i'm just a link machine... a bloggin' writin' fiend ♫

MNPP picks five favorite shots from his favorite movie Rosemary's Baby
Village Voice wonderful insightful review of Lily Tomlin as Grandma 
Comics Alliance did you know we almost got a Jurassic Park animated series before Spielberg changed his mind?  
Coming Soon Christian Bale to star in a biopic about Enzo Ferrari directed by Michael Mann
THR might we have another documentary theme nominated in the Original Song category? Lady Gaga & Diane Warren's "Till It Happens To You" from the campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground is a buzzy one

Coming Soon speaking of Lady Gaga, here's our first look at her in American Horror Story: Hotel
Out Cheyenne Jackson talks about her, too. She's all up in my internet today!
Pajiba on the expanding cast for that Netflix Brad Pitt movie War Machine 
Playbill Carrie The Musical being revived again... in Los Angeles this time in October. It never truly dies
The Film Stage James Gray has begun production on Lost City of Z starring Charlie Hunman, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, and Tom Holland. (They don't mention it in the article but this is the first time he's made a movie WITHOUT Joaquin Phoenix since his 1994 debut Little Odessa.)
The Film Stage also shares Bong Joon-Ho's 10 favorite films: Recent entries like Zodiac  appear alongside stone cold classics like Psycho and South Korean classics like The Housemaid (1960) which you might remember was recently remade.
Variety Hugh Jackman may make an Odyssey movie. 
Final Girl top 20 horror movies of the 21st century. I read stuff about horror by smart horror fans way way more often than I am willing to watch horror. Why is that? Don't know! But it's true.
Variety wonders why The Americans still can't catch a break with Emmy voters 
Variety is the Emmy race for Drama down to Game of Thrones versus Mad Men? 
i09 ewww Buffalo Bill's creepy house from Silence of the Lambs is for sale (basement not included which makes the news far less creepy)

Off Cinema For Fun
Bad Lip Reading takes on the First Republican Debate -heh
Zimbio "it turns out posing Nicki Minaj's wax figure on all fours was a bad idea" - ya think!? 

Showtune to go...
Congratulations to Tony winner Victoria Clark on her recent wedding! Beautiful wedding photos and if you've ever seen her perform you won't soon forget. Her acting and her gorgeous voice are ideally fused together and she gives splendid rich and nuanced musical performances. Lately she's been relegated to featured roles as mothers and grandmothers but she is one fine leading lady. Here she is doing Sondheim's classic "Losing My Mind" from the recent revival of Follies (Bernadette Peters played the role in NYC but Victoria took over for Los Angeles)

Photographed by Julia Wade 

Revisiting Rebecca (Pt 1) Off to Manderley

A 75th Anniversary Special
Alfred Hitchcock's Best Picture winner Rebecca (1940), based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, is 75 years old this month. To celebrate, Team Experience is experimenting with something entirely new: a baton pass viewing of sorts. We don't even know how it will turn out so we hope you'll stick with it and enjoy. Five of us will be watching Rebecca in shifts. So we each get about 26 minutes of it to write about. As your host, Nathaniel, it's my duty to start running when the gun goes off. In this case perhaps lighting an Olympic flame and starting to jog is a more fitting analogy?

Flames... Breathing.... on the side of Mrs Danvers face...

Part 1. By Nathaniel 

00:01 How I do love the MGM Lion roar. First some loud David O. Selznick fanfare in the form of a title card and then a Selznick pictures tag and later another Selznick credit. Guess who's paying the bills? And then a silhouette of trees, which hey, Isn't that how GWTW's title cards begin, too? Bragging much, Selznick?

Opening credits in old movies are always over so quickly. This one names only 35 people, and 5 of them are the writers. Can you imagine?

35 names wouldn't even cover the visual effects department credits on a remake of Rebecca from the fire sequence alone (this sentence was not intended to give Hollywood any ideas). Once Pandora's Box of Credits was unlocked, credits got longer and longer.

02:00 We begin on wrought-iron gates with one of the most famous of opening movie lines. 

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. 

(Something no one ever said about Lars von Trier's Manderlay.)

In her dream state opening monologue our protagonist (Joan Fontaine's Mrs de Winter) mentions the supernatural. She drifts like a spirit through those gates, winding through fog and trees until she conjures up a silhouette of Manderley, "secretive and silent," which is just as well because the lies begin immediately thereafter. She tells us that "Time could not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls" but that's the end of any notion of immortality. More...

Click to read more ...

Cinema's Greatest On-Screen and Off-Screen Couples

Here's abstew with a Valentine special!

In the dark of the movie theatre is where we fall in love. Romantic films have influenced our lives and how we love since the dawn of cinema. And as we watch–perhaps on a first date–the actors fall in love on the silver screen, we swoon. More often than not, if you believe location rumors, that passion on-screen finds its way into the real-life relationships of the actors involved. In honor of Valentine's Day, let's celebrate those cinematic couples who's love burned bright on and off the big-screen.

Here are five of Hollywood's most iconic lovers...

Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh

Click to read more ...

Chang Chen Marries

Wedding bells. Congratulations to Chen Chang (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Grand Master) who married his girlfriend of 4 years Monday in Taipei.

She passed the bouquet to Chens second most famous onscreen romantic partner Qi Shu (Three Times). Awwww. The starstudded guest list was conveniently already in town since the 50th Annual Golden Horse Awards take place tomorrow. TFE Reader Tony is calling tomorrow's event "the red carpet to end all red carpets" as far as Chinese-language cinema goes. Over 40 past Best Actor and Best Actress winners are expected to attend.

Could you imagine how fun that would be at the Oscars? I would say we'll have to wait until Oscar's 100th anniversary (February 2028!) but since they care so little about their own history these days that's unlikely.

[Left: with Crouching Tiger lover Zhang Ziyi promoting The Grandmaster]

Who will win the Golden Horses tomorrow? 
Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster (an Oscar submission) is the nomination leader but Chen who has never won the Golden Horse is not one of them. His co-stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Zhang Ziyi are nominated, though. The Grandmaster will have to fight off significant threats to win though. The lineup is a strong one including critical hits Stray Dogs and A Touch of Sin, Johnnie To's Drug War and Ilo Ilo (Singapore's Oscar submission).

Mr & Mr Ben Whishaw!

Congratulations to Ben Whishaw who confirms he's gay and happily married to Mark Bradshaw, the composer.

Whishaw & Bradshaw

Here's a cute trivia note that too few sites will mention: Bradshaw scored Whishaw's rare romantic leading man gig in Bright Star (2009) where the actor played the poet John Keats. Good god that movie is underappreciated... except for here at TFE where it won multiple nominations in its year. If it brought them together it's even more lovely in retrospect. 

Bradshaw recently scored the Emmy-nominated miniseries Top of the Lake (it's mesmerizing - watch it!) and Whishaw will next be seen in Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem, the next James Bond film reprising his "Q" role, and possibly a Ron Howard picture called In the Heart of the Sea.