Months of Meryl: An Epilogue

John and Matthew watched every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

Meryl has been a superstar for 40 years now

MATTHEW: You never forget the performers who first reach out to you from an illuminated screen and lay claim to your gaze, mind, and devotion. Before I knew anything about the art of screen acting, I knew about the miraculous and almost mythic marvel that is Meryl Streep. Months of Meryl was an undertaking that exhausted and aggravated me without end: for every unparalleled Silkwood in Streep’s filmography, there are at least two The House of the Spirits; for every forgotten or underrecognized gem like The Seduction of Joe Tynan, One True Thing, or A Prairie Home Companion, there are at least three Still of the Nights, Primes, or Dark Matters. But, more importantly, this project illuminated a great deal about a veteran artist whose empathetic interest in the lives of others moved me at such an impressionable age and will never cease to do so.

Watching and writing about Streep’s films side by side by side for well over a year has not taught me a single overarching lesson, but only deepened my appreciation for her mastery...

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Months of Meryl: The Post (2017)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#52 — Katharine “Kay” Graham, pioneering Washington Post publisher who authorized the printing of the Pentagon Papers.

JOHN: Since it was first announced in March of 2017, deep into the first hundred days of the Trump presidency, The Post moved at a breakneck speed from rewriting to shooting to post-production before it quickly arrived in theaters in December of that year. Spielberg had paused production on his historical drama The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and after reading a spec script by Liz Hannah, set the gears into motion on The Post, assembling his usual team (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, among others), along with two screen legends who had never before shared a single frame. This urgent sense of timeliness is palpable in The Post, which is both a riveting period piece about a landmark historical moment and a rousing paean to the free press in our distressing present...

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Doc Corner: 'The Most Dangerous Man in America' Goes Where 'The Post' Doesn't

By Glenn Dunks

If The Post gave you a hankering for the truth behind the Pentagon Papers, then the 2010 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers will prove uncommonly fulfilling. In fact, watching this Academy Award-nominated doc (it lost to The Cove), you would be hard-pressed to believe that it's about the same events as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg movie.

Last week we looked at The Price of Gold and how closedly I, Tonya mimicked it, so it's actually quite amusing to see that this week's Best Picture / Documentary cross-over is the complete opposite. Sure, they overlap here and cross-over there, but The Most Dangerous Man in America goes longer, deeper, wider, and somehow all but completely ignores The Washington Post and the personalities within the 2017 film...

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90th Oscar Nominations: Shape of Water Leads. Darkest Hour and Phantom Thread Surprise.

by Nathaniel R

Guillermo del Toro's beauty & the beast style macabre fantasy romance cold war mystery monstery movie whatsit The Shape of Water led the nominations with 13. (The record for most nominations remains 14 held jointly by Titanic, All About Eve and La La Land). Darkest Hour and Phantom Thread were the overperformers this morning with 6 nominations each even though many pundits (including myself) didn't think they'd quite manage Best Picture nods even though we were predicting them in other categories. For the record I myself had Phantom Thread in 10th place and Darkest Hour in 12th place (oops). As expected Blade Runner 2049 was the most nominated film without a Best Picture nomination (5 nominations. The record in the new era of the expanded Best Picture field remains with Carol which had 6 nominations). And finally The Post ends its whiplashing inducing what-is-happening-with-this-movie precursor adventure by scoring just 2 nods but they're biggies: Picture and Actress. 

TRIVIA AND COMMENTARY FOLLOWS...

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Tweetweek Turducken

Collected by Nathaniel R because Twitter is so toxic you shouldn't hang out there but you also shouldn't miss the more curated pleasures. Let's begin with a question that's enormously easy to answer:

Has there ever been a movie couple with better collective hair then Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS?

— Max Weiss (@maxthegirl) January 15, 2018

An emphatic chorus of "NO!" because seriously. Never. Never has there ever. After the jump some Star Wars, a little Frances McDormand, a laugh from Sharon Stone, and guest appearances by Ratatouille and The Greatest Showman...

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