Linkers Dozen

• MovieMaker Bruce Willis retires from acting after Aphasia diagnosis. Our heart goes out to him and his loved ones.
• World of Reel polled 150 critics (including me) on the best films of the 1970s. No surprise to see The Godfather top it even though it wasn't on my list (we could only choose 10-15 films each). Four of my selections made the top ten (Nashville, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, and Network)
• Pajiba great piece on Ryan Reynolds turning himself into a brand while becoming blander as an actor

More after the jump including Essie Davis, Chang Chen, Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, and the aftermath of The Slap at the Oscars... 

Click to read more ...

It's Devil's Night

Be safe out there with your pre-Halloween partying.

Uptown Link You Up

Guardian Amy Schumer taking up active role in fight for more US gun control
Variety in strange news MacBeth will be available to stream shortly after its December release
Empire Channing Tatum has only just now agreed to play Gambit in the upcoming superhero film. This is why i hate internet superhero culture. We've been hearing about this for about ten months. And he's only just made it official so now we get to hear about it again? 
/Film Relativity's bankruptcy has saved us from at least one reboot: The Crow (though as with Terminator the idea of rebooting it makes no damn sense since the very concept enables endless sequels with very little connective tissue to the originals
Playbill at least one cast member (Josh Gad) of Beauty & The Beast is done filming
The Matinee looks back at Her after reading Aziz Ansari's "Modern Romance" 
E! Online WHOA. Kyle Chandler played Coach Taylor (Friday Night Lights) again... albeit for just a few seconds

 

YNMS
We've done so many of these lately that to do them all would be a bit like becoming a trailers only site and no thank you... so a few that we missed are Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth starring Elisabeth Moss who was so so excellent in Perry's Listen Up Philip (it also has a great poster!),  the Oscar hopeful Brooklyn (which I loved at Sundance), Nancy Meyer's The Intern which we will obviously see because Anne Hathaway (♥), the Half Nelson directors returning with Mississippi Grind though they've moved from Gosling to Reynolds in the "Ryan" department, that continuous shot German movie Victoria (which Sebastian already talked about) and the latest trailer for the animated version of The Little Prince. 

Video To Go
"Uptown Funk" as sung by the movies. 

Cute. (I was wondering what they'd use for "Michelle Pfeiffer" and had no idea that she was referenced in The Bucket List) But wow is that a boy-movie montage. Even the dance breaks are sans-actresses!

The Links (Are Out Today)

These Links Have Little Do With Oscars.
Woot! We're (almost) clear!
Movie|Line the new Spider-Man suit. Try to contain your excitement that it's the same as the old one with bigger eyes. 
Stale Popcorn the week in Kidmania. (It's so gratifying to enjoy Nicole Kidman with the whole world again.)
Salon a mash note to Bailey Buntainn (the mini Megan-Hilty) on the increasingly stellar Bunheads 
/Film The Coen Bros rewriting Unbroken for Angelina Jolie to direct. Whoa. Smart movie Angelina.
Coming Soon James McAvoy make take on the remake of The Crow... although given the concept of The Crow I fail to see why it needs a remake OR a reboot. The idea is that the crow moves on to a new fresh corpse once you've had your vengeance.

Oscar Leftovers
TMZ Quvenzhané Wallis causes an explosion in puppy purse sales (Courtney isn't the only girl that got excited about them.)
HuffPo a producer of the Oscar winning short Paperman kicked out of the Dolby for throwing paper airplanes on Oscar night! 
The Verge Oscar winning doc short Inocente is the first Oscar winner funded by Kickstarter. Methinks it won't be the last 
IndieWire behind the current vfx problem in Hollywood. What the Life of Pi winner was talking about before the orchestra drowned him out.  
Towleroad was "amazing" the most overused word at the Oscars? 

Oscar Commercials?
I hadn't even thought of this as a topic but two of my friends had something to say...
Kari Artwork did his own zombie unicorn painting inspire that Tim Burton Samsung ad? 
Tribeca Film Joe Reid on the movie-star commercials that aired during the program 

Today's Must Watch
David Bowie recruits one of his modern day descendants Tilda Swinton for his new music video. YESSSSSSSSSSSSS 

For her next art project I would like Tilda Swinton to star as David Bowie and remake all of his music videos.

4 Things We Didn't Get Around To Saying This Week...

Which we really meant to. It was a sorry week in time management. So... Let's cover them right quick now.

1. The cast of Moulin Rouge! will be reunited on May 3rd on MTV for the 10th anniversary. The movie's exact anniversary is kind of confusing, so I'm choosing to celebrate the 10th anniversary on June 1st which is the date it went wide. May 30th through June 3rd is MOULIN ROUGE WEEK!

2. Congratulations to Darren Aronofsky for his Venice Film Festival Jury gig. I've always said that artists aren't necessarily the best judges of art so you can't really tell if a brilliant person at any one particular thing will have any brilliance at recognizing the brilliance in others within that same thing (hi sentence. You are too long). Nevertheless, it's always interesting to see which film luminaries the prestige festivals choose and who their jury ends up being.

3. I would pay good money for a way to watch old sitcoms with the laugh tracks removed. Why is this not an option? I literally can't watch anything with a laugh track -- with one or two exceptions -- it just takes me right out of what I'm watching.

4. It was 18 years ago this week that the death of Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow was proclaimed "negligence" That was such a sad creepy movie story back in the early to mid nineties but me and my friend Kevan, who I went to every movie at the time were really obsessed with the movie.

I have a soft spot for the movie (it's set in my hometown on a holiday I always had to explain to people "Devil's Night" once I left Detroit) though it's not exactly a great movie. And I love Brandon Lee in it. So I've been sad to hear about the rethink these past couple of weeks (to star Bradley Cooper?). Although technically a revival of this franchise isn't at all sacrilegious because it's a resurrection myth and there's no reason why the Crow can't keep raising the dead, you know?