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• Brain Pickings Marilyn Monroe's unpublished poems on the anniversary of her death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. 

Tweetweek: Cliff Top Screenings, 100 Acre Wood realizations

Have you ever rapelled down a cliff or climbed up one? I've only down the former (so fun) but I applaud anyone who went to this screening... "What a thrill" (said in Marcia Gay Harden Oscar winning voice). Lots more after the jump...

2,000 feet, 2,000 people, 4 hours of hiking. The most impossible screening of #MissionImpossible Fallout. Thank you all for coming! I wish I could have been there. pic.twitter.com/ufi1FkP6KI

— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) August 2, 2018

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Interview: Desiree Akhavan on Queer Desire, Americana and One Scary Mustache

by Murtada Elfadl

The Miseducation of Cameron Post takes place in the 90s and is about a young queer woman who is sent to a gay conversion center after getting caught having sex with the prom queen at her high school. Once there she bonds with her fellow “inmates” (played by American Honey’s Sasha Lane and The Revenant’s Forrest Goodluck among others). She is forced to contend with the strict brother and sister team (Jennifer Ehle and John Gallagher Jr) who run the center and pretend they can "cure" her. The film is based on a novel by Emily M. Danforth and was adapted for the screen and directed by Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior). It won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance and has been making the festival rounds since January. We recently spoke with Akhavan in New York as she geared up for the film's release. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Murtada Elfadl: The book is longer and has much more detail, how did you arrive at the story for your film?

Desiree Akhavan: I always knew that I only wanted to focus on the last 200 pages; Cameron's time at God’s Promise. I think that when adapting a book it’s about whittling down for yourself what the kernel of inspiration is. What you loved about it and wanted to translate to the screen. And what you think you tangibly can translate into a different medium. To me that was the tone. My co-writer and I were always working in service to maintaining that tone... 

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Happy Birthday to Shu Qi's Cat

Shu Qi just held a fifth birthday party for her cat, MayMay. Sang to him and everything. Your favs could never. 

Mission Accomplished: Ranking the Mission Impossible Series

By Spencer Coile 

Anytime the latest entry in an action movie franchise is released, it is celebrated as 'the best' in the series. No film series has better exemplified this than the Mission Impossible franchise. What makes this series particularly special is that it set the standard for filmed reboots of classic television shows. It may not have been the first, but it certainly is the most consistent. Perhaps most importantly, it knows when to take a break. 

The release of Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a clever reminder in the age of comic book adaptations arriving every month that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) will always be there to save the day. But how exactly has the series evolved over time? And is Fallout actually the best in the series thus far?

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