Desperately Seeking Link

THR Insightful piece about experimentation of studios and Hollywood's post-coronavirus future
Vulture "are the celebrities okay?" a funny piece about the bizarre social media of stars during quarantine
Awards Daily Contagion (2011) reframed
Boy Culture a huge celebration of Madonna's "Vogue" as it turns 30

More after the jump including showbiz obituaries, Marvel's What If?, and the cinema of 1962...

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The New Classics - Happy-Go-Lucky

Michael Cusumano here to discuss a scene I find myself thinking about all the time.

 

Scene: Scott's meltdown
When you pause to consider how mundane the actual events of Mike Leigh’s films usually are, it’s funny to think how many moments from them lodge permanently in the memory.  Barely a weekend goes by that I don’t see some kind of world-ending cataclysm portrayed in expansively budgeted detail and what does my brain return to over and over again? Lesley Manville in Another Year retreating to her glass of white wine or David Thewlis in Naked stalking a security guard through the dark to harangue him about the meaning of life.

The famous Mike Leigh technique of crafting screenplays from extensive improvisations yields scenes that unfold with the convinction of real life...

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Eight Links Out

• Deadline 10 upcoming films that were given by funding from the British Film Institute... including a new meaty role for Sally Hawkins
• Filmmaker picks the 10 best films directed by women this year from Kenya's Rafiki through the US indie Madeline's Madeline. The biggest grosswer on the list is You Were Never Really Here by Lynne Ramsay...
• TFE <-- which, in case you missed  our year in review of box office hits, is only the 8th biggest grosser among female helmed films this year just behind Leave No Trace and Can You Ever Forgive Me?
• The Muse "Penny Marshall and the Movies That Shaped Me" 
• Gold Derby if Lady Gaga wins two Oscars this February she'll be the fifth woman to accomplish that trick in one night (but first actress).
• Pajiba picks some favourite movie costumes of the year and thankfully doesn't ignore contemporary films
• Electric Literature why recent movies about queer friendships are so revolutionary
• Awards Daily talks to Black Panther's editor Michael Shawver about some of the movie's best scenes and a compliment from Francis Coppola
• /Film you have just one week to watch Pixar's animated short finalist Bao online. It's soooo adorable

Red Carpet: Best Actresses Hug It Out

by Nathaniel R

Tonya, Mildred, Lady Bird, Eliza, and Katherine

Beauty! This season's five most celebrated leading actresses have 32 Oscar nominations and 5 statues between them. (Of course Meryl accounts for more than half of both totals but what can you do?). But readers hearts were elsewhere this year...

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Mike Leigh at 75: Happy-Go-Lucky

With Mike Leigh turning 75 tomorrow, we'll be looking at a few of his films. Here's Chris Feil

Of Mike Leigh’s many great films, Happy-Go-Lucky is perhaps the one the has grown most in its potency. Though his films reward multiple viewings, here is one that has grown all the more meaningful as the world around us has become increasingly fraught with depressing news; the benefit of positivity is at once essential and ignored. The film is both a character study of its relentlessly gleeful protagonist Poppy, played to perfection by Sally Hawkins, and about how the world works against her optimistic state of being.

The pull to submit to anger and gloom weighs heavy on our times, and an outlook like Poppy’s can seem so very far away indeed. 

Ten years on now, Happy-Go-Lucky feels prescient to the dire state of the world, as if we are becoming more like those annoyed by her cheeriness. Some of us who once saw ourselves in Poppy might have even succumbed to the numbing anger of the every day in the intervening years...

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