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).

Soundtracking: "All That Jazz"

by Chris Feil

These days we don’t get many musicals brave enough to buck genre comforts and form as Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All That Jazz. The director/choreographer transplants himself onto Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a highly regarded and sexually cruel master of the stage on his way to untimely demise. It’s a masterpiece to shame other masterpieces.

There’s a reason that the film isn’t remembered for its songs - musical pleasantry is low on his priorities, as the film is an uncompromising character study of the visionary creator’s weakest impulses...

Click to read more ...

Call Me With Kindness

by Jason Adams

Call Me By Your Name is turning out to be the sort of success none of us saw coming sixteen months ago when it was first announced that the director of I Am Love was tackling a little gay love story. It just broke the 2017 record for per theater average over the weekend, and its reviews have been unanimously stellar. It won Best Feature at the Gothams Monday night, it topped the Independent Spirit nominations, and it’s expected to stick around racking up such prizes all awards season long.

And yet there’s been one complaint that’s nagged at the movie from a determined bunch of folks (including the film’s own writer, legend James Ivory) since it first screened at Sundance in January – a supposed shyness about nudity and gay sex. Ivory told Variety it’s a “pity” there's no full-frontal nudity in the film, while The Guardian called the movie “coy” and Slate called it out for a “lack of explicit sex.” One shot in particular has rankled these folks the most – a seemingly old-fashioned pan out the window just as the characters finally approach their erotic consummation.

The film’s director Luca Guadagnino, who probably had to look up the word “coy” in the dictionary the first time it was lobbed at him for this, is nonplussed by the reaction – he told Vulture:

“It’s really something I don’t understand. It’s as if you said there are not enough shots of Shanghai. I don’t understand why there has to be Shanghai in this movie.”

I’m inclined to agree with him. Not only because I found the film sexy as hell, erotic in languorous, voyeuristic ways that movies don’t really approach anymore. Its sense of tactility, for sweat and fabric and skin, and its often-prurient stares – up the legs of swimming trunks, for example - are a welcome shock to the system that makes the forbidden seem commonplace, easy...

Click to read more ...

Mindhunter (4-7)

by Nathaniel R

Continuing our look at Mindhunter. Let's discuss the middle bulk of the first season, shall we?

How would most men feel if they were being intimate with a woman and they sensed that she wasn't enjoying herself... [no response] Come on, be scientists.

Click to read more ...

Fifty Shades Blander

By Spencer Coile 

It is a sunny, carefree weekday afternoon. A spur of the moment decision leads me to rent the 2017 "blockbuster," Fifty Shades Darker, which prides itself on being the sequel to the risque and monotonous Fifty Shades of Grey. It's new to DVD, I had read half of the second book several summers ago, the first film was altogether harmless, what did I have to lose? 

Two hours, it would appear.

Click to read more ...