The Oscar Race Plot Keeps Thickening... or is it Thinning?

by Nathaniel R

For those of you who are wondering why the Oscar charts are still not updated, here's a simple fact. Every time I go to work on them, something huge changes and I have to start over. I'm fully aware that other pundits keep making breathless pronouncements of what will actually WIN the Oscars but I just can't do that. We STILL have no real sense of what will actually open since Hollywood keeps clearing and resetting the chess board. The latest upheaval is that West Side Story, Steven Spielberg's remake of the Oscar-winning classic that didn't need to be remade, has moved back an entire year to December 2021. So now both of the big latinx musicals that were originally intended for 2020 have just essentially scrawled a one over the final zero on their original calendars with The Heights in summer 2021 and West Side Story for Christmas 2021...

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How Mulan got the Rey Palpatine Treatment

by Ginny O'Keefe

After I watched Mulan (2020), the lackluster live-action remake of the beloved 1998 animated movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the bitterness and anger I felt after watching The Rise of Skywalker back in December. The feelings of disappointment and resentment were incredibly familiar, all stemming from the fact that both Mulan (2020) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019) refute the idea that a hero can be anyone and come from anywhere. This is where both films ultimately fail their two female leads. 

In the original animated film, Mulan is an ordinary girl who feels incredibly out of place and cannot seem to do right by her family or the deeply ingrained misogynistic society that surrounds her. She has no fighting skills, no hunger for war, no royal heritage, no outstanding measure of beauty. She has nothing that could suggest she is “special” besides her brave and kind heart...

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Say No to the Blue Face - Jonathan Majors joins Ant-Man 3

by Ben Miller

Comic book movies can attract some high-class talent, and it looks like Lovecraft Country star Jonathan Majors is the latest to join the fray. Deadline is reporting Majors will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man 3. The third installment of Marvel’s most light-hearted franchise isn’t expected to come out until 2022, but Majors will join Ant-Man vets Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas, alongside director Peyton Reed.  It is unknown whether TFE-pfavorite Michelle Pfeiffer will return...

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New Mutants and New Films. What did you see this past week?

Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.

I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...

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Curio: Paul Harding's Collectible Heroes

by Nathaniel R

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As someone who studied illustration but couldn't wrap my hands around three-dimensional work, I've always been fascinated and envious of sculptors. In fact, whenever I'm in a museum I'm much more likely to drift towards sculptures than stare at paintings. In fan culture sculptors have a special if uncelebrated place. Someone has to sculpt those action figures and collectibles you can buy and CG animation involves lots of 3 dimensional rendering. Paul Harding recently caught our eye for a jaw-dropping rendering of the principal characters of our current favourite comedy series What We Do in the Shadows (pictured above). It's brilliant caricature and the details in the expressions are joy-making -- look at Nadja's eye roll! 

More examples of his work after the jump...

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