Link Came Back

Vanity Fair's Emma Watson cover story (with a really cool photoshoot by Tim Walker that of course is getting flak due to one semi-topless photo)
Daily News JJ Abrams says Mark Hamill will be up for an Oscar for The Last Jedi next year. Uff, we're going there already? (What is it with blockbuster teams especially that like to make these predictions. Remember when Vin Diesel was sure Fast & Furious was going to be a Best Picture nominee?)
Variety a movie theater in London plays a prank, showing a bit of La La Land before a Moonlight screening
Variety a movie theater in Alabama, one of those states that just can't help being a stereotype of itself, won't show Disney's new Beauty & the Beast due to...
TFE ...the earlier announcement that there'd be a gay character 

Playbill Hairspray Live!'s directing duo will reunite for the live version of Bye Bye Birdie -- that's good news as I really think Hairspray Live was by far the best of these productions yet
THR strange cast assembled for what's billed as a romantic drama that has something to do with death. Irreplaceable You will star hotties with star hotties Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman as well as Christopher Walker and Steve Coogan
i09 filmmakers discussing why video game movies always suck 
/Film Disney may reboot Tron for... Jared Leto. Hrmmm. 

Oscar Crumbs
Jezebel an Oscars story we accidentally didn't cover but for a brief mention on the podcast - Oscar winner Patricia Arquette is understandably upset that Alexis Arquette was left out of the In Memoriam montage 
AV Club Sir Ian McKellen's advice to awards show presenters to avoid the Beatty/Dunaway fiasco 

Off Screen
The Hairpin "Everyone wants to be this raccoon" Amen
Theater Mania Sondheim and Bernadette Peters attend the opening night of the new Off Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, with the theater transformed into a pie shop. The show has already extended its run all the way through December. Wheeee 

Mark Harris's Book Gets a Documentary Version
Yes, I wish we were talking about Pictures at a Revolution (because we can never get enough Oscar lore) but it's his book about Hollywood directors during World War II which is also fascinating. Here's the trailer for Five Came Back which premieres at the end of the month

Bad Blood: How many film references did you catch?

Manuel, PhD here (it's official as of yesterday people!) and while I should bring you some high brow news to commemorate the occasion - maybe about Cannes or the feminist box office weekend we had - I want to chat about Taylor Swift's Bad Blood video instead. I mean, the credits read "A Joseph Kahn film" so we should obviously pencil it in for Best Animated Live Action Short Film, yes? After plenty of Sin City-style posters, we finally got to see the full video last night at the Billboard Music Awards (which also featured a bunch of dancing Umas!):

It's a smorgasbord of filmic references: Tron bikes! Hunger Games-ey costumes! Leeloo-lookalikes! Academy Award nominee Hailee Stanfield! Minority Report-esque art direction! Sucker Punch-ean lineup! Mad Max: Fury Road color palette finish! Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet echoes! 

I'm sure I missed plenty, but I'm also curious to see if I was the only one who kept thinking of that amazing Battlestar Galactica episode ("Unfinished Business") during those boxing scenes? And more importantly, do you agree that bandaids don't fix bullet holes?

(the video is after the jump because it likes to just start playing randomly)

Click to read more ...

Interview: Michael Wilkinson. Before 'Batman vs Superman', Came 'Noah'

With Oscar voting in progress, let's talk costume design. With Best Picture contenders hogging all the conversation, we remain ever hopeful that the guilds remember to look beyond the films as a whole to the specifics of their particular craft when they scribble down their nominations. One of the most influential costume designers working today is Michael Wilkinson who regularly pushes the envelope in terms of costume technology (see Tron Legacy) and I'm not talking about the miraculous cleavage feats of American Hustle which won Wilkinson a well-deserved Oscar nomination last year. This year you can even see the influence of his 300 costumes in those Maze Runner harnesses (Fun fact: Christine Bieselin Clark, one of the costume designers on that film, was once Wilkinson's assistant!)

Prior to American Hustle he was best known for the films of Zach Snyder (Watchmen, Man of Steel) and the costume designer and I spoke  between fittings on day 104 of the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice shoot (he'd just finished the final fitting of our new Amazon Princess Gal Gadot). This superhero epic has occupied him for well over a year but he says "happily so" but Noah was no easy task either. He built an entire film's worth of costumes for Noah ...from scratch. 

No matter what genre or film he's working on, be it prestige dramas like Babel, indies like Friends with Money or huge superhero fantasies like Watchmen he's always look for ways to illuminate character. In his own words

Costume design is a subtle art but immensely satisfying.

We couldn't agree more. Excerpts from our conversation follow

Click to read more ...

Michael Sheen is Such a Freak...

Sheen as computer program

Sheen as lycan

How did he ever end up in that stuffy English man groove in all those political movies?

This random question is brought to you by the recent full moon (were any of you killed by werewolves?) and my new blu-ray of Tron Legacy in which Sheen really gets his freak on... presumably to entertain himself since the movie won't. [Editor's aside: The BFCA is honoring the 5th anniversary of the Blu-Ray soon so I'm reinvestigating several titles for their blu-crispness and such so I can vote on the honors.] 

My god is that movie (Tron Legacy) incoherent. And I'm not talking about the plot since one can forgive movies about people getting trapped inside computers and creating malevolent digital versions of themselves for plotholes and diversions; part of the territory! I'm talking about the filmmaking. From scene to scene but more problematically from cut to cut nothing ever makes any sense. Where is this character standing? Which direction are they moving in? Where did that other character come from? Did they leave where they just were? Perhaps they turned around to face another direction? Why are we looking through a window now? Why did we just watch Tron fall into water from underneath the water? Why does that butterfly conveyor built thingie take 21 minutes to take the characters to the climax when every other distance in Tron world seems to be covered in like 4 seconds? We're talking basic spatial incoherency constantly. And you can't blame "the grid"... don't know if you've ever noticed this but cities built on grids are super easy to navigate in comparison to cities that aren't. 

This post was brought to you by 2010. Thanks for listening.

SuperFreak and his unsuspecting lady friend Rachel McAdams

As you were.

New on DVD: Zeéeeee, Tron, Jack, and Swans Hangin' On

Just out on DVD: Casino Jack, Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I Love You Philip Morris, Little Fockers, The Tacqwacores, Tron Legacy and the final season of Friday Night Lights (yes! can't wait).

Which went on your queue immediately?

And finally, I kid you not, "The Renée Zellweger Collection" has hit stores. I always find these three-pack "collections" so bizarre as they're usually highly unrepresentative of someone's career. The films featured in this one are ME MYSELF AND IRENE, DOWN WITH LOVE, and MY ONE AND ONLY. I guess Down With Love is totally "a Renée Zelwegger picture" but the other two? Well, I haven't seen My One and Only so I shouldn't say that. Have you?

P.S. I like Down With Love. Fun movie. I like Peyton Reed so much but his career doesn't seem to be happening in the way I'd hoped post Bring It On (2000). Sigh.

Meanwhile, Black Swan which came out last week on DVD is still trying to hold on to our collective psyche by launching midnight screenings hosted by famous queens.

Shequida and Manila Luzon (one of my favorite girls on RuPaul's Drag Race) hosted the event which got the crowd dancing here in NYC.

Events were hosted at midnight in Los Angeles (there's the wonderful "Chloe" to your far left -- her YouTube videos sending up Chloë Sevigny as fashion hipster icon are a treat -- with "Rhea Litre"), Chicago (that's Frida Lay as the Black Swan and "Mercedes" as the White Swan) and San Francisco (Heklina and Sister Roma hosted).

Attendees were encouraged to dress up of course.

I totally considered going as my girl Winona in a silver X dress with a nail file protuding from my cheek but alas... my ideas are always bigger than time and my budget can account for.