Showbiz History: Trainspotting's 25th and a one-time-only Globe happening

8 random things that happened on this day, February 23rd, in showbiz history

1939 The 11th Academy Awards are held with zany family comedy You Can't Take It With You winning the top prize and Jezebel pulling down both Lead and Supporting Actress. This past summer we spent a lot of time discussing the 1938 film year. What's more, I even ranked all ten Best Picture nominees and guest starred on the "And the Runner Up Is..." podcast about it (icymi). Honestly these viewing projects, but especially 1938, got us through the first few months of the COVID lockdown. 

1950 The 7th Golden Globes are held honoring the best of 1949. All the King's Men wins Best Picture (as it also would at the Oscars later). It was the last year of the Globes before they begin to separate their categories into Drama and Comedy but the next piece of Globes trivia is even more unusual...

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Review: Jungleland

By Abe Friedtanzer

There is a certain general structure that can be expected in films about fighters. A boxer or wrestler will be driven to succeed through sheer strength and commitment to their craft, and will usually have a firm supporter in their corner egging them on and ensuring that they don’t falter. Inevitably, an injury or some outside factor will threaten their physical ability, and that will be precisely the moment that everything is riding on their performance, including a large sum of money that will make or break their future. If that’s essentially the narrative framework, the richness of the characters and the performances is what’s needed to differentiate a specific film from the pack.

Let’s take a look at a new theatrical and VOD release, Jungleland…

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The Furniture: Reframing the Legend of King Arthur

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

King Arthur, the character, is listed by IMDb as appearing in 149 films and TV shows. That’s more than Dracula. I’m not going to go through all of them, obviously. But circumstance has given me a good excuse to compare two examples: Knights of the Round Table (1953) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). The latter just came out on Blu-ray. The former will serve as a bit of a tribute to Mel Ferrer, whose centennial was this past Friday.

The most obvious difference is between Ferrer’s version of Arthur, noble and even a bit meek, and the ever-hulking Charlie Hunnam. But this isn’t a physique column. Instead, I want to take a brief look at how Hollywood’s presentation of the loosely defined Arthurian Age has changed...

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The Furniture: Indulging Fantasy in 'The Lost City of Z'

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber 

The Lost City of Z begins with Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) in hot pursuit of a stag, risking his limbs to win the respect of his superior officers. Two things are obvious in an instant: his athletic ability and the enormous chip on his shoulder. Burdened by the memory of his alcoholic father, he throws his whole body into the quest for social redemption.

Unfortunately, this burst of exertion doesn’t pay off. He does get the stag, its lifeless head displayed prominently at the evening ball. But it’s not enough. The labyrinthine snobbery of England is presented by writer/director James Gray as an impossible obstacle, as resistant as the dense rainforests where Fawcett later seeks his fortune.

After this initial frustration, Fawcett accepts a cartographic mission to Bolivia. There, he is seduced by tantalizing stories of a lost city of gold. It becomes his obsession. In turn, the contrast between rigid England and lush Amazonia drives the film’s visual logic...

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Review: "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"

by Chris Feil

Guy Ritchie thrives on comedic machismo. Even when gratingly stylized or frenetically composed, his work is never less than entertaining when breaking down how buffoonish men interact. So King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a natural fit for the director’s next big budget exercise. In some ways, Arthur and his knights of the round table were the original bros...

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