Beauty vs Beast: Running Mates

Jason Adams from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" query -- when I saw it written in my calendar that today is the 25th anniversary of The Fugitive my first thought is I must have done that movie for this series before, but a quick skim tells me I hadn't, and so here we are! I vividly remember The Fugitive coming out in the summer of 1993, a banner year for this movie-lover - I had gone to see Jurassic Park a dozen times by then and I needed something fresh and new to feed this newly awoken beast inside me; Harrison Ford leaping out of a train-crash did the trick.

I went to see the film several times after that, but save a few minutes here and there on TV I don't think I have seen it since? Still it's an easy enough film to remember, especially after we spent that entire year's awards season getting the clip of Tommy Lee Jones saying "gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse" hammered into our heads over and over and over, until he got his Oscar for it the next spring.

bike trails

PREVIOUSLY Two weeks back we had you tackling PTA's The Master - turns out that Joaquin Pheonix holds that title, taking a precise 2/3rds of your vote. Said Devin D:

"This performance truly cemented Joaquin Phoenix as one of the irrefutable greats, and it was very nice that Philip Seymour Hoffman got to work yet again before his untimely passing with Paul Thomas Anderson in a role so sizable."

Ranking Tully's Figures of Speech

Seven years after fucking up Charlize Theron’s silk, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody teamed up again to fuck up just about every other fabric in her house in this year’s Tully. Here Theron plays Marlo, a soon-to-be mommy of three struggling to find any room for excitement or naps in her caffeine-deprived days. Enter Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the night nanny she hires to add some hours of sleep to her frustrations.

From the opening scene, Cody assures the audience she has no intention of grounding these characters in the reality that corresponds to them. Her script keeps this up throughout by frequently using figures of speech and occasional underwater reveries to buoy up the characters in their imagination. She reinforces the fantasies her script's players construct and dress themselves up in (from Tahitian home bars to cat ears headbands) with an equally rhetorical language. We've ranked enough of our favorite metaphors and similes from Tully that we can already hear the wheels of your high school English teacher’s TV cart rolling up to your classroom.

Ten of our favorite lines and very wet spoilers after the cut...

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Supporting Actress Smackdowns, All Episodes

by Nathaniel R

The Supporting Actress Smackdown began at StinkyLulu's dearly departed blogspot many years ago. We revived the series here for summertime airings with his blessing a few years ago, and get this, there are only 25 years that haven't been visited. If you axe the years that are too recent for retrospectives and remove the years that have a missing film (neither streaming nor available on DVD) than we're down to only 12 years that we can visit!

In total 56 years have been reviewed. In those Smackdowns, the rotating panel has agreed with Oscar 48% of the time (if you count ties that included the Oscar winner as agreement. Though Oscar has never had a tie in a Supporting category there have been six ties at the Smackdown.) Herewith an index of where we've been and where we might go next...

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What did you see this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

This weekend looked much the same as last weekend with Mission Impossible - Fallout still dominant and the same limited release hits going strong (Three Identical Strangers and Blindspotting and Eighth Grade... though the latter has now gone wide - yay!). Disney's Christopher Robin opened slightly below expectations but family friendly films sometimes have staying power and audiences reportedly like it... 

Weekend Box Office Estimates (August 3rd-5th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
Mission: Impossible - Fallout	Three Identical Strangers
1. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT  $35 (cum. $124.4) REVIEW	1. THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $1 on 405 screens (cum. $8.4) REVIEW
2.🔺 CHRISTOPHER ROBIN $25 *NEW* REVIEW	2. BLINDSPOTTING $660k on 523 screens (cum. $3.1)
3.🔺 THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME $12.3 *NEW*	3. 🔺 ALONG WITH THE GODS 2 $329k on 48 screens *NEW*
4. MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN $9 (cum. $91.3) REVIEW	4.  LEAVE NO TRACE $266k on 169 screens (cum. $5.1) TRAILER DISCUSSION
5. EQUALIZER 2 $8.8 (cum. $79.8)	5. 🔺 MCQUEEN $181k on 34 screens (cum. $491) REVIEW

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The Link Next Door

• Brain Pickings Marilyn Monroe's unpublished poems on the anniversary of her death
• Vulture Every Tom Cruise performance ranked. Interesting and sound choices mostly though I don't understand the #1 choice at all.
• TV Line The Americans wins big at the Television Critics Awards while Killing Eve is named best new series

• Salon has a piece on MoviePass troubles that is the most sane and balanced I've read. (I'm so sick of the disdain most articles have for a subscription that has meant so much to so many people and convinced them to see more movies - only a good thing!)
• Coming Soon Patrick Stewart to lead Star Trek again
• EW Lance Bass is buying the Brady Bunch house. Wha?
• Variety... spoke too soon. Lance Bass lost the house again. And it upset about the shady dealings!

Heated Discussion Point
As you may have heard by now Chloe Moretz has dissed the gay conversation camp drama Boy Erased sight unseen because the director isn't queer unlike her gay conversion camp drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Her reasoning is 'queer people should be making queer films'. As you may have guessed I have some feelings about this. A) Maybe people should wait until they see films before judging them and B) Maybe a straight woman taking a gay role when there are plenty of queer women who can act shouldn't be throwing such stones? and C) We should all be worrying about this emotionally and intellectually lazy epidemic of people demanding and assuming that artists stay in their lane and only do biographical work from here on out; Artists are capable of great leaps of imagination. Ang Lee is straight and made two great gay movies plus a smashingly good Austen adaptation and he definitely didn't grow up British and white and female in the 19th century.  Spike Lee has made two terrific movies with non black leads (Summer of Sam and 25th Hour). White guy Hal Ashby made a fascinating movie about race (The Landlord). Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar tend to make amazing movies about women and only occasionally about gay men, though they are gay men. Steve McQueen's first two genius movies were about a white guy. Etcetera. Not everyone can or should be like Sofia Coppola and Woody Allen and just make movies about one specific kind of person or autobiographical milieu. 

I don't want to discount the importance of minority voices telling their own stories. I just want there to be some balance in the discussion because imagination and artists who push themselves towards a wide range of expression are gifts to audiences. (All that said, Boy Erased might be terrible, who knows. But let's see it before we decide that.)

Finally...
Happy Centennial to Tom Drake. 100 years ago on this very day "The Boy Next Door" was born in Brooklyn.

Though he never became a household name, he worked steadily through the 1940s and 1950s in films like Meet Me In St Louis (1944), Mrs. Parkington (1944), Raintree County (1957), and Words and Music (1948) where he played Rodgers of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Rodgers & Hart musical fame. Some faces achieve immortality through proximity; Once you've heard Judy Garland yearn for him from him window and porch vantage point with "The Boy Next Door," you'll be ready to marry him on the spot, too.