Oscar Dark Horse Watch: Joel Edgerton for Best Actor

by Lynn Lee

As we approach the start of Oscar voting, the race for Best Actor remains comparatively quiet, especially when compared with the super-tight margins in the Best Actress category.  Currently the smart money has the Academy tracking the SAG lineup, with Casey Affleck and Denzel Washington as virtual locks (notwithstanding the continued rumbling about those 2010 sexual harassment suits against Affleck) and Ryan Gosling, Viggo Mortensen, and Andrew Garfield filling the remaining slots...

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Judy by the Numbers: Sunday Night at the Palladium

Anne Marie has spent each Wednesday morning this year, investigating Judy Garland's career through musical numbers. And now, the finale...

Somehow, we've reached the end of this series, this year, and the life and career of this incredible performer. Though Judy never starred in another television show or movie after 1964, she stayed busy with tours and TV guest star gigs, including a recurring spot as Johnny Carson's guest on The Tonight Show. Her touring schedule brought her frequently to England, where she was taped one last time in front of an audience in a sold-out January performance at the London Palladium.

The Show: "Sunday Night at the Palladium"
The Songwriters: Various
The Cast: Judy Garland 

The Story: It was a bittersweet discovery to find that the full kinescope of Judy Garland's last television performance, Sunday Night at the Palladium, has been almost totally lost to time. Though sound recordings of the special exist, the only actual image currently available is sixteen silent seconds of Garland taking her final bows. It's an oddly perfect way to end the series, though... 

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Cinematic Shame... with a "Stay Positive!" Twist

Year in Review. Every day a new wrap-up. Tonight, the "worst" of the year... 

Since we are absolutely determined to make 2017 the greatest year it could possibly be despite oppressive circumstances, let this post serve as last call for excessive negativity. Get it all out of your system in the comments, mkay? We'll also put a positive spin on these dubious "awards" for ungreat things at the movie theaters this year... 

WORST OPENING SCENE(S)
Hacksaw Ridge begins with such overworked hokey cartoonish Americana and Andrew Garfield plays his eventual pacifist hero as such a Forrest Gump style village idiot that it's something of a miracle that the movie becomes a surprisingly watchable war drama thereafter.

Even Garfield manages to turn his initially quite awful (sorry) performance around in the final hour of the film. I personally haven't seen a decent / good movie start so much like it was a terrible movie since Juno, have you?

WORST MIDDLE
Suicide Squad is so inept that it never gets past character introductions. Criticisms that it was just a movie trailer with a real movie running time proved to have deadlier aim than Will Smith's Deadshot.

Best Acting in Bad Movies, and other "Honors" after the jump.... 

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May Carrie Fisher's Brilliance Be With You

Instant gratification takes too long."

Meryl Streep popularized that brilliant one-liner in the essential showbiz comedy Postcards from the Edge (1990) but the line pre-dates the film, having emerged from the actress/writer Carrie Fisher's sharp pen (or was it tongue?) some time earlier. The line is so good it ended up on t-shirts. Fisher's best lines in print (multiple books, my personal favorite being "Surrender the Pink") or on the screen (Postcards from the Edge plus much script-doctoring) often sound exactly like things she may have uttered spontaneously in real life first with that unmistakably frank, darting, and mischievous wit. The showbiz icon passed away this morning after a heart attack aboard a plane this past Friday but her work and her influence will live on.

The irony of her delicious and beloved quip above isn't hard to miss...

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Doc Corner: George Michael on Show in 'Foreign Skies'

Nathaniel already looked at his favourite George Michael songs in tribute to the man's passing at age 53, and today a 1985 tour documentary featuring the finest male vocalist of his generation.

Three decades ago when China figuratively opened their doors to western culture, the first to arrive were… Big Bird and Wham! Two fey, energetic, hyper-coloured performers who sought a mutual exchange through music and film. The yellow Sesame Street character had Big Bird in China, while George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley got Wham! In China: Foreign Skies.

It’s a peculiar film, and not an especially good one. Half Chinese travelogue for the western audiences fascinated by the newly open China with their bustling food markets, seas of grey fashion, and their Great Wall; half concert film focusing, rightly, on the energetic and handsome George Michael sashaying around on stage like nobody had ever seen before.

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