Posterized: Bong Joon-ho

by Nathaniel R

With Parasite rapidly collecting box office loot ($95 million worldwide to date) and looking very strong for awards season and top ten listsd, let's talk about the master behind the camera Boon Jong-ho. The Palme d'or winner turned 50 last month and had yet more cause to celebrate his half century mark with Parasite opening to sensational box office and expanding rapidly (lots more cities this weekend, so go see it!)

Let's look at his short but stellar filmography in poster form after the jump...

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No Hit Ever Dies: Cruella, Juno, Saw, Snowpiercer, and Capernaum

• Coming Soon Emma Thompson is in talks to join Disney's Cruella movie. No word on what her role is, though, since its Emma Stone playing the title character
• Playbill Leos Carax (Holy Motors) begins shooting a movie musical called Annette this summer. Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver star
• MNPP Rocketman photocall at Cannes. Fun suit, Taron Egerton
• Screen Daily how Nadine Labaki's Capernaum became a major hit in China's growing arthouse cinema market
• Variety ...and speaking of. Labaki is working on a documentary on the making of Lebanon's all time biggest hit film

More after the jump including Avengers Endgame, a reboot of Saw, recent Hollywood deaths, and the latest news from Broadway...

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Posterized: Tilda Swinton's Greatest Hits

by Nathaniel R

Alien movie star Tilda Swinton is one of the true glories of modern cinema, and she's playing multiple creepy roles this weekend in her third Luca Guadagnino picture. After starring for the Italian director in I Am Love and A Bigger Splash she's the MVP of his new spin-off riff (it's hardly a 'remake') of Dario Argento's classic hallucinatory horror film Suspiria.

What's more this is not even the first time the actress has played mutiple roles sometimes of multiple genders in the same picture (see also Teknolust, Hail Caesar, Man to Man, and Orlando). Since Tilda Swinton works so often, her filmography is over 70 movies long. That means we can't do a comprehensive Posterized lest we be here for literally hours working in Photoshop, so instead we've opted for Swinton's largest and/or most essential roles.

How many of these 21 key Tildas have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

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Beauty vs Beast: The La-Di-Da Lady

JA from MNPP here, back from the holidays and welcoming everybody to the year 2015 with a brand new round of "Beauty vs Beast." This week we're tackling one of our most favorite actresses and her maybe probably most definitely most iconic role - yup it's Diane Keaton's 69th birthday today and so la-di-da la-la y'all...

poll by twiigs.com

So all of you left-wing Communist Jewish homosexual pornographers have got one week to make your voice heard - vote and then tell us in the comments which neurotic you wanna chase lobsters with. And happy birthday, Diane Keaton!

PREVIOUSLY I wasn't here last week and so Nathaniel took over and man, did he come up with a doozy - in The Battle of the Tildas, the winner was... Tilda! Snowpiercer Tilda, to be specific - the Minister Mason made like a good shoe and trounced over Wes Anderson's old-lady-drag competition. (For the record, Mason's my pick too.) Said commenter Marsha Mason:

"I think Tilda in Snowpiercer was the supporting performance of the year. Showy and even a little cartoonish maybe, but it meshed perfect with the art design and surreal feel and everything else about that movie. It was perfect for a fantasy world take on real sociological problems."

Best of the Year Pt. 1: Double the Swedes & Triple the Tilda

With love for last year's cinema.

2015 has a lot to live up to. This past year delivered amazing films from fresh-voiced directors, a good number of them female for a change, and it also came through, unexpectedly, with a surprising spread of high quality empathetic and diverse LGBT cinema. But even if you're stuck in multiplex-only towns, the mainstream also delivered with sneaky overachieving surprises in genres as oft-lazy as superheroes, horror, animation, giant monsters, and crime thrillers. When it came time to draw up my lists I had 30 pictures I really wanted to celebrate. Thirty! 

So let's briefly sum up (alphabetically) the films that just missed the top 20

The Boxtrolls - Laika's boldly grotesque superbly-voiced Victorian fable. 
Godzilla - Smartly reimagined not as reboot but myth returned. The paratroopers. Gah!
Edge of Tomorrow - Emily Blunt's 'full metal bitch' isn't easy to forget. Neither is the film's gleeful rapid fire anarchy in treating Tom Cruise as South Park might. "You killed Tom Cruise!" Repeat ∞
Happy Christmas - No budget? No problem. Just write a warm funny script, film it in your home and hire famous actor friends. Joe Swanberg is living the Cassavettes dream only seems much happier about it.
The LEGO Movie - Excessively clever and fun. But in truth I'd rather it win a Clio than an Oscar.
A Most Violent Year - a slow simmer but Jessica Chastain is at full boil
Nightcrawler - Jake & Rene's bring out each other's best but their character's worst in this amoral nightmare. Great dialogue but man do those laughs curdle.
Two Days One Night - Belgium's Oscar submission is simple in narrative if not in complexity of feeling but Marion Cotillard is impossibly good / real / Oscar worthy
The Way He Looks - In a simply fantastic year for queer cinema (thank god - it's been a while) this was the sweetest offering, a coming of age pic about a blind teenager and his two best friends
Wild Tales - A raucously entertaining Argentinian anthology produced by Pedro Almodóvar and directed with skill and wicked invention by Damian Szifron. If you can, see it with a group of friends (comedies are always best that way). I'm already sad I didn't include it in the top 20!

So here we are. Twenty may feel like an indulgent number to settle on for this 2014 countdown party but it comes down to this. No matter how many times I adjusted my "tippity top" movies list I couldn't live without these twenty. They were the ones that refused to budge, that defined the year for me, that demanded top ten placement, refuting the laws of math. To sum up: This cinephile had a great year in the dark. If you were positive I loved it and you don't see it in the top 20, it's tied for 21st! 

The film year is not drawing to a close just yet -- we keep celebrating through Oscar night. But the calendar year is a wrap so here is part one of my favorites roundup starting with a Tilda Swinton double feature...

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