Bye Instant Watch: Terms of Endearment, Tom Cruise, Big Fish...

What's leaving Netflix Instant Watch?

We should probably start covering that. It seems like a boring topic but we jazz up your public service announcements. I'll close my eyes and play with the control bar and wherever I freeze the movie I'll share the image. This weekend is your last chance to watch these films for free for who knows how long. Since there are Oscar titles in the mix, perhaps you can fill some holes in your Oscar lists of Things To See or Rewatch.

Ready? In chronological order of their film year, seven films leaving Netflix on February 1st...

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

EMMA: I've got some good news. I'm unofficially pregnant. I mean I haven't got the tests back but I'm never late.

AURORA: [Pause] Well... No, I don't understand."

Look how crazy young Jeff Daniels is! Shirley Maclaine is so hilarious and complicated in this movie -- that long pause with cascading rejection of possible responses under frozen 'I don't understand' face. She's going to lose out since she doesn't want to think of herself as a grandmother. A well deserved Best Actress win, with Shirley obviously relieved about it "this show has been as long as my career."

Oscar Note: I know we've asked this before but how long before we get another girlie Best Picture winner it's been FOR-EV-ER. Terms of Endearment was nominated for 11 Oscars (an astounding amount for a contemporary-set film), winning 5. 

six more movies after the jump

THE TERMINATOR (1984) 

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I link. I die. I link again!

Daily Mail Tim Burton's type is hilariously permanent. Now he's on to Eva Green who fits it like a T
New Yorker The brilliant Emily Nussbaum on sexual consent and PTSD on Jessica Jones and its Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 6 reflections
DGA Chris Nolan interviews Quentin Tarantino about The Hateful Eight which will now enter wide release on January 1st instead of the 8th.
Slate reflects on what the Star Wars franchise is given that it's not "sci-fi"
Variety has a few old FYC and congratulatory ads for Star Wars from the 70s. Good stuff
Vanity Fair today's celebrities all want to be Han Solo

News
The Black List  If you've got some free time you can wade through Hollywood's favorite unproduced scripts. List was just announced today.
Collider Mad Max Fury Road may return to theaters in a black & white version -- Miller's original intention before they opted for super saturated color.
Variety Brad Pitt's satire War Machine wraps shooting in the United Arab Emirates.
Tracking Board Warner Bros is moving forward with a Speedy Gonzalez feature, date TBD. (He was my second favorite of the Looney Tunes as a child, after Pepe Le Pew... but they both have cultural stereotyping issues. How will they walk that line?)
Variety Melissa McCarthy is nearly free of Mike & Molly

List Mania
Slant picks the 25 best films of the year from 45 Years through Chi-Raq and on to Mad Max: Fury Road. But since Carol is way down at #19... What?
Los Angeles Times Brooklyn tops Kenneth Turan's otherwise alphabetical top ten
Indie Wire critics poll for the year with Mad Max & Carol fighting for supremacy. Fassbender & Rampling take the acting prizes
Pajiba celebrates the best 'comfort movies' of the year - not particularly challenging but great watches from your couch in your jammies: Cinderella, The Intern, and more...
AV Club on the best film scenes of the year including Creed's continuous shot boxing match and lots of interesting and unexpected choices -- yay for including "Summer in Ohio" from The Last Five Years

Today's Watch
If you've got a free two hours you can watch all six previous Star Wars movies at once?  It's an art installation. Click on the image if you wish to do this craziness.

Beauty vs Beast: Marriage Among the Ruins

Jason here, taking a little break between New York Film Festival screenings to give you this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" -- this past weekend Danny Boyle's film Steve Jobs screened at NYFF to sold-out crowds and from what I gathered very good notices (stay tuned for TFE's take soon; I took that picture to the left myself at the press conference), and I heard that on Saturday night Danny Boyle led the crowd in a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" to birthday girl, beloved actress, Oscar winner, and icon Kate Winslet.

Kate turns 40 today! We have been worshipping Kate ever since she helped bash in her girlfriend's mother's head with a brick in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, and we've never wavered... well okay we had no idea what anybody was thinking with Labor Day either, but other than that, not ever. Here on her 40th birthday let's give love to one of her best recent performances, one that just happened to coincide with a reunion with the Bogie to her Bacall, Leonardo DiCaprio, who was doing very fine work right across from her.

PREVIOUSLY Last week in anticipation of Ridley Scott's The Martian's looming box office boom we faced off our favorite pair of Red Planet invaders -- well it was Tim Burton's little green men that zapped their way into our hearts, to the tune of nearly 80% of your vote. Sorry Tripods, better luck next invasion. Said Denny:

"ACKACKACKACKLOLOLOLOL The martians from Mars Attacks win for their Frankenstein-ian experiments ALONE. "

Tim's Toons: Corpse Bride, ten years later

Tim here. This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the festival premieres of two very different stop-motion animated features. We've recently chatted a bit about Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so other than reminding you that it exists, and it's still delightful a decade on, I will pass it by in silence. Instead, I want turn everybody's attention to Corpse Bride, or if you prefer - the boys in marketing clearly did - Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. The second movie's reputation has gone off in a very different direction over the last ten years: while Were-Rabbit remains a touchstone of sorts thanks to its iconic stars, I'll bet that a good number of you just thought, "Huh, Corpse Bride, I forgot all about that".

That’s not unfair. Revisiting it for the first time in most of that same decade, I found it to be visually inventive, and dangerously rushed as a narrative: based on a Russian folk tale of a young man who accidentally weds a beautiful dead woman, the films never quite shakes the sketchy structure of a fable.

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5 Suggestions for that Newly Announced DumBurton Film

Manuel here with your daily Disney update. By now you’ve probably already heard that Tim Burton, he of Alice in Wonderland & Big Eyes fame has signed on to direct a live-action adaptation of beloved Disney property Dumbo. With it, of course, came cries of “IS NOTHING SACRED?!” despite large corporations (in particular the Mouse House) constantly letting us know that, no, actually nothing is. Especially when we’re all so eager to shell out money for Phase 1 of their live action remake roster.

So, rather than rehearse those conversations (“What will they turn to next; Fantasia?!”) or snarkily, if gleefully, begin to imagine what other director/Disney film pairings we could come up with (Fincher’s Ursula, Bigelow’s Mulan, Apatow’s Hercules…), I figured we’d offer some suggestions for this Dumburton film:

• Cast Andy Serkis as Dumbo (or maybe Sean Gunn who did such great work on Rocket Raccoon?)
• Steer away from casting Johnny Depp (no one wants to see his take on Timothy Q. Mouse)
• If you’ll be recruiting past collaborators, make us excited about seeing what Colleen Atwood & Dennis Gassner could do with a circus (they did such great work on Big Fish)
• Gender-bend this mostly male story; might the crows be an all-female gang? (think of it: Ricci! Davis! Ryder! Green! Pfeiffer!)
• Keep it weird (but not Mad Hatter dancing weird, more like ‘is this really a drug-induced elephant dancing sequence?’ weird).

I’m sure we all have strong opinions on this one, so let’s hear ‘em! Are you the teensiest bit excited about this or is Disney’s cash-grab go back-to-the-animation-well more unsavory than when they used it to cast Glenn Close as Cruella DeVil back in the 90s?