King McQueen On Every Screen

by Jason Adams

Steve McQueen, the man who directed five, count 'em, five of last year's best films with his Small Axe series, is about to confound everybody fixated on old-fashioned definitions of Art all over again with a new three-part thingamajig for the BBC called Uprising.  THR is calling it a "docuseries" and this one, on paper, does admittedly sound more like a proper old-fashioned series than the Small Axe anthology ended up seeming (to me). We'll  wait and see how McQueen confounds our expectations, since he does always love to do that, and to stunning effect. And hey if awards voting bodies can't keep up with where and how the art is happening that's their fault, not the artists.

Uprising will focus in closer on the 1981 events that formed the backdrop of Axe's fourth chapter "Alex Wheatle" -- namely the New Cross Fire which killed 13 young people, and the Black People's Day of Action and then the Brixton Riots which followed right on its heels. It's not entirely clear if this will be entirely a documentary -- McQueen's quoted as saying it will be drawn from "testimonials" of the people involved -- or if there will be a hybrid project with a fictionalized mix of recreations. Not that McQueen needs help but I'm hoping he draws some inspiration from Raoul Peck's recent HBO series Exterminate All the Brutes, which threw absolutely everything at us all at once and blew my socks straight off in the process.

Lunchtime Poll: Which Lizzie would you rather be axe murdered by?

It will never fail to amuse us how Hollywood can rarely go more than, say, six months without announcing competing projects about the same topic. Today we hear news that Elizabeth Olsen (surely feeling the love from the WandaVision reception) will be playing axe murderer Candy Montgomery in an HBO miniseries called Love and Death based on the non-fiction book "Evidence of Love: True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs". This book was previously adapted into a TV movie A Killing in a Small Town which won Barbara Hershey the Golden Globe in the 1990s. But this miniseries is NOT the same project as the previously announced Candy which is based on the same crime with Elisabeth Moss headlining. But since we haven't heard a peep about the Moss project in several months, maybe that one isn't happening after all. 

Nevertheless it all begs the question: Which Lizzie would you rather be axe murdered by?

bike trails

Jessica Walter (1941-2021)

by Nathaniel R

Showbiz lost another great this week as Jessica Walter passed away at 80 years of age. Her sensational and much-memed performance of smug, biting, privileged Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, will live forever but it was just a small portion of her long career...

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What did you think of WandaVision?

by Nathaniel R

DO NOT READ OR COMMENT IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED WANDAVISION - SPOILERS

Today we were treated to the final episode of Disney+'s hit WandaVision, returning us to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by way of streaming sidebar. Watching WandaVision was a like a meta experience on steroids. The show itself was intentionally constructed that way using Wanda Maximoff's (Elisabeth Olsen) love of TV sitcoms to comment, however broadly on them, but more pointedly on nostalgia and the human need for escapism...

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Showbiz History: Linda Blair movies, Kurt Russell's Emmy nod, and Burt Reynolds on a bear-skin rug

8 random things that happened on this day, February 11th, in showbiz history...

Linda Blair made several TV movies in the 1970s post The Exorcist

1975 Sarah T Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic starring fresh Oscar nominee Linda Blair airs on NBC. It was the second of a handful of TV movies she made after The Exorcist that all traded on the dichotomy of her being young and innocent in scary adult situations...

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