Links: Madonna's Biopic, "Fast Times" Read, Pattinson's Return, and "Popeye" Remaster

• CNN Madonna will direct the biopic she's been teasing about her own life. She's co-writing it with the brilliant Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult). It'll be interesting to see if Madonna can pull this off. She used to have such a great sense of humor about herself and that would come in handy here. No word yet about casting though the internet rumor mill has us convinced they're looking at Julia Garner (Ozark)
• Awards Daily Delroy Lindo will be submitted as a Lead to the Oscars for Da Five Bloods
• Theater Mania It took her long enough! Broadway star Laura Benanti is finally releasing her first album (next month)

Tatlany Maslany, Fast Times, Popeye and more after the jump...

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Review: Weathering with You

By Tim

Makoto Shinkai, the Japanese animation director whose new film Weathering with You opens this weekend in the US, has honed in on a few particular aesthetic preoccupations with laserlike intensity over the years. One of these is rain and the way that each droplet catches and reflects the diffuse light of a cloudy day; one is the brilliance of sunbeams piercing their way into shady areas, with fuzzy, dusty edges blurring the difference between light and dark; one is the way that riding in trains forces a lateral flatness onto the perception of the rider, transforming landscapes into planes of action moving across each other. He also favors stories about the extreme emotional states of teenagers, starting with but not limited to youthful romantic passion, and these stories tend to end in lopsided sentimentality expressed with as much unsatisfying contrivance as a decent filmmaker would dare throw into an otherwise satisfying screenplay.

Weathering with You, comes with a scenario that has been created with the apparent goal of specifically enabling him to chase every one of those things as far as a person possibly could. It's about a near-future Tokyo where it's always raining, and a teen girl who has the ability to create localized pockets of rainless sunshine...

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Links: Letitia, Lists, Lady Gaga, and 'Live-Action' Remakes

• Slate a rant about Vice's insulting post-credits sequence. A *lot* of people really hate Vice. Will that stop the Academy from voting for it? The studio controlled the conversation for a long time with the embargo and it built up real awards steam. We shall see.
• Cartoon Brew looks into Disney's weird stance about their Lion King remake. They keep saying "it's not animated" but we all know it is!
• /Film the live action remake of Japanese hit Your Name will be 'Americanized'

• Deadline Dame June Whitfield of Absolutely Fabulous fame has died at 93
• Into the Spider-Verse the screenplay is online if you're interested
• Vulture a survey and exploration of what Asian-American art meant this past year featuring Burning, Crazy Rich Asians, Searching and more...
• The Atlantic has a series of articles called "And Scene" that's worth checking out zeroing in on great scenes from the year
• Coming Soon supposedly Bird Box had the best first week of all time for views on Netflix but the company is still totally cagey about stats and numbers so it's hard to trust. We don't even know what counts as a view really - did you have to finish watching it for example?
• The Root Letitia Wright crowned box office queen of 2018 (it helps to be in the top two grossers of course)
• Vulture "horror is not defined by what scares you"
• MovieWeb More news on what Disney+ streaming service is planning (i.e. tons and tons of Marvel shows)

List-Mania
• IndieWire 52 directors choose their favorite films of the year. This is a good read and the variety of titles cited is noteworthy, reminding you more than critics lists have how different each person's experience of cinema in a particular year can be.
• Cinemablographer chooses 20 best performances of the year and Nicole Kidman makes the list twice! Some unusual picks here but thankfully no category fraud!
• Furious Cinema top 20 of the year, in no particular order featuring Suspiria, Spider-Verse, and more
• Jesse Knight best movie taglines of 2018 beginning with... Dog Days (lol!)
• Vulture 10 best podcasts of 2018
• The Guardian Mark Kermode's top 10 list with BlacKkKlansman, Leave No Trace...
• Vulture 10 best film scores of 2018

Exit Video
Lady Gaga performs inside a mecha-robot in her new Las Vegas residency show "Enigma"

I’m gonna be thinking about this for a few days... the POWER... #ENIGMA pic.twitter.com/4Yj9orazre

— LG Updates (@LadyGagaVegas) December 29, 2018

Podcast: Crazy Rich Asians and Glenn Close for Best Actress

Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl welcome Nick Davis back to the podcast this week for lots of Crazy Rich Asians talk.

Index (58 minutes)
00:01 Introductions. Randomness.
02:10 Nick has read the book that The Wife is based on!
05:01 Crazy Rich Asians talk. Lots and lots on with SPOILERS (sorry). We love the ensemble including Michelle Yeoh, Harry Shum Jr, Pierre Png, Gemma Chan, and more...
36:34 Older films we've been watching: Travels with My Aunt (1972) Your Name (2016), and Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969)
42:00 Recent releases: I Feel Pretty, Madeline's Madeline, The Darkest Minds
50:45 Steve James new docuseries "America to Me"
54:00 Glenn Close for Best Actress! 

Referenced in this discussion
• Nathaniel's year old review of The Wife from TIFF
• Murtada's Desiree Akhavan interview
• Justin Chang's Crazy Rich Asians review
• Kelley Dong's Crazy Rich Asians review
• The 1972 Best Actress list

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Crazy Rich Asians, The Wife

What did you see or Smurf this weekend?

The weekend's biggest new film was Smurfs: The Lost Village... which probably says all you need to know about this mini Spring lull between blockbusters (another Fast & Furious is next).

Audiences weren't of one hive mind with people going to see a little of everything, though The Boss Baby and Beauty and the Beast still dominated as they did last weekend. Beauty and the Beast has been so dominant already that it will surely end the year as the second or third highest grosser. For comparisons sake, if you throw it back into last year's calendar, it would be #3 behind Rogue One and Finding Dory and ahead of Captain America: Civil War...

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