Emmy Review: Drama Guest Actress

By Spencer Coile 

Historically announced with the Creative Arts Emmy Awards Show, Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series is a category often filled to the brim with brilliant performances -- making it no less memorable than the main stage categories. Won in the past by the likes of Allison Janney, Margo Martindale, Carrie Preston, and other incredible actresses of strage and screen, the soon-to-be winner will be joining prestigious company. 

Fortunately, the nominees for the category this year are (for the most part) equal parts memorable and thoughtful -- leaving a lasting impact on their series. Let's dive into this year's nominees and determine who will and should win...

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Coming Soon to the Smackdown

Hey all. You voted earlier this year on which years you'd most like to see covered on the Supporting Actress Smackdown. The next four regular Smackdowns (excluding the one in February for the new nominees of course) are drawn from your top five most requested years. 

October 1st "Supporting Actress Smackdown 1985"
Panelists: TBA; Nominees: Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple, Meg Tilly in Agnes of God, Anjelica Huston in Prizzi's Honor, and Amy Madigan in Twice in a Lifetime

November 5th "Supporting Actress Smackdown 1944"
Panelists: TBA; Nominees: Ethel Barrymore in None but the Lonely Heart, Jennifer Jones in Since You Went Away, Angela Lansbury in Gaslight, Aline MacMahon in Dragon Seed, and Agnes Moorehead in Mrs Parkington.

Get to watching those 9 movies and the Smackdowns will feel even more festive for you! And yes this means that September's 'year of the month' (that thing where we very randomly investigate a particular vintage of film) will be 1985 and October's will be 1944. ANY REQUESTS?  

Open Thread

Your host Nathaniel has been been out of commission for a couple of days having thrown his back out. Thank you for your patience with the slower posting. In the meantime, what's on your cinematic mind that we haven't been talking about? 

One Film, One New York

Have you heard about NYC's fun new free arts event? On September 13th they'll be playing one famous shot-in-and taking-place-in New York film, chosen by the public, all over the city in all five boroughs, at the public screening outdoor venues and in some theaters. The five options are The Wedding Banquet (1993), On the Town (1949), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), New York New York (1977) or Crooklyn (1994) and were selected by the film critics of the New York Times. You can vote on which one here but the best thing about it is whichever film wins, the public wins because they're all good films.

Where would your vote go? I'm still trying to decide on mine. I'm only sad that this date is during the Toronto International Film Festival so I'll have to miss it. *cries*

Soundtracking: "Evita"

It's Madonna's birthday!! Chris Feil looks back at one of her biggest soundtracks...

By the mid-90s, musicals were all but dead, even though Disney created their own resurgence in animated form. Madonna’s career however was always heading toward reviving it: she constantly reinvented the game for the music video and her Breathless Mahoney songstress was Dick Tracy’s genre flirtation device. With her divisive performance in Evita, she brought the cinematic musical back into the popular culture and delivered a hit soundtrack in the process.

And I should qualify that for emphasis: a hit soundtrack to a quasi-opera about propaganda and Argentine political figures when the popular music landscape highlighted Alanis, Tupac, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Madonna did that in arguably the least accommodating musical or cinematic climate, and perhaps only Madonna could have done it. Like it or not, much of the film’s success (even musically) is thanks to her star power, no matter how indelible Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s score remains.

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Review: Wind River

by Lynn Lee

It should come as no surprise that writer-director Taylor Sheridan, currently hot in Hollywood after his Oscar screenplay nomination for Hell or High Water, is an actual, bona fide cowboy.  Perhaps that’s why his work feels like such a throwback—to an era in which quietly capable men, silently toting unspoken burdens, took on the joyless task of meting out frontier justice.  At the same time, he’s shown a canny gift for placing such old-school archetypes in a distinctly modern, of-this-moment social and political context, making their struggles feel unexpectedly timely or, rather, timeless.  That gift is on ample display in his new film, Wind River, which is now in wide release after nabbing the best directing prize in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes earlier this year.

Set on a remote, wintry Indian reservation in Montana, the film marks the third installment in a loose trilogy of Westerns penned by Sheridan (the first two being Sicario and Hell or High Water), though Wind River is the first one he directed...

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