Links: Born Sexy Yesterday, Acting as Self-Actualization, and More...

Pajiba gird your loins - Dan Stevens is in everything
Tracking Board Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, and Candice Bergen to co-star in a comedy about a book club reading 50 Shades of Grey? This could be awesome or terrible...or both. Whichever way it turns out, we're there!
Coming Soon Focus has acquired the new Jason Reitman / Charlize Theron collaboration Tully but we'll have to remove it from the Oscar charts. It's not coming until Spring 2018 now

AV Club NBC greenlights its first two series of the new year, one of them that used to be called Drama High (and sounds like it has potential) is now called Rise. Why does Hollywood love to go from specific to generic titles? Are their studies that show that generic titles do better or is it fear of specificity?
/Film the first cast photo of Marvel's The Inhumans has been released and boy is it underwhelming. I've always loved Medusa but you really shouldn't be able to tell that it's such an obvious and stiff looking wig since the character is so tied up in her hair! I mean, couldn't they have gotten RuPaul's wig designers to do it if they wanted something both outlandish and real looking?

Tony Season
Theater Mania hoping to dominate the original play Tonys next year, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has announced an opening for the tail end of eligibility in 2018
Playbill did you know that Audrey Hepburn won her Tony Award the same WEEK as her Oscar? Isn't that crazy? She won the Oscar for Roman Holiday on March 25th, 1954 and then the Tony for Ondine on March 28th!
Deadline Amélie, a New Musical, based on the Oscar nominated French classic, is the first casualty of the Tony nominations, announcing its Broadway closing date for May 21st after a short run and zero nominations.
Broadway World Despite a disappointing Tony showing (2 nominations) Anastasia, based on the 90s animated movie musical, announces a world tour. It helps to have that known "brand" going in. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was savaged by critics and received zero Tony nominations, is still doing well and the box office and is already working on the tour)
THR Tony nominee anecdotes including Laurie Metcalf on the proposed Roseanna revival and Sally Field discussing the release she felt when she found her calling as a young girl:

It isn't something that I just decided one day or backed into it one day. I found a stage when I was 12 when I was lucky enough to be in a school that still had a theater arts department. And something inside of me changed, woke up, I could hear my own voice for the first time when I was onstage, and then when I would get offstage I had to be all the things that little girls in the '50s had to be, and all of that went back in the box. But when I got onstage I could be all the things I wasn't allowed to be anywhere else, so I could hear my own self.

Love ya Sally!

Exit Video
Got 18 minutes? That might seem like a lot but this video essay really is compelling. It names a sci-fi fantasy trope that I haven't personally seen named before but which is as familiar as they come. He calls it "Born Sexy Yesterday" and it's all about the way genre fiction infantilizes women so that men are their natural superior.

At the very least it will make you rethink mermaid and sexy android movies, The Fifth Element and Splash a little bit. 

Tribeca 2017: The Endless

And here's Jason Adams finally report from Tribeca Film Festival though Nathaniel has a few more to go...

If you loves puns as much as I love puns you'll understand when I find myself in a bit of a mental pickle when a film I don't particularly enjoy comes along and it's called The Endless. On the one hand it's just far too easy, riffing on how "endless" you found the experience of sitting through the film to be. On the other... it's the base level humor of puns that we're talking about here. This ain't precisely elliptical rocket science stuff. You can go low when they go low.

But even worse for this pun-lover is it's not particularly true either, that The Endless feels endless, and so we're stuck somewhere in between. Kind of like the characters in The Endless find themselves! Whoa. If that blew your mind then have I got a movie for you...

Click to read more ...

Three Fittings: Fantastic Beasts' Odd Costume Win

New Series! Three Fittings celebrates costume design in the movies. The number is necessary self-restraint for we love the art of costuming too much.

By Nathaniel R

Dear reader, I didn't think I'd ever need to see Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016). I thought, solid reasoning given the golden trajectory of most franchises, that Oscar would want to move on after a year of regular craft nominations for the series. I thought, surely they'd never hand one of them an actual Oscar if they hadn't done so by now. But in the interest of completism, after Colleen Atwood's generous fourth statue for costuming this particular movie and its bluray release, I caught up. 

I was both impressed and utterly perplexed by what I found.

While Atwood does unusually understated work (for her), there are far fewer costumes than you might expect (approximately one per man, two per woman). Sussing out why they voted for this confident minimalism within a fantasy over more traditional costume perfection in Jackie, the primary color bliss of then-frontrunner La La Land, the erotic glamour of Allied, and the flouncy Most-ness of Florence, proves nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, here are three key looks to discuss:

Click to read more ...

Review: Anne Hathaway is "Colossal"

by Jorge Molina

As much as her career seems to have been engraved by "light" and "fluffy" material like The Princess Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada, and despite the bubbly and eager-to-please persona that she has become infamous for, Anne Hathaway is no stranger to playing characters plagued by demons: recovering addict, martyrized mother, troubled wife, woman with degenerative disease. She’s always had the outstanding capacity to portray a complex darkness within.

Colossal brings this into the light like no movie she’s done before...

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Hugo Nominees 2017

Like many awards groups the Hugo Awards (which specialize in sci-fi literature) have been the subject of controversy over the years. That's not just in terms of nominees but the voting process itself. But as window dressing for those of us who like sci-fi but aren't immersed in that world firmly, so to speak, they still make for a handy list of reading suggestions! I'm going to try a couple of these since I needed some new books to read.

They have two screen movie/tv related categories, too, so Arrival has a chance to win something else (crosses fingers)

THE NOMINEES
[Note: If there's a bold link, the nominee is free to enjoy online. Regular links go to Amazon. We're an affiliate so if you purchase anything after clicking over (and some of these are quite inexpensive) The Film Experience gets an eensy-weensy little kickback.] 

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

• Arrival, (21 Laps Entertainment/FilmNation Entertainment/Lava Bear Films)
• Deadpool (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Marvel Entertainment/Kinberg Genre/The Donners’ Company/TSG Entertainment)
• Ghostbusters (Columbia Pictures/LStar Capital/Village Roadshow Pictures/Pascal Pictures/Feigco Entertainment/Ghostcorps/The Montecito Picture Company)
• Hidden Figures (Fox 2000 Pictures/Chernin Entertainment/Levantine Films/TSG Entertainment)
• Rogue One (Lucasfilm/Allison Shearmur Productions/Black Hangar Studios/Stereo D/Walt Disney Pictures)
• Stranger Things, Season One, (21 Laps Entertainment/Monkey Massacre)

Click to read more ...