Streaming Roulette, Oct: High Life/Noon and Handfuls of Dust.

As is our practice we've selected a handful plus of new-to-streaming titles and frozen them at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up!). After those selections we've listed all the movies from each of the streaming channels. What should you queue up for OCTOBER 2019 ? (★ means we definitely recommend catching them and bold titles are buzzy things we haven't yet seen) 

Let's get started...

[mood music]

HIGH LIFE (2019) on Amazon Prime
Funnily enough this empty shot is exactly as I recall High Life, so much atmosphere and isolation. Humanity is over. (Except for Juliette Binoche who is just living for her disturbing role.) We expect this will end up on some top ten lists at year's end...

Click to read more ...

Laura Benanti Predicting "Supergirl" in 2013

We're celebrating 1979 this month so let's talk about one of its most underused / overtalented showbiz babies: LAURA BENANTI.

She's a Tony Winner (Gypsy) with great pipes, Broadway's Queen of Twitter (giving her 71 thousand followers more joy with hilarity than you can fathom if you don't follow her), and this decade she's been making inroads to television stardom with recurring characters on several shows including "Nurse Jackie" and "Nashville" but she's still without a big leading role which she more than obviously deserves!

She'll next be seen as Supergirl's birthmother in the pilot of "Supergirl" (2015) - currently having pirating problems -- so add psychic to her many gifts. See, In 2013 she stripped down into Supergirl costume at a Skivvies* concert! See the video after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Curio: Bubblegum Card Oddities

Alexa here. Everyone knows that there is a whole universe devoted to sports trading cards, with stories of someone selling their Mickey Mantle card for thousands.  Of course a similar form of geekdom revolves around sci fi films, with Thor and Star Wars trading cards produced by the truckload.   But occasionally I run across some vintage film trading cards that I find a little unexpected.  Here are some I've enjoyed.

Yes, I bought this complete set of Saturday Night Fever trading cards about 15 years ago.  You'll be happy to know that I didn't spend all that much; apparently a card of Tony Manero in his black briefs isn't worth much in the open market.  The unopened packages still had gum!  My favorite part was being able to assemble the poster image from the back of the set.

Although it makes sense that they produced Alien trading cards in 1979 (in a feeble attempt to ride the Star Wars sci fi wave) I find it hilarious that this means there are trading cards out there of Veronica Cartwright and Harry Dean Stanton!

But wait there's more: Marlon Brando, Mia Farrow and...

Click to read more ...