" is smaller than most and they'll probably end up going with an unknown?

Restoration @ 25: Honoring the great James Acheson

by Cláudio Alves

In 1995, Michael Hoffman's Restoration adapted the best-selling novel of Rose Tremain into a sumptuous dramatization of 17th century England. Despite some dumbfounding feats of miscasting and a disjointed structure upended by the advent of the Black Plague, the picture's quite beautiful to look at and features some of the best Baroque designs in film history. The scenography leans into the theatricality of Charles II's court, creating an airless world gilded in gold. The costumes, in turn, indulge in the absurdities of 1660s fashion, conjuring a world of radical contrasts between royal splendor and the austere rigor of Puritan charity.

Both achievements won trophies at the 68th Academy Awards. As usual, I'm more interested in the work of Oscar-winning costume design by the great James Acheson. Let's explore the man's genius, his filmography, and the Baroque stylings of the 25-year-old Restoration…

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The New Classics: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

By Michael Cusumano 

The best genre parodies are so full of affection for their targets that they can’t help but make a superior example of the very thing they aim to satirize. It can be fun to throw tomatoes at a genre’s contrivances and cliches from the outside, but titles such as Young Frankenstein or Down With Love circumvent your ironic detachment to provide the far more satisfying experience of playing with these tropes from inside a story you care about. 

This kind of rare pleasure is one of the reasons Shane Black’s crime caper comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has amassed the following it has since it underperformed in theaters back in 2005. Black’s film actually does double satirical duty, lampooning both the world of Raymond Chandler-esque noir and the world of the hyper-masculine, wise-ass body cop action movies of the 80’s and 90’s, a subcategory Black helped to inflate to absurd levels as the big gun screenwriter behind films like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout...

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