I Really Really Really Really Really Really Link You

Vanity Fair documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens) has died at 88
MNPP Have you ever noticed that a skull flashes in Gaston's eyes when he falls to his death? Jason on Beauty & The Beast (1991)
Theater Mania Helen Mirren returns to Broadway in her Oscar winning role... albeit for a different property, a play called "The Audience"
Comics Alliance AMC is offering a $65 Marvel movie marathon to celebrate the opening of The Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's  29 hours of movie in one sitting from Iron Man (2008) through Ultron (2015). This sounds exhausting. Thing of all the floating objects in skies you'll see exploding every couple of hours as climax

Interview talks to Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) on his new project American Crime
Jared Leto cut his hair, shaved his eyebrows, and dyed the rest platinum blonde -- it's very return to Fight Club all told
Coming Soon looks back at the actresses originally considered for the new Cinderella from Emma Watson to Alicia Vikander and everywhere in between. (Lily James from Downton Abbey eventually landed the role)
Variety - see! TFE isn't the only place still handing out awards for the 2014 film year. The Location Managers Guild of America just gave Wild & The Grand Budapest Hotel prizes 
The Cut the milliner who gave us Indiana Jones's fedora and other movie hats is going bankrupt 
Kenneth in the (212) an update on that petition to pardon 49,000 men who were victimized by the same laws as The Imitation Game's Alan Turing
MNPP [NSFW] the marketing department went to the expense of computer generating underwear for naked Dave Franco for the Unfinished Business trailer.
Boy Culture centerfold turned director Dirk Shafer (Man of the Year, Circuit) found dead at 52 

Today's Must Watch
Tom Hanks lip synchs for his life with Carly Rae Jepsen's "I Really Like You". Adorable.

Linkless

Whoa we're getting behind on the linkages... here ya go

The Babadook order the pop-up book so that I have someone to commiserate with when it keeps us awake at nights in 2015
NYT looks at Ava DuVernay's direction of Selma
MNPP Continually undersung TFE favorite Alessandro Nivola celebrates the shortness of his shorts and how it helped A Most Violent Year win NBR's Best Picture. Hee
The Credits on the makeup work on Wild. How to keep Reese dirty?!

Hey U Guys interviews the always welcome Judy Greer on Men Women and Children and Ant-Man
Dissolve Sundance announces its titles for 2015. I should probably go again but haven't committed yet
Carpetbagger interviews costume designer Albert Wolsky on Birdman's briefs and super suit
In Contention Kris interviews TFE's communal husband, cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma / A Most Violent Year) 
Awards Daily mad scramble of wide open Oscar year
Heat Vision Suicide Squad, which I guess is a Batman movie without Batman (isn't TV's Gotham already covering that beat), gets an all star cast: Smith, Hardy, Robbie, Jai Courtney and Jared Leto as the Joker risking Heath comparisons less than a decade later. Yikes.
Boy Culture on Madonna's much talked about new Interview photoshoot 
The Atlantic Joe Reid thanks the NYFCC for expanding rather than narrowing the Oscar conversation this year (may other orgs and associations and circles do likewise)
/Film everyone is talking about the Fantastic Four synopsis which I find incredibly strange since its the vaguest thing ever and everyone already knows it (four young people are cosmically transformed in super odd ways and have to face an enemy that was once a friend - duh!)
Variety a bunch of major screenplays are ineligible for the WGA awards this year including The Theory of Everything and Selma
Daily Mail Kathleen Turner profiled for Dumb and Dumber To

I don't look like I did 30 years ago, get over it.

Sorry Kathleen, I'll never get over you! Then or now. (Though I'll skip this type of cameo and wait for the next great stage performance)

Absolute Must Read of the Day
Garden & Gun 98 year-old two-time Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland gets sassy remembering her career and Gone With the Wind (1939). On working with some of the greatest directors of all time from George Cukor to William Wyler...

They didn’t get the performances out of me. I gave the performances to them.

Videos o' the Day
Louis Virtel details all the reasons why Madonna is the greatest celebrity of all time. And David Ehrlich countsdown his 25 favorites of the year with a neato montage with wonderful music choices

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2014: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from david Ehrlich on Vimeo.

Top Ten / List Manic Season Begins
John Waters the inimitable director does his annual duty for Artforum. It's always refreshingly eclectic and this year he loves Maps to the Stars and Nymphomaniac
Washington Post from Boyhood to Under the Skin 
AV Club kicks off it's best & worst of the year with comedy albums, least essential albums (heh) and worst tv. ouch.
The Film Stage looks at the best of 2014 according to Cahiers du Cinema from Under the Skin to Love is Strange
Sight & Sound from Boyhood to Mr Turner

THE FILM EXPERIENCE's YEAR IN REVIEW begins Dec 11th
[Lee Pace doesn't believe us! ------->]
I've seen nearly all the films one has to see (but I have about 10 more I'd like to screen or rescreen before the list-making proper). We'll have a couple of days of "Cinematic Shame" beginning on the 11th to cleanse the palette and from December 14th through January 14th is when "everything is awesome" and we celebrate the Best Ofs. But, as you know it's tough to keep up 'in the season' so some lists/categories from Year In Review will obviously trickle out after the Oscar nominations on January 15th. Stay tuned!

I thought, "hey, I can link, I can link." but now I know that I was wrong, 'cause I missed you ♪ ♫

Criterion Collection Pedro Almodóvar write about his experience making Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down (1990). I so love that one. So weirdly romantic in spite of its whole Stockholm Syndrome business
Natasha VC Brad Pitt before and after makeup. Hee
In Contention Tapley wonders if Eastwood's American Sniper will have an impact on Oscar with its Christmas release
The Dissolve John Lithgow has revealed that Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (which he does voice work on) has been completely reimagined
Buzzfeed investigation into 80s arcana: who deserved credit for Flashdance and didn't get it?

 

The Hairpin the best friends of romcom heroines, in order
The Guardian on "my favorite city in film: Blade Runner's LA
i09 Have you ever wondered how Replicants are made in Blade Runner?
Salon interesting piece on Lauren Bacall (and Bogey's) political activism which the obits have steered clear of mostly
Chiseler Bacall's recent death also prompted this look back at Humphrey Bogarts first actress wife, the now forgotten Mayo Methot
AV Club Keanu Reeves moves to television for a series called Rain about a half Japanese half American assassin but...
/Film ...there's also a TV show being developed based on Keanu's hit The Devil's Advocate in which he is not involved. Strange timing, eh?
RogerEbert.com interviews Ira Sachs on Love is Strange. That finally comes out this month. Do NOT miss it 
Cinema Blend Johnny Depp to star with his teenage daughter in Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers. I do not understand what's going on with that career. I really don't 
Empire Bradley Cooper to headline a new franchise based on the "Mack Bolan" book series about a man at war with the Mafia

Off Cinema
Towleroad Portia de Rossi surprises Ellen DeGeneres on their anniversary
Entertainment Junkie on the Emmy contest for "Best Writing in a Drama Series"
Taye Diggs dancing. That's all. That's enough.
AV Club looks back at the seminal single "Stay" from Lisa Loeb. God, I loved that one. I can't remember if it was written for Reality Bites (1994) or not but if it was Oscar made the worse choice in not nominating it

The Stuff of Nightmares
Cinema Blend Chinese movie theaters projecting audience texts onto screen. 

ahem... I used to worry about keeping The Film Experience PG-13 because I knew teenagers were reading and when the site was first created you didn't want to be labeled NSFW because it shut you off from tons of traffic and search engines and so on and so on. And now I just feel like the biggest prude every day since even mainstream websites that people read at work print photo galleries of "bulges," naked celebrities, and charity events involving random civilians stripping. Case in point in the past 24...

Gawker imagining what's inside Jared Leto's pants courtesy of a quote from Alexis Arquette
Jezebel imagining what Disney Prince Charming dicks look like. 

So basically I am a prude and singing "Class" from Chicago right now as I type this. But I click on all these links, so, guilty. 

Beauty Vs Beast: A Table For Two At Dorsia

JA from MNPP here with this week's new drug (sorry I've been listening to a lot of Huey Lewis and the News these days - I consider their album Sports to be their finest acheivement, don't you?) aka another round of "Beauty Vs Beast."

Here's the deal - tomorrow's my birthday and it wasn't exactly planned this way but since there's a screening of American Psycho happening this weekend here in NYC my week's taken on that movie as a sort of non-official theme. I'm not murdering homeless men or stuffing kittens into ATM machines, mind you - don't get too freaked out. It's just a sort of general thing. But with the specter of Patrick Bateman hanging in the air I figured what better time to give you what I think might be one of the toughest picks between two bad apples (Christian Bale and Jared Leto) that we've had so far in this series.

I speak of...

poll by twiigs.com

A vote for Paul Allen is a vote for that whole Yale thing! Yeah you know, that whole Yale thing. So per usual you've got seven days to make with the picking and the commenting - in seven days our masks of sanity will slip and we'll crown a winner.

PREVIOUSLY And speaking of slipped masks of sanity, last week's competition was a literal face off between the two Jake Gyllenhaal's in this year's best-picture-so-far-says-me Enemy - since this choosing was slightly arbitrary (either way you win, with Jake) the competition remained close but in the end the "nice" guy won first - we all decided to let Adam stay on. Carmen honed in on the peculiars of this decision:

"I'm voting on blueberries alone. It's Jake Gyllenhaal vs Jake Gyllenhaal, I can afford to be frivolous."

Three Quickies: Caesar, Victor, Jared

Caesar
Have you ever considered the job of Location Manager? I can quickly confess that I have not despite often considering plentiful jobs that go on behind the scenes on motion pictures. The Credits discusses the complicated work with Catou Kearney the Location Manager of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. It's a technically challenging movie, not least of which because they shot so much outdoors and needed a lushly overgrown forest.

The apes ... have created a vast forest utopia. Finding such a place, one that looks as abundant as the script demands, but that could also support a large crew and a ton of equipment, takes months of research, legwork, and a few thousand phone calls. Kearney is a seasoned location manager, and relishes the opportunity. “It’s like putting a ten-thousand piece puzzle together,” she says. “When that last piece falls into place, there’s nothing like it.” 

As it turns out the Vancouver rainforests got the job of portraying futuristic California wilderness.

Igor (Marty Feldman) in "Young Frankenstein"Victor
Since we're in an era wherein everything that is enormously familiar is being regurgitated nonstop, we're going to get a new Victor Frankenstein movie shortly after getting a new Victor Frankenstein on TV in Penny Dreadful. Next October to be exact. The new angle this time? The story will be told from the perspective of Dr Frankenstein's assistant Igor who will be played by Daniel Radcliffe. The mad doctor is James McAvoy. I've always felt a little bad for the Frankenstein Monster because of the classic monsters, he's the least popular... though that never stops Hollywood. My theory on this is because he's not thematically easy like the self-generating metaphor machines that vampirism and to a lesser extent lycanthrophy are. Maybe when science evolves to a point where we all have organ transplants and articifial limbs and cyborg parts and we worry about what we've become everyone will be really into him. 

Jared
Remember when I interviewed Jared Leto last year for Dallas Buyers Club and he was all 'don't expect me back in the movies anytime soon'. Liar liar pants on fire! He's being talked up for Doctor Strange. I think Cumberbatch & Hardy are great actors but I honestly like the idea of Leto so much more in that particular role. That's partially because he's less familiar as a screen actor and feels 'other' already which would help -  and he's just replaced Will Smith in the lead role in Brilliance.

As In Contention astutely points out

To those who say winning an Oscar makes no difference to one's career, here's evidence to the contrary. This time last year, news of Jared Leto replacing Will Smith on a major commercial project would have seemed like crazy talk ...

Brilliance is a thriller based on the novel by the same name by Marcus Sakey about a federal agent chasing a deadly terrorist. They're both "brilliants" which is a sort of human being with 'extras' if you will. Everyone's gotta be superpowered these days whether they get it honestly by mutations, under duress via bags of leaky drugs implanted in their stomachs, or they're airlifted in from other planets.