"my link saw something that night"

• The next James Bond will be... Damian Lewis? Our first ginger 007 you guys! Rumor only but I could see that happening. [Mirror]
• It's weird that there's not a definitive feature about the airplane-building Wright Brothers. Steven Spielberg wants to make one as it turns out. Seems like a good fit, no?  [/Film]
• Life on the red planet? There's water at least. Did Fox pay NASA to announce this the week before the opening of The Martian ;) ? [The Guardian]

• Rising star Jonny Beauchamp says he owes everything to Roland Emmerich. Oh noooo. Tough debt. Also there's a photoshoot [Interview magazine]
• "I was being talked to like I was a silly pop singer." Grace Jones is still quotable/fabulous/singular. Just released a memoir [Time Out]
• "I've got tea. I've got cookies. No cake!" I cannot tell you how often my best friends and I quote The Log Lady from Twin Peaks. RIP Catherine Coulson [Wired]
• "Marlene Dietrich believed her pussy was magic" is the first sentence of this article so you know you want to read it. Why can't we get a biopic about THESE anecdotes? [Pajiba]
• Is this really Frank Grillo (from Captain America: Winter Soldier) younger & NSFW? [OMG BLOG]
• Everyone in the world has forgotten that Disney was going to make an Enchanted sequel. Except Disney apparently. It's going to be called Disenchanted. I shudder to think of the web exploding with "who should replace Amy Adams?" articles  [Coming Soon]
• "we were certainly looking for shots that told the story without a lot of cutting." - Roger Deakins on point of view and action sequences in Sicario [The Film Stage]
• First image of Woody Harrelson as LBJ in Rob Reiner's forthcoming biopic [Empire] 

Image of the Day
Thor and The Vision making out from the Avengers: Age of Ultron gag/blooper reel. Love the elegant placement of Thor's hammer. The best part of the image is surely that man about to shoot in the corner. 

P.S. My favorite part is Elizabeth Olsen dropping her accent when she messes up a line. 

Video of the Day #1
The Revenant gets a new nearly 3 minute trailer. I won't be watching it because I love the teaser so much (previously discussed, the one with all the heavy breathing) and I don't want any more information in my eyeballs before seeing it than we've already gotten.  The reaction online seems breathless/"MASTERPIECEY"! but one should never bank on trailers to tell you what the finished quality of a movie will be, only to tell you whether it looks like you must see the movie. The last trailer that fooled me with "oh, this will be a masterpiece, hands down!" was Little Children (2006) and that's where I learned my lesson once and for all that the art of cutting trailers into 2-ish minute expressive gems was an entirely different art form (a beautiful art form if you don't give too much away) then making a 2 hour movie. 

Video of the Day #2
"Bitch Better Have My Money" Barbershop Quartet Quintet style with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 

Bring Link On

Mic Manuel on the transgressive feminism of Bring it On 15 years later
Grantland Mark Harris on four takeaways from this summer's box office - great piece as usual
Stuff this piece is old but I was shocked to learn (sorry if I'm way late) that the 80s posters (like Madonna's debut album) in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night weren't real. I loved that vampire bedroom!
Awards Daily reshares the Lady in the Van trailer. I guess it's back on for 2015? Such a crowded year for Best Actress already but I'm expecting an onslaught of "weak year for best actress" pieces any moment since we get those every year even when it's a good one
A Fistful of Films shares his personal awards from 1988 - fun choices including Married to the Mob and Salaam Bombay both of which are underloved 

Empire I'm trying to avoid reading about the new Star Wars -- doesn't anybody like to be surprised in the movie theater anymore? -- but I ended up clicking on this piece about Kylo Ren (with the jagged lightsaber) and now I'm more excited about the premise behind the villains
Empire Léa Seydoux offered female lead in Channing Tatum's Gambit
Pajiba catches us up on what's going on with Tom Hardy's TV projects including a new one called "Taboo". (Somehow Tom Hardy is making time for TV every year despite his ever increasing In-Demandness in big movies, too)
Guardian the great Jacques Audiard will make his English Language debut with The Sisters Brothers. John C Reilly headlines. Audiard's past leads have tended to be fascinating dangerously sexy actors like Matthias Schoenarts, Romain Duris, Vincent Cassel and Tahar Rahim. John C Reilly as follow up? 

Stage Door
Playbill Kevin Bacon will star in a stage adaptation of Rear Window in October.
THR fun guests at Taylor Swift's Monday concert including Ellen Degeneres
Playbill Top US colleges for Theater Majors? from NYU to Florida State via the highly specific metric of which colleges are represented on Broadway right now
Theater Mania Steven Pasquale on a painful audition. He has been working on stage and TV forever and somehow people don't realize how incredible his singing voice is. Movie musical please.

For LOLZ
"Rock Dentistry" fun tumblr of the moment 
The Poke lost Stephen King books recovered. Need to read "Brian's Arse"
EW "how the internet would have GIF'ed the first MTV Music Video Awards" - the title is more exciting than the GIFS chosen but a highly worthy topic and of course, the internet would have GIF'ed the hell out of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" 
and
"Hi, I'm Marvel... and I'm DC"

Little Link on the Bloggie

Today's Must Reads
Cleo Journal has an excellent piece by Sara Black McCulloch on audience complicity, cat-fights, and star persona in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 
Grantland Mark Harris, typically brilliant, looks at this weird dispirited holding place (2015) before the next wave of superheroes are due to hit the movies for five plus years

Linkage
Variety Melissa Gilbert, that little girl from that Little House on the Prairie must have liked her role as SAG President some years ago -- now she's running for Congress in Michigan where she moved in 2013! Michigan politics are SO messy. Perhaps Laura Ingalls can help clean things up!
Gabby Sidibe loves Jussie Smollet cleaning her floors. LOL. Get all of that dirt, papi!
Criterion Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons look back on The French Lieutenant's Woman 
LA Times talks to the men behind Shaun the Sheep's dialogue free wonders
Rope of Silicon Angelina Jolie's By the Sea gets a hard "R" from the MPAA  

Empire Reese Witherspoon to produce and star in a supernatural thriller called Cold. She stays busy, that one
Defamer talks about the twist in Joel Edgerton's The Gift. I can't read this yet because I haven't seen the film but I love Rich Juzwiak's articles
The Hairpin "32 Things That Are All In Your Head" 
MNPP Gratuitous Miguel Angel Silvestre
The Film Stage PT Anderson made a music video again. This time for his Inherent Vice supporting actress Joanna Newsom
Uproxx a sequel to the one-off wonder Edge of Tomorrow is a possibility. Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossble - Rogue Nation) and Tom Cruise maybe thinking about it
Slate argues that the problems with the Fantastic Four might just be in the source material 
AV Club on the proliferation and pros and cons of the anthology format, post American Horror Story. Interesting but I dearly wish people would stop crediting Ryan Murphy with inventing a genre. Anthologies have existed since the beginning of television. He just popularized them again after a few decades when they went mostly extinct. It's like crediting Baz Luhrmann for inventing musicals or something.

ICYMI
Here at TFE we recently discussed that recent damning Miles Tellers profile in Esquire and The New York Times has now published "a brief history of the tough celebrity profile"  featuring Mira Sorvino, Cara Delevingne, Ernest Hemingway, and more. I thought I'd share it since we were just talking about Mira Sorvino at length in Mighty Aphrodite.

Stage Door
Playbill awww. Cyndi Lauper visited the stars of Fun Home backstage. Incidentally the show has been selling out houses for months now. That Tony win did good for a great musical. I keep wondering if anyone will dare make it into a movie?
CNN Benedict Cumberbatch is on stage in London as Hamlet but having trouble with fans who are filming him do it. Jesus, what is wrong with people? Just watch the thing you've paid to see. 

Ricki Rendazzo, Reed Richards, and Bubbles Bursting

Meryl Streep? Tom Cruise? Pac-Man? Vacation? It's like the 1980s all over again in movie theaters. It was a weak weekend overall with a ton of miniscule new releases and underperforming wide newbies. Meryl Streep had her worst opening weekend in a film sold on mostly on her presence since Prime (2005) before she regained her box office clout with The Devil Wears Prada. The only true success story this weekend was the word of mouth for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation which held on to #1 for another weak. It is definitely a fun summer picture but the "best in the series!" reviews feel like a bit of an overstatement. It's not quite as ambitiously staged and exciting as Ghost Protocol, but it's better than the other action films around it which makes it seem that much better. That opera scene with at least four simultaneous agendas in play and all the deadly assassins totally confused by each other sure is a kick, though, don't you think?

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Podcast: Ant-Man and Southpaw

We're spoiling you with two podcasts this week. Yesterday we talked 1995 (to tease the Smackdown). Now, conversations about Marvel's Phase Two ender Ant-Man with Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lily, Michael Douglas, and Michael Peña, and the new boxing drama Southpaw starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams.

Contents (43 minutes)
00:01 Marvel's Ant-Man
27:55 Antoine Fuqua's Southpaw
40:00 Coming Attractions: Mistress America & The Finest Hours

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversation!

Southpaw & Ant-Man