ICYMI: Missi's Memoirs, Bellucci's Bond, Freakshow's Find

Christian Bale moonlighting as Natalie Portman's hairdresser

7 Highlights You May Have Missed
Grand Budapest sounds as good as it looks
Bellucci + Bond. Where does the Italian goddess stand in the Bond Babes Age Stats?
A Year With Kate: Love Affair *sobbing* The series is almost over.
From Freakshow to Magic Mike XXL - meet actress Kathy Deitch
Reader Questions Podcast Globes & SAG discussed
Rhett vs. Ashley! Do you give a damn on Scarlett's 75th anniversary?
Knight of Cups trailer. Like flipping through Chivo's Instagram

But Most Importantly...
One more round of applause for this week's Celebrity Guest Blogger, Missi Pyle. Her long-legged box office hit Gone Girl, with features Missi memorably nailing Nancy Grace journalism, comes to DVD on January 13th! (Will it get any Oscar nominations that week?).

2015 should be a good year for Missi fans since she promises she has a new album and a handful of indies wrapped. Missi was also kind enough to share thoughts and advice on being a working actor, reveal her all time favorite movie (and a few favored actors), offer up a bunch of silly photos, and share her HILARIOUS memoir from the 84th Academy Awards.

Basically Missi is everything, okay?! Okay. 

As you can imagine, dear readers, I'd love to do make the One Day Celebrity Blog Takeover thing a quarterly event but it's tough to find goddesses as awesome and generous as Missi & Melanie & Dana & Leslye who are not just talented but also into talking movies/tv as showbiz fans. Who will be our next victim? We'll find out together in 2015. Stay tuned!

ICYMI. Play Catch-Up!

December and January are always the busiest months in these parts so even if you're clicking over regularly your bound to miss something. Tragedy! 

[Quieting the inner drama queen now.] Perhaps it's not tragic, in the standard definition, but it's sad. Why miss a post you might love just because you overslept one day, partied one night, or (gasp) went offline for a full 24 hours (pull yourself together, reader, never do that again -- that's what April and August are for!). Herewith a handful of recent key posts you may have missed but shouldn't have! And the unending swath of awards news in list form.

Five Musts
Jake's Southpaw... would you rather?
Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is going gray; he just hit 50
Monty smells Cake. Will Oscar? 
Podcast goes behind the Critics Awards curtain. How do those votes happen?
Amy vs. Nick. Where's your vote gone, girl?  

Awards Updates Golden Globe Nods | OFCS Mommy issues | SAG Nominees |  AFI conservativeness | Grammy detour | Help me with my "Critics Choice" ballot

Interview Jamboree
We've really been hitting the 1:1 circuit hard this year so we hope we're not overwhelming you with information so much as spoiling you with pleasure and making 2015 even more difficult for ourselves by way of 'how to top this?'. Before we move into yet more interviews (18 still to transcribe. whew) and the Year in Review Madness which begins tonight and lasts forever [insert nefarious laugh] you really should play catch up with these highlights: the inimitable actress who loves to play wild women; the legend who turned down Sex & the City; the iconoclast who won't option her own life story to the movies; the perfect specimen who plays with the superheroes; and the visionary who made that crazy convincing ape village; and last, but by no means least, the one and only shockingly versatile Carrie Coon, that newbie who humanized Ben Affleck onscreen just after wowing everyone on stage in Woolf and killing it on TV in The Leftovers.

Will all the statues one day belong to her? 

All of that and you still haven't liked us on Facebook or followed us on Twitter or donated (see sidebar) or told all your friends and relatives about us ?! What more do you want from us - Blood!?

ICYMI November Is A Wrap

We hope you had a lovely holiday and that at some point this weekend you found time to give thanks for all the goodies this movie year has brought you this year. The most important film event in the last half of November was the death of entertainment giant Mike Nichols, who we celebrated with both a tribute to his collaboration with Meryl Streep and a group effort highlighting individual idiosyncratic favorite performances from his high-quality actor-friendly filmography.

Here are a few more highlights from November, you may have missed if you're just joining or rejoining us..

Laura Dern. photographed by Carolyn Cole

• Nathaniel sat down with the essential Laura Dern, one of the world's best screen actors, to talk Wild, psychotic women, and what the hell happened to her role in The Master
• Aca-yes, please. Margaret took a look at the Pitch Perfect 2 trailer
• We talked Spirit Award Nominees
• 'Quick Impressions', a new series celebrating the working actor, like "voice matching" Sean Patrick Doyle, debuted and we're glad you seem to like it
• Nathaniel suggested ensembles SAG ought to look at and interviewed the fine Australian actor Jason Clarke from one of them.
• Amir shared the top Box Office Hits of 2014 that were not franchises
• And the Podcast returned with The Theory of Everything and an AFI wrap-up

More highlights from early November here...

Coming in December:
It's campaign season so expect lots of coverage of the hunt for Oscar nominations, our team's FYCs, precursor madness with the Globes "Critics Choice" and SAG, and celebrity interviews. We'll also kick off the Year in Review festivities and the Film Bitch Awards -- your favorite party, yes? (say yes) -- and talk Christmas releases from Annie to Selma. December also means that we'll reach the end of "A Year with Kate" as Anne-Marie hits Love Affair.  

Jose Gives Thanks.

Editor's Note: I asked Team Experience to tell us what they're thankful for this year during the holiday weekend. Here's Jose in the cinematic spirit.

Jose here. This year I’m thankful...

For Hardy with puppies. And Godard with Roxy.
For Keira, Kristen and Kirsten.
For snakes made out of clouds.  
For cruising in French lakes (even with killers on the loose)
For movies about toys that didn’t treat me like a kid.
For Marion x 2. For Joaquin Phoenix x 2. For Chastain x 4 (she doesn't make it seem like bragging either!) 

For Dan Stevens’ abs and killer acting chops (pun intended).
For Shia in the buff.
For Carrie Coon and Jenny Slate (can they play sisters some day?).
For Swedish films about skiing that reminded me how much I love Mike Nichols.
For Broadway actors in movies (I'm looking at you Jefferson Mays in Inherent Vice).
For Edward Norton's tan. 

For Anne in outer space.
For Nolan growing the balls to acknowledge he makes movies from the heart, not the mind.
For Daft Punk in Eden.
For Snowden in a robe. And Tilda in the snow.
For Emma Watson's U.N. speech and Daniel Radcliffe in Horns.

For TV that makes me forget bad movies and IMAX reminding me how I could never quit the movies (even the bad ones).
For Meryl's daughter, Grace.
For singing Emma Stone
For Colin Farrell's eyebrows, Elizabeth Moss' face, Rosamund Pike’s voice. And Ben Affleck's butt in Gone. xo 

-Jose

Related: Nathaniel gives thanks

Nathaniel's Thanks, Given.

The world is a tough place and the movies are our collective great escape. For your host here at TFE there's an awful lot to be thankful for. So as I prepare to stuff my face tomorrow with my best friends I will be especially thankful...

For the orange tabby in Gone Girl
For Julianne Moore getting her groove back on yoga mats and at beach houses
For Ava DuVernay and Jennifer Kent's vivid reminders that women can and do direct movies and we need those fresh voices.
For David Fincher's consistency at turning mainstream audiences on while never pandering

For Shia Labeouf because every film decade needs its defining crazy
For the blooming of Keira Knightley, from an always memorable but uneven actress, to a completely confident movie star, relaxed, nuanced and magnetic in two fine performances
For that shot of the paratroopers in Godzilla
For Finn Wittrock's arrival, sympathetic (Masters of Sex) then terrorizing (Freakshow) outcast beauty
For every single march scene in Selma
For "the world is round, people!" 

This scene, people. This scene. It's everything.

For Melanie Lynskey onscreen (Instant-watch Happy Christmas now - it's delightful!) and off
For memorable physicality: Chastain's scolding fingers, Krysten Ritter's Big (Side)Eyes, Luke Pasqualino's battering-ram run, Ralph Fiennes cartoon dashes, and Billy Magnussen's horseback riding (or, rather, his mounting and dismounting)
For the single best crop of LGBT films in one calendar year that we've had in ages and ages (Love is Strange, Pride, The Way He Looks, Stranger by the Lake, The Circle, and so on)
For everything that happens in the elevator in Captain America: Winter Soldier
For "Bob's Burgers"... particularly Tina Belcher. I'm late to the party but that show makes me laugh harder than any show since 30 Rock. 

For Jonathan Glazer's return to the movie camera after 10 long years away - his gaze still deliciously alien
For that pop-up Babadook book I just ordered (my advanced thanks)
For the singing voices of almost the full cast of Into the Woods - but especially Streep & Kendrick
For a film year so good I'm already struggling (before screenings are even complete) with too many options for the Film Bitch Awards rosters. I could go on and on... but...

Finally, I'm hugely thankful to my Film Experience team (who delight me so frequently) and to all of you, the readers. Especially if you donate monthly, visit frequently, share articles, and otherwise really engage with what we do here. You help keep the fires burning as we try year in and year out -- against bigger odds than you'd think -- to approach each film year and awards season from  lightly different angles than you'll see elsewhere and with more genuine all-eras all-genres movie love.

Abundance to you all! xoxo,

Nathaniel

P.S. What are you thankful for this holiday weekend? Onscreen and off.