Stop Trying to Make Link Happen

Next Movie can you recite all of Mean Girls in half an hour? This guy in a pink shirt can. 
AV Club Netflix knows you're lying about all those highbrow films you claim you watch!
Pop Matters this is a pretty great interview with Courtney Love about her short but fascinating career as an actress with The People Vs Larry Flynt as its focus
The Playlist Woody Allen needs the right idea for his eventual "shot in Sweden" film -- he's already done his Bergman riff (Interiors) so what could he do? 
Dark Horizons on how they're filming Quicksilver (Evan Peters) super-speed for the new X-Men flick 

Playbill It looks like Clint Eastwood's A Star is Born has been shoved aside for a different musical he's interested in since he's set to start filming his take on Jersey Boys later this month. Several cast members have been plucked from the stage show including Tony winning John Lloyd Young
Empire a new Legolas still from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (I shudder every time I type that title. Such a horrible title) 
Esquire What I've Learned: Woody Allen Edition

YouTube you've heard that 8 year old Nicki Minaj-addict Sophia Rose Grace got the Little Red Riding Hood role in Into the Woods right? This furthers my wariness about the movie.  That's actually kind of a tricky part which is usually cast older since uh... her whole plot is kind of a sexual metaphor
Coming Soon filming began today on Black Sea, the latest from Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) an treasure-hunt thriller starring Jude Law
In Contention reminds that This is Martin Bonner comes out this week. I thought it was already out but no matter. Go see it. It's good.
MovieWeb a television series based on The Exorcist may be on the way. No word on what happened to the previous series based on The Exorcist (from Martha Marcy May Marlene's Sean Durkin) that was supposed to be heading our way.

Review: Blue Jasmine

This review was originally published in my column at Towleroad

Cate Blanchett can't shut up in Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest dramedy which added more cities this weekend for its platform rollout. We join Jasmine (real name "Jeanette") in medias res on a flight to San Francisco as she's chattering away with, no, at an older companion. She goes on and on (and on some more!) about her love affair with her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) all the way through to baggage claim.

But Jasmine is a liar or at least a half truth-teller. We will immediately discover that her great love affair ended in ruin. Hal was a criminal, a financial con artist who pampered Jasmine with other people's fortunes and ruined everyone including Jasmine. She's moving in with her estranged adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), also ruined by Hal's crimes, now that she's destitute. Jasmine hasn't adjusted to her new facts, though, treating her cabbie from the airport like a personal chauffeur, and leaving him a big tip considering she's supposed to be penniless.Jasmine isn't always "in the now" as it were. She never is actually, talking or bragging or obsessing over the past. [More...]

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Sex & The Linky

Sound on Sight has a massive post about famous ongoing director/muse collaborations: Liv & Ingmar, Lynch & Dern, Fassbinder & Schygulla, etcetera...
Empire Chris Evans is becoming a director with 1:30 Train, a romantic caper about a woman trying to catch the 1:30 train (with the help of Chris Evans, who will co-star)
Pajiba celebrates the release of 2 Guns. "Boom, you've been Denzel'd"

In Contention 15 awards players still looking for distribution including one I hadn't heard of Tracks with Mia Wasikowska crossing the desert with John Curran (The Painted Veil) directing. I've been thinking that the Best Actress chart is leaning a little 'woman of a certain age' for Oscar's taste (if not for mine) so maybe Mia and are peers are just in hiding right now? 
David Poland says that the bullshit myth is that originals don't make big money at the box office and it's only sequels that did. He backs it up with titles.
Variety Whoa. are the Weinsteins going to get Miramax back. A merger may be in the works
Cinema Blend on the list of possible Bale/Batman replacements for that Superman/Batman team up movie. Surprisingly they're not all super famous with Richard Armitage (The Hobbit) and Max Martini (Pacific Rim) both on the list. Weirdly there appears to be little thought of Joseph Gordon-Levitt despite that The Dark Knight Rises Robin set up.

You guys, I can't decide if this "What if Woody Allen directed The Wolverine" is funny or not. Help me decide.

I think I'm in the place of LOL without the OL part. So, maybe not? I like it in concept!

/Film Warner Bros is still trying to get that Akira Without Japanese People abomination made.
MNPP The Golden Girls dollhouse? Amazing!
Signs and Sirens hates on Blue Jasmine. My review will be up tomorrow.
Coming Soon Josh Trank says the rumors about Miles Teller being Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four are not true. Good -- I like Miles Teller a lot but he's about 90% wrong for that role -- but it's going to be terrible anyway. Why must Fantastic Four movies be so terrible? 

Finally, I feel I've been remiss in not linking up to Emily Nussbaum's great great rescue piece on "Sex and The City" in The New Yorker. People have been discussing it online for a few days but I hadn't mentioned it. I'm so glad that a writer as scalpel-sharp as Nussbaum is a fan and performs this reputation resuscitation operation. It's too bad that the show's rep suffered after the two theatrical features drifted towards becoming what people always accused the show of being. Which it never truly was. I especially love her (correct) assertion that Carrie Bradshaw was the first female anti-hero on television. Carrie was of course reviled for it whereas her male counterparts in terrible behavior are regularly championed by fans and critics. I know people probably think I harp on gender politics too much here at the blog but what's happened to Sex & The City is a classic example of sexism at work. Canons are one of the best places to see the power of the heteronormative patriarchy thrown into obvious relief. "The greatest this!" and "The greatest that!" lists and the people who make them like critics organizations and awards shows and such often dismiss "feminine" identified films, tv, genre or entertainments as lesser than merely be excluding them from the conversation. But if you can't include "Sex and the City" as one of the shows that was instrumental in ushering in television's golden age -- just as crucial as "The Sopranos" -- you just weren't watching closely enough.

Should There Be An Oscar For Best Casting?

Yesterday I thought about casting director Juliet Taylor probably more than anyone on the planet who isn't Juliet Taylor. When her name came up on the screen in Woody Allen's trademark font during Blue Jasmine I smiled -- I love that font and those familiar names so much. I recalled that she'd narrowly missed our top ten for "Women Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar", winning the most votes for anyone not in the writing/directing/acting/producing fields. Her resume is astounding featuring the massive Woody Allen filmography and non Woody films as famous as The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, Terms of Endearment, The Stepford Wives and Interview with the Vampire (so you can probably thank her for Kirsten Dunst). We made that list in the hopes that someone with pull in the Academy would read it and think 'huh. These are great ideas to course correct!'

Woody Allen's infamous reputation as a silent director of actors extends into casting where his auditions are notoriously short... sometimes just a meet and greet is all you get. So you know Juliet Taylor works long hours before and after Woody says "yea" or "nay". So there I was thinking about her, wondering about how many decisions she's making on her own when the Academy announced that they were adding another new branch to their ranks, Casting Directors. People are already speculating about whether this means a Best Casting Oscar will be added to the annual horse race for gold.

poll by twiigs.com

My heart and mind war on this topic all the time. My heart knows that casting directors are crucial to a film's success and would warm to them being recognized -- it's obviously the single most important element of filmmaking that doesn't have a category. My mind, on the other hand, isn't sure this is a good idea. My mind knows that people would win the Oscars for the wrong reasons... even wronger [sic] reasons than people win other Oscars for in other categories! I'd argue that casting directors would win for which Movie Stars and Films were favored in any given year rather than their hard work filling the screen with less glitzy faces. I don't work in the film industry but I'd argue that Directors, Agents, Movie Stars, and Lawyers and Studio Heads signing off on budgets are the ones who decide which Movie Star is paired with which project -- especially since movie stars are often in place before the casting director is -- and that the casting director's brilliance is filling out the names in the below the title list, predicting the intangibles of chemistry and guiding the director to the right decisions about who goes best with whom. It's world building actually... the world of faces.

Rich DeliaI imagine Best Casting would nearly always line up with Best Ensemble at SAG and come to mean "Starriest Cast That Is Also Our Vote For Best Picture" which is quite reductive. Do you imagine the same?

If you had to vote on Best Casting for 2013 right now, what would you pick? Without contest I'd name Short Term 12 the winner for 2013 (thus far) which mixes the awesome Brie Larson with Tony winner John Gallagher Jr (currently on The Newsroom on HBO) and a large supporting cast of wonderful unknown child and teenage actors. So congratulations to  Rich Delia for winning my non-existent prize for this year! He only recently graduated to lead Casting Director (He also did Dallas Buyers Club this year) but he's been very busy for the past few years as a Casting Associate on dozens of movies including The Help and August: Osage County.

Woody Allen - The Last 12 Years

Podcast mate and friend Joe Reid polled several critics (including myself) for an article at Tribeca Film detailing Woody Allen's recent output as the critical hit Blue Jasmine hits theaters. I won't be able to see the new entry in his filmography until Sunday since I'm in Chicago for the weekend and limited release films only believe in Los Angeles and New York for their coming out balls. But since I took the time to write Joe notes on each film for this collective list, I thought I'd share them. I regret to inform that in doing this I have just been reminded that my proud familiar refrain "I've never missed a Woody Allen movie in the theater since I saw my first one in 1984!" is not technically true anymore. This article forced me to recall that I did not see and still have not seen Cassandra's Dream (2007) ... though I can't honestly remember why. Have you? 

Here's my ranking from worst to best of Mr Allen's recent work if you'd like to compare it to the consensus list at Tribeca. I've also included their Rotten Tomatoes percentage and box office gross just for survey perspective. 

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