Julianne is Dope. Also: Links

The Far From Heaven team cleaning up at the Indie Spirits in 2003IndieWire so it looks like it's really happening *sniffle* Julianne Moore is moving to television. After that Sarah Palin telefilm turn she's doing a pilot for an HBO series called Dope.

But it's not all bad news: Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon are involved so it's essentially the great Far From Heaven team. Cross your fingers that it's worthy of their collective gifts! It'll have to be really really special to be that. 

The series would be set in the 1950s and is based on this novel. Publishers Weekly describes Moore's character like so.

Josephine "Joe" Flannigan, is a former heroin addict and hooker who has recast herself as a petty thief and con. Working her home turf, New York City's Hell's Kitchen, she is taken up by a mysterious well-to-do couple to find their addict daughter, expelled from Barnard and lost to the streets. 

So there's room for great acting. We shall see.

The Linkies
The Wrap Patti Smith is working on a biopic of sorts -- it's based on her memoirs of her early years with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the late 60s/early 70s -- with screenwriter John Logan. Who on earth could play Patti Smith? She's kinda strange looking and Hollywood only hires beauties. Here's what they looked like when the movie would take place.

ArtsBeat David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method will get a gala screening at the NYFF.
Latina Antonio Banderas on his long artistic separation from Pedro Almodóvar 'tween Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Skin I Live In (coming soon... and also getting a gala NYFF screening).

And speaking of Almodóvar, how amazing is this Rossy de Palma wall art by Adrian Valencia? I went to his site via a series of Lady Gaga drawings that are just stellar. 

© Adrian Valencia, 2011

 The Funnies
Ultra Culture "Cowboys and Aliens Fact Sheet"
My New Plaid Pants Quote of the Day from Jean Claude Van Damme [nsfw] 
The Hairpin an amusing review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes with drawings 
I09 "ten vestigial traits you didn't know you had". Robert Gonzalez, who wrote this, is funny. 
Bachmanneyezed a new tumblr  

Oscar Predix Updates: Costumes, Make-Up, Visual F/X, Sound

Have you seen the Vanity Fair gallery of costumes from Madonna's W.E. designed by Arianne Phillips? Will she be Oscar nominated this year? Hmmmm.

James D'Arcy and Andrea Riseborough modelling the costumes

That's always a tough call given that the costume branch of the Academy sometimes goes their own way entirely, embracing films no one else cares about or have forgotten, and sometimes they just stick with general Oscar buzz or their default choices (Seriously you won't find someone who loves Sandy Powell more than me but that Tempest nomination was ri-dic-u-lous).

Here are my newly updated predictions in the visual categories.

Testify Leo!You'll notice that I've also added J. Edgar to the predicted Make Up Nominees but it wasn't because of this official still of Leonardo DiCaprio. Why then? Well, it was the accompanying text in Entertainment Weekly which read. 

The movie traces Hoover's life from his childhood in Washington, D.C., through his ascent to power in the 1920s, his 50-year reign over the FBI, and his death in 1972 — with Leonardo DiCaprio donning prosthetic makeup to portray the man well into his bulldog-like elderly years.

Prosthetic makeup. Bulldog-like. Elderly. DingDingDing. Though, really before I get to settled on this prediction I need to recall my own words on the Make-Up branch within the Academy. I just copy and paste this every year onto my charts because it never ceases to be true.

About the Make Up Category

Nearly impossible to predict... even up until the last moment. They like werewolf movies except when they don't. They love Rick Baker except when they don't. They admire old age makeup except when they don't. They eliminate films with extensive CGI work except when they don't. They never vote based on awesome period hairpieces and makeup (though that's part of the equation) except when they do. They disapprove of multiple nominations for the same series except when they don't. It's almost as if their membership is entirely dismissed and reformed from scratch each year.

 But back to J. Edgar. I must say that synopsis signals that I have official worry for the movie.  Covering fifty years in someone's life usually means the very traditional kind of biopic. The kind that is all "....and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened", the Greatest Hits Biopics. Those are always the least focused and the most boring kind of biopics. 

Visual Category Prediction Updates
Aural Category Prediction Updates
Unfortunately there's still many films that have not announced their composer so Original Score punditry is still nothingness.

You'll notice that Rise of the Planet of the Apes suddenly, well, rises in Sound categories and Visual FX. (Once films start showing themselves these things always change.) In visual effects in particular it's obviously become the instant frontrunner. You know that Andy Serkis's trailblazing motion capture acting will help the FX team win, though the FX team will not help Andy Serkis get recognition. It doesn't go both ways, though I think we can all agree that they make a beautiful team. 

DVDs. The greatest film I...

...almost never saw, or is it? Paolo here again. I'd normally be the first person to watch a movie that features attractive men wearing fedoras and Emily Blunt doing contemporary dance, but fate had other plans. But between The Adjustment Bureau's theatrical release and now, it was a movie that had a minor 'bucket list effect' on me. 

In one of its DVD extras 'Leaping through New York,' writer/director George Nolfi praises the city as an all around "magical place". But the film's visual version of New York is underwhelming and dour, since we mostly see colours like blue and grey and it seemingly takes place in perpetual dawn or autumn. That's how I felt the first time, although repeated viewings made me appreciate how the sunlight would hit on the upper half of the city's Metropolis-like art deco skyscrapers.

New York, as this film depicts is, makes its citizens feel anomic. We get this feeling specifically through the way the titular adjusters are depicted within the shots, as when four mid-level adjusters look out from a rooftop to countless windows in front of them. That image is essentially repeated when two adjusters Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slattery) look out a window inside the bureau. A high angle long shot of the bureau's library before we see Harry thinking about one of his cases, David (Matt Damon) offers a similar feeling. The city is an overwhelmingly large frame for an internal and masculine struggle, as Harry becomes wary of how his job affects others. But maybe the film dwarfs the adjusters to highlight a part of their function, to have the least ripple effects, as invisible, microscopic, unnoticed.

David and his star crossed lover Elise (Blunt) are also lonely people without family...

Click to read more ...

"The Link! The Link!"

My New Plaid Pants Meet Brienne, who'll be very important on Game of Thrones. Eventually.
Critical Condition asks what it will take to get Ewan McGregor an Oscar nomination? We've been asking this for years. He ought to have at least two by now (Moulin Rouge! and Trainspotting)
Tom Shone makes a sound ExPat confession about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Heh.
Frankly My Dear remembers Richard Linklater's Slacker for its 20th.
Pajiba Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) will play Hervé "the plane! the plane!" Villechaize in the biographical My Dinner With Hervé. Like Pajiba I don't see a resemblance at all but Dinklage is a great actor so we wish him all the best in the role.
Sunset Gun recommends Over the Edge with Matt Dillon as a great time capsule and timeless rebellion teen film. I haven't seen this one but I'm now intrigued.
PopMatters I'm not going anywhere near Zookeeper but I'm finding the reviews somewhat interesting in a staring through thick glass kind of way. This one wonders which voice actor has the worst job in the film. That's a good question! 

Several blogs have been noting the revision of the Straw Dogs poster -- the original version is to your right where Alexander Skarsgård is mysteriously inside of or ramming into James Marsden's eye (ouch!) rather than reflected in his glasses. Poster design is so half-assed these days, right? It looks much better (to your left) now all black and white and reflected. BUT while they were revising shouldn't they have come up with their own design rather than just recreating the original poster from the 70s Dustin Hoffman film?

Poster design is just so frustrating in Hollywood. The internet reminds us every single day --  and usually several times an hour -- that there are abundant graphic artists out there with the talent to make this another golden age of movie poster design and it just never quite happens. Hollywood, which runs on images, doesn't trust the visual literacy of its clients.

Maybe they shouldn't. I mean I'm sure you've all heard someone look at the rare illustrated movie poster and say "is that a cartoon?" but it's still sad-making.

Baby Magneto and Other Links

Flickr the set of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows is growing.
IndieWire seems there are two Jeff Buckley biopics in the works and the Penn Badgley version is not the one with the Buckley estate blessing.
Austin Translation "The Iron Grill" funny illustration to celebrate yesterday's finale of Game of Thrones (did you watch?)
I Need My Fix new Jason Statham movie The Killer Elite looks like every other Jason Statham movie.
Awards Daily just days after we covered that Dick Tracy event, in which Beatty said a sequel is in the works, comes news that the legend has another film nearly ready to start production. I'll believe these two films when I see them. But I loooooove my Beatty so I'm hoping both pan out.
vitorugo "Erik's first..." HAHA!

Illustration by Victor Hugo

Classic! (There's too much iron in his diaper.). Don't you now wish that Pixar had made X-Men First Class Mutant Babies instead of Matthew Vaughn?

OffCinema
Diesel Sweeties "The Herald of Deliciousness" one for you cat owners out there.
AV Club Meredith Blake is reviewing the first season of The Real World. you know back when it was trailblazing, experimental and "real" feeling ...and kind of awesome. MTV immediately fucked it up the following season but there's always season 1. It's kind of random that this review is happening but also awesome.
Raja "Diamond Crowned Queen" for you RuPaul's Drag Race fans