FYC: Christine Baranski in "A Bad Moms Christmas"

By Spencer Coile 

As this year's Oscar race heats up, two performances appear to be our Supporting Actress frontrunners: Allison Janney in I, Tonya and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird. These two veterans share more in common than scene-stealing roles in their respective films. They are each renowned television actresses (with 13 Emmy nominations and 10 wins between the two of them). With careers spanning decades and their biggest success arguably coming from TV, there is something deeply satisfying about seeing these two respected television actresses be paid their dues for film as well.

That said, there is another 2017 performance in the same vein that merits some discussion: Christine Baranski in A Bad Moms Christmas... 

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The "Bad Moms" Sequel You Don't Want Is Coming

Chris here. One of the biggest success stories of the past summer was Bad Moms. The film's strong word of mouth and box office staying power flew in the face of the more macho movies that came and quickly went during this lackluster season. With a fun cast of likeable stars including headliners Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, and Kristen Bell you can see how distributor STX Entertainment would want to replicate their biggest success yet. They've just announced a sequel is being fasttracked, but don't get too excited.

Next year's sequel will flip the script in the lamest of unexpected ways: Bad Dads.

Call me crazy, but isn't the concept Bad Dads exactly the kind of film we get all of the time, the antithesis of which made Bad Moms's concept so appealing to audiences? This flies in the face of exactly how the film was able to financially merit a sequel in the first place, not to mention denies us a potential franchise of Hahn being hilarious.

There's no word yet if Dads will be a direct offshoot and keep any characters, or if writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore will return, but STX is planning several films, reality shows, and consumer products. Does this film have any chance of being unique next to the bawdy manchild likes of Old School and The Hangover?

Links: Movies (and TV) Matter, Garrel Picks Pics, Oscar's Centennial

Thrillist "Why everyone was wrong about Warcraft" - the summer's most underrated movie?
MNPP great moments in movie shelves hits Young Frankenstein
The Wrap looks at Colton Haynes winning an HRC award. Why Colton, exactly?

Criterion Louis Garrel chooses movies from the Criterion closet. He likes Jacques Tati, Loves of a Blonde, and Amarcord among others
FlavorWire looks back at Madonna & Sean's Shanghai Surprise in its Bad Movie Night column
Telerama (in French) Alain Guirardie talks about his filmography - he thinks he can do better than Stranger by the Lake! 
SBS hilarious satire video on White Fragility in the Workplace
Slate pits Bad Moms against Ghostbusters because women have to be pitted against each other!
NY Times on current film restoration anxiety asking the following question which I swear is going to give me regular nightmares:

What happens to an art when its foundational medium disappears? 

Today's Must Read
Richard Brody at the New Yorker wrote a great piece called "Why Movies Still Matter?" that examines the critical circularity that leads people to write things like "Could This Be the Year Movies Stopped Mattering?” We're all inside this ororborus! Help. My favorite part is his contention that the rise in popularity of serial television is actually emulating the college experience. Interesting.

The experience that the watching and the critique of new serial television resemble above all is the college experience. Binge-watching is cramming, and the discussions that are sparked reproduce academic habits: What It Says About, What It Gets Right About, What It Gets Wrong About. There is a lot of aboutness but very little being; lots of puzzle-like assembling of information to pose particular kinds of questions (posing questions—sounds like a final exam), to explore particular issues (sounds like a term paper). For these reasons, television’s actual competition isn’t movies or museums or novels but nonfiction books, documentary films, journalism, radio discussions, and general online clicking. Serial television is designed to gratify the craving for facts to piece together and analyze. The medium seems created for the media buzz that’s generated by the media people who are its natural audience, and to whom the shows owe their acclaim, their prestige, and their success.

Then he goes on to investigate the personal versus the public in our cinema experience. Love this piece. So much to think about and not judgmental about those film or television! Or to quote another great writer...

TV and movies have been coexisting for decades, yet the number of people insisting one must vanquish the other remains constant.

— Farran Nehme (@selfstyledsiren) August 29, 2016

  

News
EW Emily Blunt hears what Julie Andrews says about her casting as Mary Poppins Returns
Guardian Anne Hathaway to star in Live Fast Die Hot  the adaptation of a bestseller about new motherhood and responsibility
Variety Richard Linklater is making a sequel (of a sort) to The Last Detail (1973) called Last Flag Flying
/Film early photos from Woody Allen's Crisis in Six Scenes, his new streaming series
Towleroad Matt Bomer has signed on to play a trans sex worker in a new film called Anything. They're still not casting trans actors for trans roles which is a shame. Especially since we actually have famous trans actors now, proof that there's no reason to not cast them or think they can't win media attention themselves 
Variety Stranger Things renewed for Season 2. (I liked Season 1 but a continuation of that story seems like a mistake to me. Better an anthology template!)
Comics Alliance Stranger Things' breakout "Barb" (Shannon Purser) will guest star on CW's Archie adaptation Riverdale
Awards Daily Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply will open the AFI Fest this year in November 

FINALLY
In case you haven't heard ABC and Oscar have extended their contract. The Oscars will now be held on ABC through 2028 now. In extremely related news: 2028 is when the 100th Academy Awards will be held so imagine that centennial. If you'd like TFE to be around for that (so far away) please consider joining our monthly donaters --see sidebar -- because it's so not easy to keep making this site work each year, financially speaking.