Soundtracking: Rachel Getting Married

by Chris Feil

Jonathan Demme’s career was populated with a musical sensibility that bordered on spirituality, more obviously so in his many music documentaries and the definitive Stop Making Sense. His narrative films could stealthily incorporate a hum of music integral to the world he was presenting, as keenly observed as his character details. From Something Wild to Philadelphia to even Ricki and the Flash, Demme would use music to make his stories come alive in authentic ways. Rachel Getting Married, his late career masterpiece, has a musical language all its own, one that represents the film’s simmering grief and provides its necessary catharsis.

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Posterized: Anne Hathaway

by Nathaniel R

Anne Hathaway's latest star vehicle, The Hustle, a gender-flipped loose remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), debuted this weekend. We're happy to see her back when she belongs -- in a leading role on the big screen.

She's one of our greatest contemporary stars, the haters be damned. Thankfully the anti-Hathaway brigade has quieted down a bit after her savvy post-Oscar low profile. She started right at the top with the $100 million hit The Princess Diaries, a rare and delicious but precarious place to start as a teenager as there's usually only one way to go (you guessed it, down). But Hathaway proved resilient, weathering the rise to adult stardom with inarguable skill buoyed not just by remarkable beauty (those huge expressive eyes are a camera's dream) but by even more remarkable talent and versatility as an actor.

The star, now 36, has made 27 features. How many of her films have you seen? The poster are all after the jump...

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Aug Screengrab Roulette: Sing!, Rachel Getting Married, etc...

You know the drill. Here's all the new stuff on the major streaming services with a handful plus of random titles freeze-framed (whatever came up when we messed with the viewing bar, no fudging). What will you be watching this month and which movies would you love to see covered in depth?

The lists and screengrabs are after the jump.

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Familiar Faces: The Jonathan Demme Players

by Nathaniel R

Dearest reader, as you've probably heard by now the director Jonathan Demme has passed away at 73. He died due to esophageal cancer. I had run into him at a screening of La La Land  this past September and I took the opportunity to tell him how much Rachel Getting Married  meant to me (he joked about being first with interracial weddings for Rosemarie deWitt onscreen). Then we talked Swing Shift for a little bit as we had just discussed it on this very site. I was so saddened by this yesterday that I couldn't do much but tweet my farewells. The words wouldn't come out for a lengthy piece but then, surprise, I remembered I'd written the following piece that was never published (oops) to coincide with the release of Ricki and the Flash (2015). I filled in a few of the blank spots and adjusted some verbs to reflect the past tense but this surprisingly doubles as what I probably wanted to say about Jonathan Demme yesterday and couldn't. It's about his favorite actors but looking back, it's a fitting tribute because what American director was more curious about literally any kind of person he might find with his camera?

Jonathan Demme was one of America's most interesting and surprising directors. Though he's now best remembered for the modern classic The Silence of the Lambs (1991) it was actually something of an oddity in his filmography being the only horror film and, in some ways, the most classically controlled. In other ways though it's a traditional Demme picture. It features actors doing unexpected or suddenly signature electric work, weird musician cameos (what the hell is one of the members of 80s synth pop band Book of Love doing in there?), and diverse casting where most films would go with the default heavily male white cast. In fact, Silence might be his most white/male movie but that's part of its plot...

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