Happy Birthday, Laura Dern!

by Cláudio Alves

Laura Dern has been blessing us with her existence for 55 years. The Oscar-winning actress started young, being the daughter of two screen titans in their own right – Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. Indeed, one of her earliest big-screen roles was by her mother's side in Martin Scorsese's 1974 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Since then, Dern has flourished into one of American cinema's most important modern performers. Often driven to auteurs with bold visions, she's a director's actress whose commitment to her roles is never in question. She's never in danger of dispassionate acting, giving it her all 100% of the time and often twisting her visage into terrifying extremes. She really is 'The Face.'

To celebrate the occasion, a list of favorite Laura Dern film performances…

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Emmy Nominations for 2018: Glow, Mrs Maisel, Game of Thrones, and the Snubbing of Mindhunter

Happy 70th, Emmys! The big awards night won't be held until September 17th (hosted by Colin Jost and Michael Che) but the nominations were announced this morning. The Emmys have so many categories that beware when you see any site that says "full list of nominees." Even the major news outlets (like Variety and all the massive circulation papers) do this while leaving out a shit ton of categories. In other words don't believe it when anyone says "full list". The only place that regularly shares that is the Emmy site itself. Here's the PDF. 

The behemoth, once again, is "Game of Thrones" which, after a year off, returns again to its throne of "Most Nominated Show" just barely edging out "Saturday Night Live," "West World" and "The Handmaid's Tale" all of which received 20 or more nominations. I was particularly happy about plentiful nominations for "GLOW" though it's worth noting that these nominations are not from the show as we know it right this second but from season 1 a full year ago. 

After the jump the major stuff and a few other categories that we're interested in... 

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A Reflection on "The Tale"

By Spencer Coile 

I intended for this to be a formal review of Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical HBO film, The Tale. I was going to dive into the Sundance darling and discuss it, celebrate it, and critique it the way we do most movies. I was going to conclude with the film’s Emmy chances, where it will no doubt be a worthy contender for Best Made for TV Movie and Laura Dern in Leading Actress. And it’s no wonder – it was critically lauded as a timely reflection of the #MeToo movement.  

But a "review" would be doing Fox’s story a disservice. This is, first and foremost, a personal story about Fox's reconciliation with the past as a means of understanding her present and future. The Tale was acclaimed coming out of Sundance, and was quickly scooped up by HBO. Gone were Dern’s Oscar chances, but this decision ensured that the film would reach an audience, which according to Fox, was the point all along.

Dern plays Jennifer Fox at 48-years-old – a documentarian, a professor, engaged. On the surface, she seems to be living a completely fulfilling life. But when her mother (Ellen Burstyn) finds a story that Jennifer wrote at 13, her world begins to crumble...

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