Familiar Faces: Woody Allen's Cast Hierarchy

Several Woody Allen's ago we began a very short lived series called "Familiar Faces" in which I surveyed repeat usages of the same actors in a director's ouevre. The series was short lived because my god do you know how long each post took? Nevertheless, I'd love to revive it if I've ever afforded the budget or time and I thought with Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's 43rd complete directorial feature, rocking it at the box office the time was ripe to revisit and republish with a few minor adjustments. If you see a half point trust that it's from Play It Again Sam which Woody wrote and starred in but did not direct or New York Stories which he directed only one segment of. One of the key factors in why I don't think Woody Allen films are as strong as they used to be is his weird shift from loyal employer to fickle star-gazer. Nowadways its rare for an actor to return to his filmography. 

Will Cate follow in other muse footsteps or is Blue Jasmine a one-off?

Take Blue Jasmine for example. The only performers with a previous Woody under his belt are Alec Baldwin who had the "pleasure" of playing an ill-defined role in To Rome With Love and (a long time ago) a small role in Alice and Ginger herself Sally Hawkins who previously appeared in Cassandra's Dream

Herewith my findings... from Mia through the Dian(n)es and on to the Scarletts 

Click to read more ...

Children of the Link

EW lets you zoom in on details of Spidey's new suit from The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Cinema Blend Oscar winning cinematography Wally Pfister's directorial debut Transcendence is already courting the Chinese audience 
Pajiba "the 12 most awesome sexually confident movie lines" Ha. I couldn't pull any of these off (TMI!) but I love the list
Coming Soon You can now watch the opening and closing credit sequences of Pacific Rim online. Though honestly they look fairly generic despite the hype for the film.
Playbill Theresa Rebeck of Smash-creation fame is trying another series. She's developing a "Bleak House" adaptation for Bravo 

Variety Whoa. Hunky Bollywood superstar Hrithink Roshan recently had brain surgery. Get well soon.
Awards Daily Rising writer/director Ava DuVernay, who made the excellent Middle of Nowhere last year, is taking on Selma, a true-life drama about MLK and the Civil Rights Act
In Contention will Philomena be TWC's secret Oscar weapon this year? I don't know how secret it can be after the reception of several minutes at Cannes but yes, it could be.
Final Girl is about to trace the evolution of the entire Children of the Corn series with a marathon blogging effort on Monday. But she's already surveyed the posters.
Natasha VC a perfect one sentence commentary on Mia Farrow and Philip Roth watching Sharknado together

Team Top Ten: Women Who Deserve An Honorary Oscar

Amir here, to bring you this month’s Team Top Ten on a topic that remains one of our biggest collective pet peeves here at The Film Experience.

Every year when the Academy announces the list of recipients of the Honorary Oscar, we can expect only one thing: they will all be men. Sure, the odd woman wins the award here and there, but consider this: between 1993, when the honor was bestowed upon Deborah Kerr, until 2009, when Lauren Bacall shared the award with two men, not a single woman was deemed worthy of the biggest honor AMPAS has to offer. Apologists can point to the fact that men have run the industry at large since its inception. They would be right; the industry as a whole is equally at fault, if not more, but take a look at the list of women still awaiting their first statue – or *gasp* first nomination – and tell me they don’t deserve better than one golden man every sixteen years. If the drought is as depressingly long this time as it was between Kerr and Bacall, it can be 2025 before we see another lady take home an honorary Oscar!

Deborah Kerr in 1993 and Lauren Bacall in 2009 and a great chasm between them

We know all too well that complaining about the Academy’s decision doesn’t get us anywhere, but since we found recently that they do have a listening ear, we’ve decided to do our part and help them correct this injustice. Let’s give voters the benefit of the doubt and assume that all they really needed all these years was a list of suggestions. So, here is ours: the top ten women who most deserve an honorary Oscar, under the following three criteria: they need to be alive, above the age of 55 and Oscar-less.

 GIVE THESE WOMEN THE HONORARY! 

[tie] 10. Marni Nixon
You may not know what Marni Nixon looks like, but I guarantee you know what she sounds like. If you've seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Secret Garden (1949), The King and I, An Affair to Remember, West Side Story, or My Fair Lady, you have heard Nixon's golden voice coming from the mouths of some of Hollywood's most legendary actresses. As if it isn't hard enough work to try to make your voice sound just like someone else's, in some instances Nixon had to do so in secret, the studios wanting to hide the dubbing from their big stars. Nixon's onscreen credits may number only in the single digits (her role as Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music being the most famous by far), but had she actually performed the roles she dubbed onscreen, she would have had at least two Oscar nominations by now. She's an indelible part of film history, and she never received any onscreen credit for her most famous work. If that isn't cause to give someone an Honorary Oscar, then I don't know what is.
-Daniel Bayer

10 more legends to honor after the jump!  

Click to read more ...

Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into weak adaptations of great books

Hi all, Tim here. Like a lot of you, I’ve been waiting on Baz Luhrmann’s brand-new, all-3D, all-CGI version of The Great Gatsby with a kind of curious dread, on the assumption that the no-doubt overwhelming style and glitz would leave F. Scott Fitzgerald’s excavation of the limits of American ingenuity and self-invention a little bit lost amidst all the eye candy. And this seems to have been exactly the case, sadly.

But let us not come down too hard on Baz. There’s also the possibility that Gatsby simply isn’t a novel that’s meant to be filmed, and as evidence I’d like to call upon the last feature film adaptation, and certainly the best known prior to now. Of course, I mean the 1974 Paramount production starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carroway, and a general sense of lifeless ennui as the stimulus-crazed Roaring ‘20s. Other than a fixation on production design and costumes (it won the Oscar for the latter), there’s not much that the ’74 film has in common with Luhrmann’s screamingly excessive vision; if anything a bit more of a willingness to push against the book, rather than to so dutifully illustrate it in the driest way possible, might have benefited it. Movies are not books, after all, and this version of Gatsby badly loses sight of that truth.

Click to read more ...

Papa Linkes

AV Club Excellent "Why don't you like this?" argument over Hugo. I liked Hugo more than Tasha does but significantly less than Scott but I found the Moulin Rouge! comparisons especially fascinating.
Movies.com crunches the numbers on Best Director, with 15 directors already honored somewhere or somehow.
Vulture who had the bluest eyes in War Horse? Not Joey, the humans. 

Roger Ebert on why movie theater audience is down. Normally I think this topic is overworked but he gets a few really succinct points in and I had no idea that Netflix's instant watch streaming numbers show a preference for art film fare!
First Showing David Fincher on why he made each of his pictures. That people are still wondering why he felt he needed to make Dragon Tattoo even after seeing it, is maybe a problem. :)
Movie|Line I lol'ed heartily reading this calendar of dates to watch in 2012
Movies.com David Ehrlich's writes a quite funny piece on the "Overrated" titles of 2011

What are you doing New Year's Eve? ♫

Ahhhhh (500) Days of Summer reunion for Winter!

Indiewire the top ten box office hits, subtitled division. France rules as per usual.
Anne Thompson on why The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is struggling at the box office. 
Cinema Blend on disappointing films of the year. Death to hype!

Finally... I wanted to take this moment to say goodbye to Cheetah from the Tarzan movies who supposedly died this past weekend. A lot of chimps played Cheetah of course as there are a ton of Tarzan movies and The Wall Street Journal claims this could not have actually been the one from the Weismuller/O'Sullivan movies. Supposedly Cheetah was 80 but life expectancies for his species is like 35 so that's baffling. Human life expectancy is like 67 years and how many 140somethings do you know? It seems weird to say "favorite thing!" about obituary madness but I was delighted to see Mia Farrow tweeting about it.

I'd been debating whether or not to make a big to do of Tarzan's centennial in 2012 (October to be exact) though I suspect most readers aren't into that particular swinger since comments tend to be lowsville on Tarzan moments here. That's one franchise that really seems dead. RIP.