Carole Lombard: First Lady of Screwball (and Much More!)

by Cláudio Alves

The Criterion Channel is honoring Carole Lombard with one of their latest collections. This curated sample of eleven films illuminates different talents in the Old Hollywood star's repertoire, from her comedic chops to less heralded, though not less excellent, work in melodramas. While she's best remembered as the queen of the screwball genre thanks to films like My Man Godfrey, Lombard was a multifaceted actress whose range deserves to be remembered. While her life was cut short by a tragic plane crash in 1942, the starlet's filmography is a thing of beauty, vast and distinctive, full of treasures to discover and enjoy…

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Miscellania: Mad Munn Mortal Minority Musicians

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MNPP playing lumberjack with Patrick Wilson
Vanity Fair Katey and Richard survey the summer movie season, get nostalgic for Mad Max Fury Road already
The Envelope talks to Lily Tomlin on her great year "If one looks at years that way."
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Vox why The Chronicles of Prydain is the best literary fantasy series (when do you suppose they'll try to film it after Disney's 80s botch job?) 
Interiors Film Journal looks at the dance scene in Tom at the Farm
THR looks back at unlikely hit Mortal Kombat when videogame movies were ridiculed
Towleroad Trans bodybuilder Aydian Dowling now a top 5 finalist for Men's Health "Ultimate Guy" cover contest
Self Styled Siren on an old book about a possibly violent but definitely tumultous John Barrymore marriage
i09 gets excited for the Minority Report tv show
Film Stage deleted scenes from Mad Max Fury Road
Starf*cker Matthew Rettenmund's (Encylopedia Madonnica, Boy Culture) new book is available for pre-order 

Today's Watch
On baffling uses of CGI... I didn't know this about 50 Shades of Grey or John Wick and definitely blocked out the "pear" from Star Wars. Repressed memory!  

A Year with Kate: A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

In which two ingénues are introduced...

A girlish debutante in a white gown floats down the stairs and into her waiting beau's arms. Gracefully, they glide around the dance floor sharing quips and quiet smiles. Thus is the world introduced to Katharine Hepburn in A Bill of Divorcement in 1932. It's a pretty enough entrance, but somehow inauspicious for Kate the Great. It is just so entirely Movie Ingénue Ordinary. The girl floating down the stairs could just as easily be Jeanette McDonald or Joan Bennett. Considering who Katharine Hepburn was and who she became, one would expect her to come striding into the room like a Greek goddess. Katharine Hepburn would make many more striking and characteristic entrances later, so for now we'll settle for this beautiful-if-ephemeral debut of the ingénue, and proceed with my own introduction.

My name is Anne Marie, and Katharine Hepburn is my idol. The first movie I ever saw her in was The Philadelphia Story. Kate was powerful and witty. She wore pants and still looked glamorous. To an awkward tomboy in middle school, she was everything. This idolatry only intensified as I grew. But recently, while perusing IMDb, I discovered two shocking things: 

1. I have only seen a third of Katharine Hepburn's movies
2. There are exactly 52 of them. 

This presents me with an exciting opportunity: "A Year with Kate"... 

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