The Woman from U.N.C.L.E.

Murtada here to praise the images released so far from next weekend's wide release The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer are lookers and judging from the trailer seem to be having fun. It’s Alicia Vikander’s big year and of course she’ll be entertaining. However the most exciting proposition the marketing has offered so far is Elizabeth Debicki as the villain. And her gorgeous costumes.

Debicki is the big baddie of the movie. Her name is Victoria Vinciguerra, the mastermind behind the criminal organization that our spies must stop before she throws the world into calamity. [More...]

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Oscar Season Cometh. And Other Links

Vox has an article on how binge-watching is changing television -- and not just on Netflix. Some interesting thoughts if too repetitive
Variety Lupita Nyong'o headed for an Off Broadway play called "Eclipsed" - I'm still stunned and disappointed that her film docket isn't full through 2018. Hollywood is so f***ed up. 
Vulture it's somehow fitting that the news that Tom Holland has already shot his first Spider-Man appearance in  Captain America: Civil War broke in an interview about Chris Hemsworth's huge prosthetic penis in Vacation. The world is a horny voyeur for all of Marvel Studios's masturbatory impulses

/Film oh noooo a Robin Hood origin story in the works? I hate origin stories so much. Hate them hate them. When will our global obsession with "origins" of characters we already know end? Just tell a story about them!
Broadway Blog Bent, the powerful play about gay men in the Holocaust is getting its first major revival in some time. Plays through August in LA. Go and report back! Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters is even in it! Anyone remember the film version with Clive Owen?
Variety finally Ryan Kwanten books another series (I was wondering why he wasn't highly in-demand post True Blood). He'll play one of two leads in Amazon's new Western series Edge. I forsee a problem: People in westerns tend to keep their clothes on.
/Film Both of David Fincher's "straight to series" shows for HBO are apparently in trouble
The Guardian celebrates Jeremy Renner's five best performances. Well someone had too... he may be infinitely more famous now but his respectability as an actor seems to have taken a serious plunge once he attempted  four different franchises leaving tough drama far behind
Kenneth in the (212) rewatches the great LGBT flick Edge of Seventeen, which relates to a recent study on sexuality and friendshipe 

Peculiar WTFs?
Pajiba on The Shroud of Cruise in a pop-up church in Florida 
Boy Culture does Guy Ritchie require all his wives to be branded?
NPR here's a weird one. A 80 year old much decorated tough guy Marine looks back on his secret: he was the voice of Disney's wee fawn Bambi 

Oscar Season Cometh
Variety Student Academy Award finalists in animation, documentary and more. One of them is actually from BYU this year (my alma mater) and thats...
"Ram's Horn" by Jenna Hamzawi
TOH! reports that Cary Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation is getting a short theatrical release after all, presumably for Oscar play. Which is too bad for me because only heavy Oscar talk could convince me to sit through something this unpleasant/brutal. Here's the teaser

Awards Daily Truth, the true story about Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) and Dan Rather (Robert Redford) and a story about George W Bush that nearly ended their careers, arrives in October. (I'm actually a bit surprised by this announcement since Cate already has a leading role in the mix this year.) Speaking of release dates...
David Poland resets the field with departures and arrivals. This is the part that interested me most on account of 'you never know'. Some movies always get pushed back and losing two or three of these would be impactful to say the least in the communal speculation. 

My best guess, based on past histories of the directors and companies and/or absence of promo materials is that 2015 loses three of these four: Silence, Concussion, Snowden, and I Saw the Light.

Rebel Assignments: Film Directors + Madonna

David Fincher winning an MTV Movie Award for Se7en (1995) he was already an MTV darling at the Music Video AwardsA reader by the name of David recently asked which direct we wished would do a video from Madonna's "Rebel Heart". Given that David Fincher, now a reknowned auteur, came to fame via some of Madonna's best, it's a great question. More movie directors really ought to moonlight with music videos intead of just graduating from them. It's a unique form, basically both a musical and a short, that gives directors the chance to work faster and looser and play with ideas that they maybe couldn't risk in a feature without a test run.

Successful directors ought to donate their services at least once to either an upcoming band they want every to haer or a legendary artist whose work has meant a lot to them. So we're assigning a director to each Madonna song on her terrific new record "Rebel Heart" in order to pretend we've been gifted a video album specifically for Madonna fans and cinephiles alike.

It's a Venn Diagram niche, sure, but go with it.

Since the first track and first single "Living for Love" already got a fine toreador and minotaur themed music video -- and it's good if minimalist --  we should leave it be.

No no no. Scratch that.

"LIVING FOR LOVE"
Recreated by Gus Van Sant
We're completists. So we gotta try for the whole album. Gus Van Sant likes a good experiment and he can't just do a traditional "remake" so how about a shot-for-shot reinterpretation with a few inserts as he is prone to do. Madonna likes a good rolling cloud as much as the next Guy Gus (see Frozen/Ray of Light)

"DEVIL PRAY"
Assigned to Lee Daniels
This song sounds conservative but its lyrics are straight up messy mixing drowning metaphors, spiritual yearning, religiosity, the devil and a list of hallucinogenic drugs. So I think the only proper guide is the current king of absolutely fascinating messes, Lee Daniels. Look at the performances he got from Mo'Nique, Kidman, Oprah, and Taraji. Please get your hands on Madonna, you crazy beautiful man, and shake her up!

more assignments follow...

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Man from U.N.C.L.E. First Look: 5 Questions

Manuel here opening the floor about some things in this first released pic from Guy Ritchie’s upcoming adaptation of the TV show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., featuring Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill due out next year. From this pic alone, Ritchie’s film is already making a case for “Best Looking Cast of a Motion Picture, 2015.” Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Debicki (!) and Jared Harris round up the cast.

Costumes by Joanna Johnston (Oscar nominated for Lincoln but also responsible for the dresses Mad and Hel don in Death Becomes Her!)

Some questions I couldn’t help asking:

1. Does everyone else now think of Mad Men’s Sally Draper whenever The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is invoked?
2. Do Vikander’s shoulder scrapes suggest she’ll be given some action alongside her male co-stars?
3. Which suit do you think Cavill enjoys donning more: this beautiful plaid three-piece or his Superman one? (It’s a fair question: both look just as tight, no?)
4. Where can one get Vikander’s sunglasses?
5. Might this be the film that finally makes Armie the star we all hoped he’d become after seeing him (doubled!) in The Social Network?

Are you looking forward to Ritchie’s film? Or are you more likely to be looking forward to his ex-wife’s #RebelHeart release instead? Yes, I might be implying those are mutually exclusive stands, though I could be persuaded otherwise.

Madonna from "Truth or Dare" to "MDNA"

It's hard to believe that the be all and end all of celebrity documentaries, Truth or Dare (1991) is already over 20 years old. Actual age aside, Truth or Dare is timeless not just because it captured one of the most famous women who has ever lived at the peak of her popularity, but because of how daringly it performed that capture. I'm sure it's impossible for anyone under 25 to imagine how shocking Madonna's behavior in the early 90s was. Believe it or not there was a time when the demistification of Celebrity was anathema to Hollywood.

You can argue that some of the magic went out of the movies the more access we had to the magicians on and behind the screen, but there was no stopping the intrusiveness of the information age. Madonna's acclaimed film and --  to a lesser extent though no one wants to give it credit -- her often reviled "Sex" book predicted all of it by revealing more and More and MORE (and then some more) of herself. Madonna has never been a great actress but she has given a genius film performance and this was it. (Her performances in Evita and the short film Star! are a distant second.)

If you're interested in influential landmarks in pop culture I urge you to read Rich Juzwiak's exhilarating piece on Truth of Dare (it's out on Blu-Ray for the first time) over at Gawker 

Madonna has rarely had her finger directly on the pulse—it took her years to dabble in electronica and new jack swing and French house—but over 20 years after its release,Truth or Dare is relevant as ever. (It's out on Blu-ray for the first time today.) It's as close to a memoir as Madonna has ever gotten, and it's brilliantly fitting that the music video master stuck with the trusted audio-visual format that catapulted her to success. Why write when you can be? Madonna's life banged the dust out of vérité entertainment, suggesting the documentary didn't have to be stuffy, that it could be wildly entertaining and overwhelmingly trashy... 

 But while we're on the topic of the Queen a few notes on MDNA after the jump...

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