Friday, March 20, 2015 at 5:29PM It's a mini-tweets o' the week roundup because I didn't spend much time on social media this week. But I do feel the need to share these yummy morsels featuring Tilda Swinton (Not Tilda), Little Women, Hugh Jackman, Crimson Peak, and Cate Blanchett after the jump...
Toys R Us is way more homoerotic than I remembered. pic.twitter.com/k5x87IMohO
— itsonlyzach (@itsonlyzach) March 15, 2015
Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 6:00PM Americans should probably get to know Sarah Snook. If you’re like me then you probably missed her in Julia Leigh’s unsettling Sleeping Beauty, but as recently as 2012 she was hailed as Australia’s Emma Stone (just google "sarah snook australia's emma stone") for her excessively charming performance in the (otherwise terrible) local rom-com Not Suitable for Children and last year impressed in a small role in the apocalyptic rave thriller These Final Hours. Her biggest role yet, however, came in the form of the Spierig Brothers' Predestination and at last night's “Australian Oscars”, the AACTA Awards, she won the coveted Best Lead Actress prize, stealing it from the grip of two mightily formidable contenders.
The big winners + Cate Blanchett without her shoes (!!!) after the jump...
Who me?
Monday, January 5, 2015 at 6:38PM Gurus of Gold a new chart reflects the PGA nominations
Variety talks about the lack of screeners for Selma
NYT great profile of Patricia Arquette. People are laying the tributes on thick now for the Oscar campaign.
THR you know it's Oscar season when people get fired for "smear campaigns"
The Guardian exchanges pleasantries with Sienna Miller (Foxcatcher, American Sniper):
You've made a good movie for once."
The Dissolve on the Razzie shortlists - nominations soon
i09 52 years of Spider-Man's mask a spiffy quick visual
Hollywood Elsewhere Josh Gad may play Roger Ebert in Russ & Roger Go Beyond
i09 Eddie Redmayne shares details of his audition for The Hobbit
Playbill Into the Woods breaks into the Billboard top 20
Film School Rejects on How the Disneyfied Into the Woods loses its allegorical power, especially in regards to the AIDS crisis
Vulture how Looking is reinventing itself for Season 2 (premiering on Golden Globe night, fyi)
Pajiba on an amazing Boogie Nights story involving Burt Reynolds
/Film Matthew Vaughn, promoting Kingsman: The Secret Service thinks people have had enough of Nolanified superhero films and want more fun
Playbill god help us all. Cats is returning to Broadway. There are still so many 1980s musicals on the boards here. Wish we could have more originals and fewer returns. P.S. Cats is the first Broadway show I ever saw so I have a certain affection. But still...
Australia Womens Weekly Russell Crowe saying annoying things again. This time knocking actresses for wanting better roles when they're older
In Contention North Texas critics like Boyhood and the usual supporting players. Gyllenhaal & Pike for leads
List-Mania
Variety on ten big spenders. See the insane amount of money the studios spend on ads for their movies. Godzilla tops the list spending big to make big but The Judge also wasted a small fortune
/Film a grab bag of lists about the film year
Vox Todd Vanderwerff's top ten list
Adam Male 5 gay men share their top ten LGBT movies list (well, there unfortunately isn't much in the way of "L" here). Interesting to see so little overlap. Nobody ever interviews me for this sort of thing but my list would contain a few of these.
Comics Alliance best comic books of the year
How to Pronounced David Oyelowo
There's finally video of Brad Pitt schooling us all on David Oyelowo's name. Here you go!
And while we're on the topic, Interview did a Q&Andy with him. On why he left the UK and came to Hollywood:
I had a very nice career in the U.K., but heroes of mine are Daniel Day Lewis, Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and when I looked at the zenith of what they do, it came out of Hollywood. So my wife and I took the risk in 2007 of leaving the U.K., coming here, and hoping that I could scale those heights.
Dizzying heights indeed but Selma's a great step up.
And Finally...
For those of you just returning from a long holiday, don't miss...
#20-11 Best of the Year, (now updated with honorable mentions)
#10-01 Best of the Year, Nathaniel's List
Unjust Pride DVD Sony has put the gay heroes in the closet
..and more interviews with:
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson Before Superhero Glory, Noah
Actor Finn Wittrock A Brief Scene in an Elevator
Actor Oscar Isaac A Most Famous Year... Coming Soon
Cinematography Yves Belanger The Man Who Shot Reese
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 at 5:00PM Glenn here again to look at the AACTA Awards - aka the "Australian Oscars" - which announced their annual nominations last night. Lots of big names spread across the field and some welcome nods to smaller films.
It was an expectedly big day for Russell Crowe's directorial debut, The Winter Diviner. While ol' Rusty may be miffed (justifiable? I'm not sure, I have not seen his film yet) that he missed out on a directing nomination, he surely can't be disappointed for too long since his film is scattered all over the nominations. In fact, with eight, the WWI drama received the second-biggest haul of the day. Somewhat less expected, however, was the film that leads the nomination tally: Predestination. A period-set sci-fi thriller from the Spierig Brothers (Daybreakers) that stars Ethan Hawke as a time-traveller whose life intersects with a mysterious man whose story spans time, space, fate, terrorism, love and even gender. Thankfully that refreshing lack of genre bias extended to six nods for The Babadook and The Rover. Meanwhile, more traditional dramas like Tracks, The Railway Man and Australia's foreign language entry Charlie's Country also fared very well.
Here are the nominations.
Best Film
Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 4:15PM What becomes a legend most? Not the biopics we see each year at the movies, Patti Smith suggests to me. We were meeting to talk about her first Original Song for a film, "Mercy Is" from this spring's $100 million hit Noah when the conversation veered into her own status as a showbiz legend, the godmother of punk. She shudders when I wonder aloud if anyone will make ever make a movie of her best-selling memoir "Just Kids" which recounts her storied relationship with fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Though she's undoubtedly been interviewed thousands of times by now in her forty years of stardom, and she questions (indirectly) the whole point of the star profile and the interviewing process -- 'if you really want to know me, it's all there in the work' -- she is a patient and warm interview. She instantly recalls the old massive paraphenalia that journalists used to bring into the room to record with when she sees my tiny electronic device and she's eager to talk Noah, a project she felt immediately taken with when Darren Aronofsky first told her about his plans for it at the Venice Film Festival years ago.
Patti Smith at a recent concert in Iceland
NATHANIEL: Movies aren’t something you've spent a lot of time with in your legendary career. Did you know Aronofsky’s work well before writing the song for Noah?
PATTI SMITH: Yes. I love the one with Rachel Weisz, The Fountain. And Pi. I saw Black Swan a couple of times and we talked about Black Swan as a metaphor for the artist process and things like that. But it was not so much Darren as the subject.
Nathaniel: But you’ve been asked about religion before in your career and you’ve called it ‘man-made dogma’ so why do a Biblical film?
PATTI SMITH: Well, I love the Bible. Just because I’ve extricated myself from religion doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It’s a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry - the Songs of Solomon and the Psalms. I studied the Bible seriously until I was young teenager. It was always part of our home education: talking about the Bible, arguing about the Bible, interpreting it. So I don’t connect prayer or scriptures with any particular religion so it’s not a contradiction in my life. [more...]
