Looking & Linking

IndieWire wonders if VOD is the future of independent film
The Atlantic Wire Joe Reid looks back on the career of Holly Hunter
Twitter yes, it's true. Stevie Nicks, the white witch herself, to guest star on American Horror Story: Coven -- and yes, I'm aware I'm like forever behind in writing about that show which I'm loving. We'll try and catch up this week
Film Comment looks back on its 50 year history
Total Film Michael Fassbender believes that Prometheus 2 is still going to happen. I'd totally go. Loved his David8
The Playlist the first image from Dark Places starring Charlize Theron 
Express Jennifer Lawrence may have lost her Oscar. (Opportunity! Let's retcon that shit and give it to Riva)
Towleroad lesbians reacting to the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color 

randomness
Gizmodo Photos of malls of the '80s. The memories! 
Time Out interviews peerless stage star Mark Rylance 

Today's Watch(es)
The extremely brief/insubstantial teaser for HBO's Looking starring Jonathan Groff. 

I'm terrified of this show as someone who was deeply embarassed by Queer as Folk which is basically it's only precedent, right? But the director of Weekend has to count for something so I'm also hopeful. In addition to Groff the cast includes other (lesser-known) lookers like Rául Castillo, Tanner Cohen (Were the World Mine), O.T. Fagbenie, Justin Chao, and in at least one episode that adorably worried werewolf from Being Human.

And here's a Young Hollywood panel featuring Michael B Jordan, Miles Teller, Dane DeHaan, Greta Gerwig and Brie Larson (aka the ones who'll be dominating our movies for years to come)  at the AFI Fest talking about celebrity and social media...

Teller making fun of Jordan's selfies is priceless and Greta Gerwig's fan crush on Jessica Chastain? Adorbs. 

Six Notes on the Six Second "X-Men" Tease

I don't want to give too much attention to a six second tease of a teaser -- I waited a whole day in fact hoping the urge to say something would pass -- but in the end my childhood hardwiring triumphed. I haven't loved or even much liked an X-Movie in 10 years but I will always love the X-Men, for better or worse. Usually worse. 

So herewith a few thoughts with screencaps from Bryan Singer's tweeting foreplay.

It's a good thing this is a period piece because Professor Xavier's helmet Cerebro is totally irrelevant today. You don't need a mutant locator anymore. The Homo Superior are impossible to miss all smeared across every movie screen and television set and website. Children of the Atom be so ubiquitous in this age of superheroes.

Unfortunately I'm not done blabbering about this yet!

Click to read more ...

Link He Wrote

GQ Michael Fassbender profiled
Deadline Octavia Spencer in a Murder She Wrote reboot? Maybe because I think procedurals are the most formulaic of all genres and entirely dependable on personality to be distinctive at all this sounds like a great idea to me. To others (Angela Lansbury super fans) it will surely sound like sacrilege.
MCN Late October and still no Best Picture frontrunner?
Empire Team Gattaca reuniting: Andrew Niccol and Ethan Hawke making another film together. Call me when Uma & Jude join and we'll talk.

 

Anatomy of a Scene Blue is the Warmest Color I'm bookmarking this one and waiting till I've seen the movie. Hopefully today
Antagony & Ecstasy on Dario Argento's Dracula 3D 
MNPP Jamie Dornan has been cast in 50 Shades of Grey but you need to know who appreciated him first. Besides Keira Knightley
Pajiba amputee Josh Sundquist wins Halloween again. Incredible costume! 
Coming Soon an unfortunate typecasting niche: John Ridley, who wrote a beautiful script for 12 Years a Slave has signed on to the remake of Ben-Hur which is, in case you've forgotten, also a slavery narrative.
The Advocate on the Oscar eligible LGBT documentary hopeful Bridegroom 

Off Cinema
New Yorker "the dream of keeping poor people from seeing the doctor must never die." I love this but it's also sad that political satire barely has to try these days to be accurate!
Vanity Fair "The Ronan Farrow Love & Politics Dreamboat Hour"

Todays' Watch
The sounds of Gravity... (I'm not sure if it's going to win Best Picture but it seems likely that it walks away with the most statues even if it doesn't.)

Horror Fest 2013
Though horror is not among my favorite movie genres I really had a great time viewing a few seminal movies and working on the Best Horror Pre-Exorcist / Post-Exorcist group lists that we did for this haunted month. I'm realizing, as I stated on the latest podcast (one of my favorite episodes actually!), that maybe I like horror films more than I thought but that it's actually just the slasher sub-genre that I hate. Since I came of movie age in the 80s, I now understand that I equate the entire genre with slashers, for whom I have no use. I just find those movies repulsive and politically suspect (so much sexism and conservativism) and I just need more artistry in my movies.

But anyway my point is this: two members of the team shared more at their personal blogs and you should read them: Michael's Top Ten Lists with commentary ; Jason's own Pre-Pazuzu / Post-Pazuzu  lists... and if you like horror Jason is one of THE voices on the web you should be obsessing on. I actually credit him with opening my heart up to the genre slowly over the past few years, like one rib at a time ...now that it's open, don't get stabby with it!

P.S. I ♥ Shelley Duvall in The Shining so much -- f*** everyone who thinks she's terrible in it! -- and that is my last word on these horror lists we did for this season.

NYFF: 12 Years a Slave

The New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct 14) is in its last few days; here's JA's thoughts on Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave.

The free man turned slave Solomon Northrup's been sent on a trip to the grocer by the mistress of the plantation. He's to get something or other. He walks down the dirt path dutifully... until he doesn't - he darts into the woods, quickly, making pains to not be seen. His brow bursts with sweat. He dodges around trees, through vines, and he runs, and runs. We've been waiting for this moment, for his nerve to snap, for the surrounding wilderness to swallow him up and carry him back to his family up North.

If only freedom were that simple. No, simplicity belongs to the other side here. Evil comes easy. Around every corner, behind every hedgerow, a hangman. A crowd surrounding two black men, strung up. There is to be no escape - just a trip to the grocer, picking up something or other, or else. The two black men yank up into the air furiously, twitching to death, and so Solomon moves on, which is all he can do - that, or hang, twitching to death in the strange surrounding wilderness of this nowhere nothing place where he doesn't belong.

But then it's not quite a nowhere nothing place, though the plantations are all rendered as any muddy backyard anyplace, thick with moss and turned-soil stretching out - it's a specific time, and a specific place, and a specific horror where Solomon Northrup finds himself imprisoned. And to say he doesn't belong implies that anyone there does - that his birthright on one side of a line drawn on a map renders him different from the souls he now stands and suffers beside. 12 Years a Slave knows better and muddies up every distinction - freedom's just a word, its meaning rendered by the person who says it or doesn't say it, so easily snuffed out in a world built upon institutionalized indifference laid over bottomless cruelty. To say one man's a little bit better than another only seems to mean he'll push the problem, you being the problem, off on someone else - you're gonna hang either way.

To say that Steve McQueen's film renders the unfathomable brutality of this period in our history tangible in a way that I've never seen captured on-screen before is both an understatement (for one it makes the cavalier jokiness of Tarantino's Django Unchained seem terrifically misguided, to put it nicely, in retrospect) and a bit of a side-step - it does that but it somehow, miraculously, does so through inclusivity. This is not a film that pushes you away, even as it renders you breathless by its terror. We become one with Solomon. That's on Chiwetel Ejiofor's flawless and open performance of course, but also McQueen's direction and John Ridley's script, which never feel the need to force us any which way but to what's suddenly, inescapably, right in front of us. The commonness of the horror, the ease of it - it's all just so simple here, the way you can turn a corner and find freedom replaced by a sack over your head and your toes scratching at the mud, as you gasp for one last strangled breath.

The scars, by the way, never go away. The ghosts neither. We might crumple into the arms of the people who love us, or we might crumple into the dirt a battered rag doll of a person, but we're all gonna fall. It's as graceless as it is inevitable. It is what comes after that means to survive. And then, after that too. And always, the after, that's all there is, stretching scarred out towards infinity, and falling some more.

Podcast: Fall Film Preview... "Lady Stuff Coming Up!"

Labor Day Weekend is notoriously unfriendly to movie openings unless you can find a gem at your arthouse... so Katey, Joe, Nick and Nathaniel are looking ahead to the Fall Film Season on this week's podcast.

Films speculated upon include Ridley Scott's The Counselor, Alfonso Cuarón directing Sandra Bullock in Gravity, Steve McQueen & Michael Fassbender reunited for 12 Years a Slave, George Clooney's Monuments Men, Spike Jonze's Her, August: Osage County and many more. We answer these fives questions and you should, too, in the comments...

• Which two movies are you most excited about?
• Which performance are you most curious to see?
• Which film are you most suspicious of?
• Whose life is going to change this fall when their movie hits? 
• Which premiere party would you most like to attend? 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download it on iTunes. Please note: There won't be a new podcast next weekend since ½ of us will be festing in Toronto and dashing madly from screening to screening. 

Fall Film Preview 2013