Links

• GQ UK Simu Liu interview and why he auditioned for Greta Gerwig's Barbie
• AV Club Pixar has announced a new original for next summer. It's called Elemental and about a water and fire elemental discovering what they have in common
• Vanity Fair Bridgerton Season 3 will diverge from the book order and follow Penelope & Colin

More after the jump including the Billboard Music Award Winners, sad news about Adele Haenel, new projects for David Cronenberg, and a tribute to Jonathan Bailey...

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Showbiz History: France loves KStew, and infamous 'Chicago' trials, real and fictional

5 random things that happened on this day, February 20th, in showbiz history...

two Oscar-winning Roxies, Ginger Rogers & Renée Zellweger

1939 A shameful moment in US history: an American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. Footage from this event became the basis of the recently Oscar nominated doc short "A Night at the Garden". 

1942 The film Roxie Hart adapted from the play "Roxie" opens with Ginger Rogers playing the murderous showgirl. Roxie would go on to pop culture immortality with the long running musical adaptation of the play and its Oscar winning counterpart, called simply Chicago...

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Beauty Break: Born on New Year's Day

No "showbiz history" today but, as with Christmas, how strange would it be to have your birthday fall directly on a holiday. Some of you know out there. Do tell in the comments. It must be especially weird to be a New Year's Day baby since people pack so much importance on to this day as a fresh start. And here comes a long a baby with a literal fresh start on everyone's collective fresh start day. 

Here are a dozen showbiz beauties born on this day...

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Review: "Deerskin" on HBO

by Cláudio Alves

Fashion kills in one of Quentin Dupieux's latest absurdist comedies, the loony nightmare that is Deerskin. After blessing moviegoers with the nonsensical sight of a homicidal tire in Rubber, the French director has now imbued a fringed jacket with the power to unravel the human mind and precipitate its wearers into paroxysms of murderous madness. Jean Dujardin's Georges is the victim of such demonic influence, though, at the start, he, like all things in Deerskin, appears unnervingly mundane…

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Performing Spectatorship

by Cláudio Alves

As people who love cinema, I think we can all understand the power art can yield over those who experience it. Whether finding refuge in an escapist dream or seeing an ugly truth reflected at us, the act of being an audience has the potential to startle and surprise, to devastate and entertain. I can often recall those moments when a film overwhelmed me in such ways that I ended up making a spectacle of myself. There were my sobbed laughs at a Whitney Houston karaoke in Toni Erdmann, the breathless shock at Hereditary's peanut panic, the miraculous tears when faced with Parasite's perfect montage and so much more. Those memories are like precious jewels, bright reminders of why I love cinema.

Because of this, I have a special fondness for films that try to capture that inchoate ecstasy that happens when an audience is similarly enraptured…

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