Mandatory Spider-Man Posting

Is Nicholas Hammond busy?As you undoubtedly have heard, Marvel/Disney closed a deal with Sony last night and now Spider-Man goes totally bi. He'll be splitting his time between two giant corporate overlords in Sony & Disney. Spider-Man's solo franchise will continue at Sony without Andrew Garfield who will finally be freed to make the movies he was meant to make after breaking through in The Social Network (2010). Cue: roughly 8 million extremely obnoxious internet articles about the casting of the new Spider-Man. I'm steeling myself: It will be so much worse than that hideous landfill phenomenon of infinite speculative Doctor Strange casting thinkpieces.

As for the new Spider-Man --  I swear to god if they start with the origin story again I will never stop puking web fluids. Everyone knows it, dumbasses. It'd be like demanding that each Biblical epic start with a two hour Adam & Eve prologue. Peter Parker will get his next solo film on July 28th, 2017 but first he'll debut over in Marvel's Cinematic Universe. The prevailing rumor is that that's within the context of Captain America: Civil War (due May 6th, 2016) which is also the film that will introduce Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther. That film is getting crowded so one hopes they don't lose the title character in a sea of universe-building agenda.

May 6th, 2016 is a tight turnaround. The ink is still drying on the contract and presumably Sony and Marvel and Disney (that's a lot of executives to please) will all have to agree on a new direction, and a new actor, and that actor's pay scale over multiple films in both supporting and leading roles for seven years (the longest you can book an actor for). And they'll have to do that this summer since Civil War will have to start filming soon to make its release date; visual effects pictures don't come together as quick as Clint Eastwood movies.

For presumably non-competitive corporate appeasement reasons, this Spider-Man deal is pushing most of the post Civil War movies previously slated back about four months.

Oh • Yel • LINK • Oh!

Gurus of Gold a new chart reflects the PGA nominations
Variety talks about the lack of screeners for Selma
NYT great profile of Patricia Arquette. People are laying the tributes on thick now for the Oscar campaign. 
THR you know it's Oscar season when people get fired for "smear campaigns" 
The Guardian exchanges pleasantries with Sienna Miller (Foxcatcher, American Sniper):

You've made a good movie for once."  

The Dissolve on the Razzie shortlists - nominations soon
i09 52 years of Spider-Man's mask a spiffy quick visual
Hollywood Elsewhere Josh Gad may play Roger Ebert in Russ & Roger Go Beyond
i09 Eddie Redmayne shares details of his audition for The Hobbit
Playbill Into the Woods breaks into the Billboard top 20 
Film School Rejects on How the Disneyfied Into the Woods loses its allegorical power, especially in regards to the AIDS crisis
Vulture how Looking is reinventing itself for Season 2 (premiering on Golden Globe night, fyi) 
Pajiba on an amazing Boogie Nights story involving Burt Reynolds 
/Film Matthew Vaughn, promoting Kingsman: The Secret Service thinks people have had enough of Nolanified superhero films and want more fun
Playbill god help us all. Cats is returning to Broadway. There are still so many 1980s musicals on the boards here. Wish we could have more originals and fewer returns. P.S. Cats is the first Broadway show I ever saw so I have a certain affection. But still...
Australia Womens Weekly Russell Crowe saying annoying things again. This time knocking actresses for wanting better roles when they're older
In Contention North Texas critics like Boyhood and the usual supporting players. Gyllenhaal & Pike for leads

List-Mania
Variety on ten big spenders. See the insane amount of money the studios spend on ads for their movies. Godzilla tops the list spending big to make big but The Judge also wasted a small fortune 
/Film a grab bag of lists about the film year
Vox Todd Vanderwerff's top ten list   
Adam Male 5 gay men share their top ten LGBT movies list (well, there unfortunately isn't much in the way of "L" here). Interesting to see so little overlap. Nobody ever interviews me for this sort of thing but my list would contain a few of these. 
Comics Alliance best comic books of the year 

How to Pronounced David Oyelowo
There's finally video of Brad Pitt schooling us all on David Oyelowo's name. Here you go!

 And while we're on the topic, Interview did a Q&Andy with him. On why he left the UK and came to Hollywood:

I had a very nice career in the U.K., but heroes of mine are Daniel Day Lewis, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and when I looked at the zenith of what they do, it came out of Hollywood. So my wife and I took the risk in 2007 of leaving the U.K., coming here, and hoping that I could scale those heights. 

Dizzying heights indeed but Selma's a great step up.

And Finally...
For those of you just returning from a long holiday, don't miss... 

#20-11 Best of the Year, (now updated with honorable mentions)
#10-01 Best of the Year, Nathaniel's List 
Unjust Pride DVD Sony has put the gay heroes in the closet 

..and more interviews with:
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson Before Superhero Glory, Noah
Actor Finn Wittrock A Brief Scene in an Elevator
Actor Oscar Isaac  A Most Famous Year... Coming Soon
Cinematography Yves Belanger The Man Who Shot Reese 

Makeup & Hairstyling: The Elephantine Origin Story (and this year's finalists since we must)

It's history time, kids! Gather round. Did you know that The Elephant Man, currently on Broadway with Bradley Cooper, is indirectly responsible for the Academy's makeup Oscar? No, not that kind of make up Oscar ... though the Academy gives those all the time, too (why, hello Ms. Julianne Moore "Ms. February 2015"!) and maybe Bradley Cooper will get one of those someday?

what's that? u think this intro was an excuse to post a photo of shirtless Bra---FINE! don't judge.

I digress. In the stage version of The Elephant Man the lead actor traditionally performs while wearing no special makeup; he merely acts deformity. But that stylization hasn't yet been tried on film. When it came time to make the film version in 1980, David Lynch, no stranger to depicting deformity without prosthetics -- deformity of the soul at least -- opted for makeup effects. People bitched about the lack of Oscar recognition since The Elephant Man was an Oscar hit (8 nominations) and the very next year we had our category! Unfortunately for the The Elephant Man's team Christopher Tucker and Wally Schneiderman and all, it was too late. Those makeup artists never won a Makeup Oscar or even the other kind of Make up Oscar for overdue peeps.

Once there was an official category a young pony-tailed prosthetics genius named Rick Baker immediately began his relentless reign, hogging 11 nominations and 7 statues starting with An American Werewolf in London. The Makeup prize continued on its weirdly lyncathropic, excruciatingly unstable number of nominee (0,2,3,4) effects-obsessed path for decades thereafter.

UNTIL...

Click to read more ...

Tim's Toons: A history of animated Marvels

Tim here. Tomorrow sees the release of Big Hero 6, the 54^th feature made by the Walt Disney Animation Studio canon, and the first time that studio has collaborated with its corporate cousins at Marvel Entertainment. The result is certainly the most prestigious animated project ever based on a Marvel comics title, but far, far from the first. In fact, Marvel superheroes have been showing up in cartoons for almost a half of a century now. I give you a tour of some of them.

The Marvel Super-Heroes (1966)
The very first Marvel TV series, airing 65 episodes in syndication. The first time I ever heard of it was about an hour ago, so I can’t begin to say if it has an kind of rabid fanbase or lingering influence on Marvel writers and artists, but it stands out in my eyes for having extraordinarily cheap animation even by ‘60s syndicated TV standards, basically just waggling still drawings underneath the camera. Seriously, watch that video.

Lasting cultural impact: None, but from now on, if I ever meet Mark Ruffalo, I’m going to chant “watch them change their very shape before your nose!” at him till he punches me in the face.

Classics and new shows alike below the jump!

Click to read more ...

Lukewarm Off Presses: Colin, Emma, Birdman and Thor

You might have thought you were done discussing these but I'm just getting around to posting about them, so don't shut your trap just yet. Here's five stories that we didn't get to in anything like a timely fashion but so what? Time is a flat circle. 

Story 1 COLIN IN TALKS
I was going to wait to post about this until it was official and not just "in talks" but since the internet moves with the speed of everything casually mentioned as fact that everyone is aware of and will be old tomorrow, it should be noted that it looks like Colin Farrell will be the leading man of True Detective Season 2 (possibly Taylor Kitsch beside him). Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey will be tough shoes to fill but as I relayed on twitter, he's a smart idea because people will be surprised when he's great because they haven't noticed that he often is. It's very Matthew McConaughey if you think about it. An actor who was always talented and then only through a unique set of career moves did people admit it and suddenly acted like he was a brand new actor. And then they overpraised but that's another topic. 

Colin has been utterly amazing a couple of times (Tigerland and In Bruges) but even in his less heralded successful or more divisive pieces where the performance arguably feels more strained (A Home at the End of the World, Alexander, Saving Mr Banks) he often feels like he's reaching for greatness. He doesn't phone it in... which is more than can be said for many actors who get paychecks that big.

Story 2 FESTIVALITIS
The Fall Film Festivals are approaching which means before too long I will be having weekly nervous breakdowns trying to keep up with all the news and discuss all the Oscar buzz. I'm waiting on my TIFF credentials now but it's exciting to hear that Venice will open with Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance starring Michael Keaton and Emma Stone. (I had never quite processed that it had a longer title than just "Birdman" though we've already discussed the brilliant trailer) Websites are already speculating on which films will show up at which festivals but I prefer not to try and guess. Half the excitement of festivals is all the "another present? for me!? ABUNDANCE!" elation that comes with discovering the goods. And since I can't afford to go to them all I don't want to worry about the films I'm missing at the other ones.

Story 3 A FEMALE THOR
It's probably worth mentioning that Marvel has announced that we'll have a female Thor for awhile (in the comics. Don't worry for Chris Hemsworth's career just yet) and she'll be wielding Mjölnir. Superheroes are replaced more often than the layman thinks within comics (and actors are replaced in movies too -Bruce Banner holla!) but it almost always reverts back to the original guy.

Besides messing up all of our favorite Thor/Dr Horrible jokes...

...this news bugs me for two reasons.

1. A female hero (Yay!) but she'll just be a glorified substitute (Boo!) for the real thing (a man, natch). What kind of message is that sending?
2. This is in the comics where there have been several female superheroes given their own books over time. What we need is a female superhero at the movies. That would still be revolutionary which is a pretty pathetic thing to type in 2014. Female characters have been carrying stories in virtually ever medium for as long as any of those mediums existed. And yet the studios are still assuming that female superheroes can't carry movies... don't they realize that two of our top ten grossers this year thus far are essentially female superhero movies (Divergent & Maleficent) but not by name and in entirely different genres.

soon every movie will be a bit expensive one episode season of a tv seriesStory 4 FRANCHISES WILL BE THE DEATH OF US ALL
There's some speculation happening in the superhero-crazed internet (when isn't there?) that Sony is rethinking that whole Amazing Spider-Man reboot thing now that the movies are underperforming and just as they were announcing a whole set of spinoff movies around them. Release Emma* & Andrew into the wild again, I BEG YOU!

"Underperforming" is a sad word when these movies should have bombed spectacularly. Shouldn't you at least have to wait for another generation to arrive before you yell "do over!"? All the movie studios want to essentially make movies into multiple TV series that release one big expensive 2 hour long episode each season so there are 22 superhero films on the way in the next 4 years and Universal is now going to try an interconnected Classic Monsters Universe. Um, none of those monsters except for the Invisible Man ever went away? Talk about long running franchises. I guess, in keeping with tradition, we should start complaining now that the Bride of Frankenstein is never going to get her own solo movie so it's another universe that will utterly fail the Bechdel Test.

Tell me something that will give me hope for the future in the comments!

* Story 5: EMMA & WOODY
Since Emma Stone was already name-checked twice in this post ... let's note that she is also filming her second Woody Allen movie in a row (Untitled 2015) before Magic in the Moonlight has even landed so expect media stories about Emma as Woody's new muse in  3...2...1...

Do you think she'll pull a Scarlett and make a third? Her romantic interest isn't Colin Firth this time.

Progress! The leads are only 14 years apart this time RT @ThePlaylist: Emma & Joaquin on the set of Woody Allen... pic.twitter.com/MHiTvBF7t0

— Nathaniel Rogers (@nathanielr) July 12, 2014