Curio: "They Live" 25 Years Later

Alexa here. While Thor hammered the box office into submission this past weekend, 25 years ago another brawny blonde was dominating the box office.  They Live, John Carpenter's campy sci-fi film starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, featured a six-minute fight over sunglasses and Reagan-inspired class paranoia that still resonates today. Here are some curios celebrating the cult favorite.

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All Links Day

Grantland Mark Harris on 12 Years a Slave and the Best Actor race
/Film Jonas Cuaron made a short film that will be a DVD extra for Gravity. It takes place on earth during one scene in the movie. 
Coming Soon The Addams Family getting a reboot. But I'm okay with this news since it's animated. If you're going to remake something, it's fine if you can do it in a new way. 

Deadline Dustin Hoffman and Kathy Bates for the musical education drama Boychoir
Shortlist Sandra Bullock extends the Feuding with Streep joke from their 2009 Oscar war
Popnography Sir Ian McKellens super short gay sitcom Vicious coming to American tv, also getting second season

Controversies
The Switch has an interesting update on what's going on with copyright extension laws. I do so hope the internet finds a way to collectively fight back because the laws are ridiculous. So many things that should be in the public domain are not
The Wrap the ongoing drama over Ender's Game and the Orson Scott Card boycott. All reports, including this one, which seems thorough end up being kind of misleading. Apparently true: he has no profit participation or creative input; Not true: he will not make a dime on this. Fact: He already made those dimes, years ago when the deal was signed. I wish people would point this out instead of pretending/saying he makes no money from this movie. He makes no "new" money, sure other than the rise in book sales, but Hollywood already paid him and probably handsomely. So yes he does profit from the movie.  

Halloween Hangover
I know I know. Halloween is over and as with all things people celebrate with excess you're probably a little relieved. But just in case it's your favorite holiday and you need a little hair of the dog, check out these horror-themed treats 'round the web...

Jessica Alba and friends as The Witches of Eastwick! Her best performance ever? (from her Instagram account)

Slant ranks the best "final girls" 
Empire famous horror film child stars all grown up from Haley Joel Osment to Daveigh Chase
MNPP's hilarious "ways not to die" series gets a pervy Halloween Sssssss (1973) edition
Pajiba Miley Cyrus is smarter than Julianne Hough (the proof is in the costuming)
Cinema Blend chooses 9 movies that deserve to ascend into "halloween classics" 
i09 the best halloween costumes from 'round the internet (I love the Peter Pan couples costume so much!)

Movies that go bump in the night

Happy Halloween, everybody! It’s Tim, here to celebrate the high holy night of horror movies, when even the most squeamish can steel themselves up to watch a scary movie, and scary movie lovers stock up all our best and blackest to watch in marathons of unendurable dread.

But let’s not go prattling about every random horror film that comes to mind (which is, I’m a little sorry to admit, the way that I assembled my movie playlist for the night). Instead, I’d like to ask everybody to pitch in their suggestions for a question always on my mind this time of year:

What movies best capture the spirit of Halloween?

That question already has a lot of wiggle room baked into it – do we mean Halloween as a night of ghosts and witches, Halloween as a night of trick-or-treating and costumes, Halloween as a night of crisp autumn air and fallen leaves? I don’t know, and that’s why I want to throw it out to all of you. But before I do that, I want to offer three suggestions of the movies that best capture what enters my head when I hear the word “Halloween”. (And I’m not including John Carpenter’s Film Experience-endorsed slasher film Halloween. There’s such a thing as too damn easy).

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Absolutely not a joke. The third of the seasonally-arranged film’s four chapters takes place in its entirety on Halloween night, and there’s not a film out there that better evokes a the feeling of dressing up and hunting for candy on a cool fall night. Not many directors in Hollywood history ever had a better grasp of what to do with color than Vincente Minnelli, and in this sequence, he and cinematographer George Folsey gorgeously capture the variations of browns and yellows that dominate the landscape during a Midwestern October (in fact, Carpenter and his DP, Dean Cundey, looked to this film as the inspiration when making Halloween). The warm nighttime lighting is just spooky enough to evoke the feeling of being a child who secretly wants to be scared, and it all couldn’t be more pleasantly nostalgic. Bonus: one of only two films that’s both a terrific Halloween movie and a terrific Christmas movies (the other, of course, is The Nightmare Before Christmas).

Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966)
Because, first, I’d be falling behind in my mission if I didn’t use an article about horror films as an excuse to talk about Mario Bava and the wide world of visually florid, narratively bonkers Italian horror cinema. And second, because my Halloween always needs a stop-over in foggy cemeteries and decaying, haunted Mitteleuropean villages, and some of the absolute best ever put to celluloid can be found in this story of a ghostly little girl making life awful for an isolated Carpathian town has some of the best. The normal rules of Italian horror apply: if you’re hunting for mood and blissed-out color cinematography, this will do you up right, and if you need a tight piece of storytelling… but hey, look at that cinematography! Still, there’s probably no place that approach is more objectively defensible than in a ghost story, where the uncanny and inexplicable is part of the fun. Nor do many movies about ghosts understand so well the primal, bedtime story impact that a good Gothic set can have when it’s been lit to be this creepy.

Sleepy Hollow (1999)
I can remember as vividly now as the day after it happened, the first time I saw Tim Burton’s last completely successful movie and thinking to myself, “That’s it! That’s autumn!” Not bad for a film shot entirely on a soundstage, without a whisper of natural lighting, for which we can credit both Rick Heinrichs’ just-exaggerated fairy tale woods, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s absolutely gorgeous lighting palette, beautifully evoking the yellow haze of light filtered through dying leaves (Heinrich won an Oscar, Lubezki was nominated. Frankly, the visuals would be enough to secure the movie a spot on my annual Halloween-time viewing schedule even if it wasn’t a pretty great ghost story, or didn’t have its own Halloween scene with quintessentially Burtonesque jack-o’-lanterns flickering in the background. There’s an atmospheric creepiness to the film that has everything to do with setting and place, not with plot (which, given the things the plot does, is for the best), and few things have ever colonized my feelings about walking in the woods quite so effectively.

What about the rest of you?

What's your favorite Halloween movie? Let us know in comments!

Two (Links) of Every Kind

Directors
Empire Darren Aronofsky's Noah is having post-production / test screening trouble. Duh! Like evangelicals would love Black Swan or Requiem or or or 
Huffington Post has a candid interview with Alan Taylor the director of Thor: The Dark World. Apparently there's a shit ton of exposition in the movie. I wish it wasn't locked yet because cut cut cut  

Actor
Vulture I would have done so much better on this Brad Pitt Hair Quiz (I scored 11/15) if it was about which girlfriend he was imitating with which red carpet look
EW I was thinking Emile Hirsch was getting a little pudgy recently... now he's putting it to (potentially) good use: he's signed to star in a John Belushi biopic. Guess he'd like to get a little closer to Oscar than he got with Into the Wild

Actresses
Backstage remembers Penélope Cruz's brilliant career makeover in Volver  
Cinema Blend Noomi Rapace taking on seven roles in sci fi flick What Ever Happened to Monday? This is totally messing with my plans to continue being uninterested in her.

Bests & Worsts
IndieWire stands up for 10 actresses that are running in longshot position for year-end honors
Salon calls The Counselor "The Worst Movie Ever Made"  

LGBT
Guardian marketing gay films for straight people
Queerty has a two parter on the most realistic gay sex scenes on film

Friends
Nicks Flick Picks does his usual "anticipation" post set to diva beats. These are always amazing to return to for updates
My New Plaid Pants wraps up his amazing "13 Snakes of Halloween series. You need to watch them slithe

Today's Visuals
Anne Elizabeth Moore and Gabrielle Gambo investigate dozens of horror movies and discover disturbing gender/racial politics (in comic book form)

Click the photo for "The Truly Scary Politics of Horror Movies"

and Todrick Hall has fun with Disney Villianesses in this Chicago spoof "Spell Block Tango" 

Curio: Monsters' Day Off

Alexa here. With spooky season almost behind us, it only seems right to feature these illustrations of various film monsters on their day off by Chicago illustrator Kiersten Essenpries.  Ever wonder how Michael Myers keeps his jumper so crease-free? How Pinhead makes a little extra cash? Whether Leatherface works in any medium besides flesh? Kiersten has the answers after the jump...

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