The Great "Make-Up and Hairstyling" Bake-Off of 2016

We just wanted the blog post title to sound fancy. Who knows if the screening/meeting/deliberation at the Academy was anything like a superlative adventure this year? But let it suffice to say that they narrowed down some unknown number of films (why no semi-finals list, AMPAS?) to seven films which will compete for the 3 Oscar nominations in Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

Those films, with photos to jog your memories, are after the jump with some commentaries about their specific follicular and beautifying achievements...

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Grammy Nominees... As They Relate to Movies, Theater, and TV

Nominations have been announced for the 59th annual Grammy Awards honoring the year in music (sort of.. their timelines can be very confusing). More than any of the other big 4 awards shows (Tonys, Emmys, Oscars) Grammy nods are largely based on financial success so it's usually the superstars in the major categories and that's true again this year with Beyoncé leading with 9 nominations and other superstars not far behind. The surprise this year was country star Sturgill Simpson (A Sailor's Guide to Earth) sharing the most coveted category "Album of the Year" category with Beyoncé (Lemonade), Adele (25), Justin Beiber (Purpose), and Drake (Views).

Adele's "25" is so great. But if she loses everything she can console herself with her 10 previous Grammys

But since the Grammys have over 80 categories (we are not exaggerating) here at TFE we just focus on those in which film, tv, or stage types are in play. i.e. the ones that can  sometimes lead to EGOTing are after the jump.

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Summer Movie Season Surveyed

This article originally appeared in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It is reprinted here in a revised TFE specific but abridged version...

While summer didn’t technically begin until June 20th and isn’t technically over yet, “Summer Movie Season” is not beholden to the solstice and equinox but to The Blockbuster. Summer has long been the most lucrative season for Hollywood and so they’ve stretched it out to start earlier each year. It now tends to begin sometime in April with the release of the first movie that feels like a Summer Blockbuster proper (this year that would’ve arguably been The Jungle Book on April 15th) and ends on Labor Day, aka Any Second Now. It’s no secret that it’s been a rough summer for the quality of blockbusters. But if you’re lucky enough to live in a big city or smart enough to seek out films without gargantuan ad budgets, there was still plenty of cinema to get excited about. So herewith the Best & Worst of 2016’s Summer movie season…

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Jared Leto and the Art of Disavowing Your Film

by Kieran Scarlett

You may have read earlier this week Jared Leto’s claims that he was “tricked" into doing Suicide Squad. These claims of course came in the wake of the film’s poor critical reception and steep box office drop off after its opening weekend. In a nutshell, Leto alleges that he initially believed the film would be much a much more artistic outing than what was on the screen and he feels duped. Now, we could certainly sit here and speculate how (with whole plot details and often times entire scripts being leaked online to the lay public prior to a film’s release) the arguable star of a major motion picture could ever be tricked into thinking the film was X when it’s really Y. But rather than unpacking that dubious version of events and the spinning and "taken out of context" responses there’s something else that needs to be addressed here—the art of shifting the blame for your participation in a critically panned film.

There’s a way to do it tactfully and believably, without the claims seeming like sour grapes. It’s a one-step process. It’s incredibly easy to remember and it will help actors avoid the side-eyes that Jared Leto and his claims are surely receiving. Here it goes...

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Links: Marnie, Pokemon, The Tempest, Emmys, and Squad Goals

MTV test your knowledge - is this person Miles Teller or Ansel Elgort? 
Forbes very positive piece on Suicide Squad's success. But what about the fact that it's a terrible movie and terrible movies aren't good for movie culture or franchise futures?
MNPP Gratuitous Robert Redford for his 80th birthday 
EW Catherine Zeta Jones joining the Feud miniseries. She'll play Olivia de Havilland
Comics Alliance Well we should have known this was coming. There's going to be a live-action Pokemon movie. Nicole Perlman, the Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter is co-penning
Variety oops. a poster for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival has accidentally stirred up political trouble in Hong Kong 

MNPP's favorite movies of 1984
We Got This Covered Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon will reteam after Big Little Lies for a movie called Truly Madly Guilty, based on another best-selling love by Liane Moriarty -- I guess they all really liked each other!
Variety Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman will be the centerpiece at the London Film Festival this fall
Tracking Board Marvel sure its spreading itself thin. Now Hulu will be making a Marvel series with Runaways. So that means they've got shows/deals with Netflix, Hulu, Freeform, ABC, and Disney.
Variety Speaking of spreading yourself thin: Lin-Manuel Miranda will write new songs for The Little Mermaid live-action remake. I love Miranda but that seems like a strange fit to me, given that The Little Mermaid's songs are so old school Broadway musical flavored
/Film why we shouldn't expect to see sequels from Laika. (Sigh. I would proclaim this as great news but we once thought Pixar wouldn't be defeated by regurgitation and we were wrong.)
Coming Soon Natalie Portman says she's done with Marvel movies
Playbill a mostly nude female production of The Tempest is playing this summers in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. For free. I bet it's better than the Julie Taymor version with Helen Mirren!
Good Morning America Amy Schumer explains how she got Goldie Hawn out of retirement for her new film 
New Yorker Richard Brody argues that Marnie, not Vertigo, is the film we should look to in regards to encapsulating Hitchcock's career...

The greatness of Hitchcock’s artistry, the musical sublimity of his images and the emotional power of his stories, isn’t separable from his carnality—rather, his greatness depends upon the worst and most bestial aspects of his character. Without them, he’d be the artisan of cinematic cuckoo clocks, and what’s all too often celebrated in the name of Hitchcock mania is precisely an abstracted craft that’s isolated from its source of power, from its dynamic principle, from its raison d’être.

Emmys
Variety Creative Arts Emmys will be split into two pre Emmys awards ceremonies
Vulture an extremely choice interview with RuPaul on his first Emmy nomination and everything being political... including politics. 

For Fun
Death and Taxes a kitty cat who really hates Donald Trump 
Ageist six secrets to outmaneuvering ageism and living your best life 
Towleroad "Greco-Roman wrestling at the Olympics is everything we wanted and more" 
Towleroad Pole vaulter defeated by his own pole -- oh, I'm sorry this one isn't "fun" but painful to watch