Oceans 8. Links 16

• Variety we now have seven of the names for the Oceans Eight gender flipped movie: Blanchett, Bullock, Hathaway, Bonham Carter, Kaling, and two musicians who moonlight as actors Rihanna and Awkwafina 
• NYFF the 54th annual festival has released the main slate titles - Opening Night: The 13th (Ava Duvernay); Centerpiece: 20th Century Women (Mike Mills); Closing Night: The Lost City of Z (James Gray); plus their usual array of buzzy titles from other festivals only this time there are a lot of female leads (which is a huge change) including Aquarius, Toni Erdmann, Personal Shopper, and an Isabelle Huppert double in L'Avenir and Elle.
• Pajiba debates Suicide Squad's interpretation of Harley Quinn
• Variety a new lawsuit about Out of Africa's profits. That's timely! (People forget that it was a giant hit at the time)
• Deadline David O. Russell pitching a TV series with Robert De Niro & Julianne Moore. What the what now?

 

• Variety FX executive on Peak TV, Netflix and when the "Peak TV" bubble will burst
• Vulture Matt Zoller Seitz on the problems with serial-dramas on TV right now -- the model is shifting yet again
• Pride Source Meryl Streep talks her discomfort being imitated (!), Florence Foster Jenkins, sequels, and her connections to the LGBT community 
• IndieWire Greta Gerwig writing another screen version of Little Women - we get one every generation it seems
• /Film a Ghostbusters sequel with the ladies seems unlikely as the film will record a theatrical loss due to that ginormous budget
• Comics Alliance breaks down the Luke Cage trailer
• i09 Black Manta will be the villain in Aquaman 

Off Screen
• Playbill Tony Danza names his favorite stage performances. Somewhat surprising but cool list featuring Mare Winningham, Mark Rylance, Faith Prince and more...
• GQ "Stop trying to get perfect abs." Love this -  Define your personality instead.  
• The Adequate Man "Steve Martin is My Body Icon" on looking like the same exact person for ages 

Today's Must Read
Todd VanDerWerff has a gorgeous personal essay up on Vox called "Hamilton isn't perfect. But it's *perfect." I couldn't write for a month after I saw it". That's a mouthful but cozy up and be moved. It's on seeing Hamilton, the power of who is telling your story, and Todd's birth parents. 

The Furniture: Joy's Emerald City of Home Shopping

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber on Joy, now available on DVD and Bluray

It seems impossible that production designer Judy Becker has only received a single Oscar nomination, if not supremely unfair as well. At the very least, she should have snagged a second nomination for Carol. Her resume includes such diverse triumphs as We Need to Talk About Kevin, Brokeback Mountain, Shame and I’m Not There, as well as a neat early credit as a set dresser on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. And so it seems totally appropriate that Becker is the first production designer to merit a repeat appearance in 'The Furniture'.

Becker’s most fruitful collaboration has been with David O. Russell. She's worked on every one of his features since The Fighter and she earned her lone Oscar nomination for American Hustle. Her sets for Joy, particularly the charismatic QVC studio at the film’s core, are among the best design work of last year. They also make quite a one-two punch with Carol, Becker showing a remarkable affinity for the stylistic underpinnings of American shopping. [More...]

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Link Becomes Her

Anya Taylor-Joy photographed by Gregory HarrisThe Washington Post interesting visual analysis of Tom McCarthy's Oscar winner Spotlight
Interview M Night Shyamalan interview Anya Taylor-Joy from The Witch
Pajiba Agent Carter in limbo after second season finale. (Is limbo the new code word for cancelled? I've never seen a network burn off that many episodes that quickly if they weren't going to cancel something)
My New Plaid Pants "I would like to talk about... Madeline Ashton." YES. Death Becomes Her is getting a special edition BluRay next month
Kotaku Ghost in the Shell finally adds a famous Asian actor to its cast list, Beat Takeshi. 
Playbill This is cool 15 ambassadors from the UN saw a special performance of Fun Home The Musical. Can we please get a film version? That show is sublime
Film School Rejects looks back at Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991) for its 25th anniversary
NY Times profiles Sarah Paulson who talks about her Marcia Clark role, her romance with Holland Taylor, and why she's drawn to older people in her life. 
The Playlist Matthias Schoenarts will star in Kursk, a Russian submarine survival drama 
MNPP on Kenneth Lonergan's new play Hold on to me, Darling starring Timothy Olyphant 
MTV briely, with wit, on Leo's Oscar win 
Tracking Board Joseph Gordon-Levitt developing a movie called K Troop, about a US Army division assigned to take the Ku Klux Klan down during their rise. 

Finally...
By know you've probably read that Amy Adams has confirmed what those  leaked Sony emails suggested that she was quite unhappy on the set of American Hustle. It was her second film with David. O. Russell but I suspect there won't be a third given what she told British GQ.

Photo by Norma Jean Roy

I was really just devastated on set. I mean, not every day, but most. Jennifer [Lawrence] doesn’t take any of it on. She’s Teflon. And I am not Teflon. But I also don’t like to see other people treated badly.. It’s not ok with me. Life to me is more important than movies. It really taught me how to separate work and home. Because I was like, I cannot bring this experience home with me to my daughter.

Contrarian Corner: Age is Just a Number As J.Law Dazzles in 'Joy'

Jose continues our new series Contrarian Corner in which team members who feel very off-consensus about a particular topic can work through it... 

One of the most surreal moments in my life occurred when I was able to speak to Winona Ryder about Jennifer Lawrence. Like J.Law, Ryder became the “it girl” early during her career, and during the early 90s earned back-to-back Oscar nominations and critical/commercial adoration. Unlike J.Law, Ryder wasn’t able to make the most out of what fame and screen maturity had granted her, as she was denied serious parts because of her age. She looked “too young” to play “older parts”, and reached a point (i.e. her 30s) where she was “too old” to play younger parts. Perhaps because she has the good fortune of staying away from social media, Ms. Ryder was unaware of the constant criticism J.Law faces whenever she teams up with David O. Russell.

I don’t even know how old she is. I always thought she was the age of her characters”

Kudos to Ms. Ryder for reminding us that films are all about suspending our disbelief.  [More...]

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Interview: Carol's Production Design Judy Becker

Judy Becker. Photo © Tom Uhlman at New York TimesThis won't have escaped you but we're a little bit obsessed with Todd Haynes's Carol. We tried to devote a week to it but the love can't be contained by calendars. The romantic drama about a glamorous society wife and a young shopgirl is rolling out slowly -- agonizingly slowly -- to more cities each week. It leads the Golden Globe nominations and though the Academy's decisions about the year's "best" are yet to come, there's reason to be hopeful that they'll embrace the filmmaker's triumphant return to the silver screen.

The Oscar-nominated production designer Judy Becker (American Hustle), is responsible for most everything you see onscreen in Carol from Therese's humble apartment to Frankenberg's Department Store, the Aird estate, and much more. "The props, there are close-ups on them, so I don’t know how you can say, that’s not important," she says passionately, underlining the fact that everything we see is part of 'the look'. She describes herself as a very hands-on designer and is sure this drives new members of her staff crazy but she has high praise for her frequent set decorator Heather Loeffler. "She never gets upset if I veto something but, at the same time, she brings a lot to the table and surprises me all the time with great stuff."

Though Becker is best known for her frequent collaborations with  David O. Russell this is not her first Todd Haynes film, having also designed his abstract Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There (2007). We began our chat marvelling at his genius. Though I'm Not There was a larger scale task, essentially designing multiple worlds, Carol wasn't much easier for different reasons. "Every film has its challenges," she explains. And films as gorgeously realized as Carol don't happen without a lot of planning, work, and inspiration. 

Our interview is after the jump...

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