A Mother's Day conversation between Zainab Jah (Farewell Amor) and Jayme Lawson (The Batman)

by Murtada Elfadl

Jayme Lawson and Zainab Jah play daughter and mother in "Farewell Amor"

In celebration of Mother’s Day I recently moderated a conversation over Zoom between actors Zainab Jah and Jayme Lawson. We'll be sharing it with you in three installments. For the first dispatch Jah and Lawson talked about their performances as mother and daughter in the Sundance 2020 film Farewell Amor, written and directed by Ekwa Msangi, and their favourite mother/daughter relationships at the movies.

Jah has previously appeared in TV shows like Homeland and Deep State but is best known for the Broadway play Eclipsed co-starring Lupita Nyong’o. Lawson is a newcomer and a recent graduate of Julliard who appeared last season in The Public Theater's production of For Colored Girls. She recently booked a major role in an upcoming film that you may have heard of, The Batman (2021)... 

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In defense of Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest"

It's Mother's Day in Portugal and Mother's Day next Sunday in the US. Since we're celebrating 1981 this week, we're starting early with the biggest, meanest mother of them all!

by Cláudio Alves

In 1971, in her book titled My Way of Life, Joan Crawford, the legendary diva of Old Hollywood, said that, of all the actresses of the time, only Faye Dunaway had the talent, the class and the courage to be a movie star. Had she lived to see the younger actress play her in the infamous Mommie Dearest, Crawford would have probably revised her statement. The 1981 biopic is one of the great camp classics of all time, a prestige picture with pretensions of Oscar glory that crashed and burned most spectacularly. Dunaway herself is said to have believed she was on her way to Academy Award glory. Instead, she got a Razzie for Worst Actress...

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Posterized: Movies named after holidays

With Mother's Day in theaters today starring romcom queens of yester-yore (Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston) the question comes to mind: What other U.S. holidays are available for Garry Marshall to make all star ensemble mosaics about?  A lot of holidays are already taken as you'll see in today's Posterized. (Disclaimer: We've opted to include only movies with theatrical releases and no holiday-themed titles -- there'd be hundreds with straight to dvd titles or movies with a holiday within the title)

How many of these movies, which take their names from holidays, have you seen?
Let's take them in order of their place on the calendar.

New Year's Day (1989), New Year's Day (2000), Groundhog Day (1993)

Ash Wednesday (1973), Valentine's Day (2010), April Fool's Day (1986)

Mother's Day (2016), Independence Day (1983), Independence Day (1996)

Labor Day (2013), Halloween (1978), Halloween (2007)

Christmas Eve (1947), Christmas Eve (2015), New Year's Eve (2011)

Still waiting for the Garry Marshall Treatment: Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Jr Day, Flag Day, President's Day, Easter, Father's Day, Thanksgiving... although the latter did get that sick sick sick fake slasher trailer by Eli Roth in Grindhouse (2007)

It seems beyond strange that the best movie named after a holiday is still a low budget 1970s slasher movie (that turned out great and became highly influential, for better...and usually worse). Halloween was #3 in our list of greatest modern horror movies.