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Being sick would be awesome if one didn't feel like crap whilst staying in bed all day watching movies,  reading blogs, playing iPhone games, and snuggling with the cat. 

IndieWire has an interesting chart of which Toronto People's Choice Winners scored big at the box office after the fest. Adjusted for inflation American Beauty (1999) is still the champ. Or Slumdog Millionaire (2008) without any fancy maths. But those People's Choice winners sure do have a good track record at winning Oscar attention.
Parade has an interview excerpts piece up about Brad Pitt. I don't want to get too sentimental about it but I consider it a huge blessing when very famous and very rich celebrities actually reveals themselves to be good souls, too. The things he has to say about religion and federal government and affordable housing and adoption and all of these things... they are so spot on. I really don't get the bad rap that charitable celebrities often get -- is it just self-loathing turned outward when people realize they wouldn't be even a tenth as altruistic if they were wealthy? Is it jealousy of good fortune? I don't know. But my point is Brad & Angie: love 'em. 
Just Jared Bizarre contest alert. Seems you can enter/audition to be a voice in the animated musical Dorothy of Oz starring Lea Michele (first photos of characters are also present). The closer all these Oz movies get to theaters (I keep losing track of how many there are), the more naive the producers of the celluloid transfer of Broadway's Wicked look. How on earth do you sit on that golden goose property (which has already outgrossed most of the biggest blockbuster films ever) long enough to let an animated film --they take forever!-- beat you to theaters and live off, profit from and burn out the renewed Wizard of Oz fever that you yourselves stoked? Sometimes the Hare and not the Tortoise wins.

Speaking of Brad Pitt, somewhere in this past week I missed the Oscar Fever rise of his candidacy for Moneyball. It would be so weird if the Best Actor race was all hunky across the board: DiCaprio, Gosling, Fassbender, Pitt, DuJardin, and Clooney? 

Awards Daily snapped photos of Julianne Moore and Ed Harris in a Game Change preview. Disturbing it was (I saw the same one) with Julianne being so spitting image of that one celebritician
Ultra Culture opens the PR package for The Change-Up. Big LOLS ensue.
Nicks Flick Picks starts his beloved "Fifties" column, i.e. best of the year thus far. As always his choices and writeups make you rethink the work... which is what great critics do.
Empire Colin Firth, whose career is still giant-sized post A Single King Man's Speech, will next star in The Railway Man, a POW drama. That is after Tinker Tailor. 
Towleroad my latest movie column in which I order people around. Go see Drive.
Stale Popcorn remembers the character actress Frances Bay (RIP) from The Golden Girls to Twin Peaks

October News and Request For Reader Input
When I was reading this article on Everything I Know...  in which Mr. Caggiano who teaches courses in musical theater history and the neuropsychology of music (?!?) asks his incoming students to name the best musical of all time, I remembered that next month marks the 50th anniversary of my personal favorite (WEST SIDE STORY). The film version of West Side Story, which first hit the big screen on October 18th, 1961 went on to become a huge hit and one of the biggest Oscar champs of all time (11 noms, 10 wins losing only its screenplay nomination as musicals tend to.). On the classic movies note, I wondered, for younger readers especially (and please do speak up if you have feelings about this), if I use too much of a shotgun approach when discussing old movies here? I sometimes suspect you have too many titles flying at you all the time to really decide what to get familiar with (like in those huge "all time" lists). So perhaps we should focus more going forward? Maybe we should try Classic of the Month style loose themes? It would be boring to talk about the same movie -- any movie -- for an entire month but perhaps a loose theme could include all sorts of detours that tie in but aren't too much of the same thing (Oscar competitions, influences, actor careers.

Sound off in the comments... I guess I'm interested to know if you liked the previous theme weeks like Aliens or the films of Tennessee Williams or Moulin Rouge! this summer or if you had to already know and love the movies to enjoy those?

Tony & Maria

June Weddings (from the TFE archives)

[Archived clipping from "The New York Times". There was some confusion as to who attended the closed ceremony. Sources claimed that Anita and Riff (RIP) had attended but no witnesses came forward to verify. The groom and his best man were also featured in the paper the following day, albeit in a different section of the newspaper.]

West Side Story (1961)

Reader Spotlight: K.M. Soehnlein

Are you still enjoying the reader spotlights? I hope you've found a few kindred spirits in the featured readers thus far. Today, I'm talking to K.M. Soehnlein in San Francisco who is a longtime reader and also a novelist. Discovering that novelists read you is a bit humbling. Anyway... let's talk!

Nathaniel: So... earlier this year you received the Warren Beatty book "STAR" from a Film Experience contest. What's your favorite nugget so far?
K.M. SOEHNLEIN: There’s a nugget on every page of “Star,” if by nugget you mean hot steamy chunk of gossip: “He made love to [Joan] Collins relentlessly, although every now and then he would accept calls while he was inside her.” In the Introduction to the book, Peter Biskind, the author, says he’s interested in Beatty as “one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation…at the intersection between politics and culture.” But he also talks about how difficult Beatty was to get interviews with, and you start to suspect, as the negative characterizations of Beatty pile up, that maybe Biskind is enacting some kind of revenge on his “star.”

But! There are absolutely page-turning stories about film production. I just finished reading the chapter on Bonnie and Clyde. I had no idea it was so difficult to get this film or that it was the vehicle that saved Beatty from a string of flops that would have sunk his career before he was 30.
 
You've written books yourselves and graciously sent me two. I'm really enjoying "The World of Normal Boys" and especially love the movie references, duh! How autobiographical are they?

Soehnlein's book references three huge musicals of its era

I’m glad you like the book! The scenes in my novel are mostly fictional – I never went to a drive-in to see Saturday Night Fever with the sexy older boy next door – but the music, the setting, the flavor of the times, that’s all from experience. Yeah, I’m a child of the 70s which meant we had one “stereo system” in the house. My parents had lots of soundtrack albums, so that was the first music I listened to as a kid: The King and I, Funny Girl, Godspell (we were Catholic), and the one I got completely obsessed about, West Side Story. I had every lyric memorized before I'd ever see these movies. I don’t think I could overstate the phenomenon of Grease when it came out in 1978. Kids were OBSESSED with it. I used to walk around with the girls in my neighborhood playing the soundtrack on portable cassette player, acting like the Pink Ladies.
 
Your three favorite actresses. Go.
Old school: Natalie Wood would be my first answer but that’s not because she was the best actress – in fact she’s often pretty terrible – but just because of my West Side Story obsession. When she cries those tears of injustice at the end of the film – “How many bullets left in this gun? Enough for you, and you, and you?” – I think some kind of tragic template lodged in my blood that has never quite left. Reigning queen: Julianne Moore. It might be a redhead identification thing, but I love her in everything. I especially like her in comedies, from The Big Lebowski to The Kids are All Right, though my favorite performance is in Far From Heaven. Rising star: Give me more Michelle Williams. (Meek’s Cutoff recently opened in San Francisco.)

Take an Oscar away. Give it to someone else.
Only one? Didn’t one of your recent readers get six? OK let’s take away Cate Blanchett’s Oscar for that hammy imitation of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator and give it to any of the four women she was nominated against: Laura Linney in Kinsey, Virginia Madsen in Sideways, Sophie Okonedo in Hotel Rwanda, or Natalie Portman in Closer. (Maybe if Natalie had won that year we could have seen Michelle Williams win this year… Sorry, wishful thinking.) Just for the record I love me some Cate Blanchett but I’d have given her the statue all the way back for Elizabeth. Sorry, Gwyneth.

Supporting Actress 2004

Name your favorite in each of the following 4 genres: Drama, Horror, High School, Woody Allen.
Drama Something by Mike Leigh, probably Naked or Secrets and Lies. Horror Carrie. High School The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, which was my good friend Maria Maggenti’s debut back in the mid-90s and which I have a huge sweet spot for. (Plus: Dale Dickey in an early role.) Woody Stardust Memories.

They put you in charge of the movies. How do you wield this awesome power?
Well if I can be completely self-interested the first thing I’d do is green-light the film adaptation of The World of Normal Boys which I’ve been trying to get made for ten years.

Then I’d wield my awesome power to dump money on all the filmmakers I love: Mike Leigh, Todd Haynes, John Cameron Mitchell, Kelly Reichardt, Spike Lee, John Waters, etc. etc. etc. I’d put limits on the amount of money any single film could cost. I’d set up some kind of incredibly well-funded National Film Agency, maybe run by a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts, (how about Meryl Streep?). I’d make sure artists had health care. Socialism. Yes please.

previous spotlights

Best Posters of Best Pictures?

I visit the IMP Awards pretty often since it's such a great source for movie posters, and because they get posters from different markets, not just the typically lesser American ones.

At the moment they have voting open for you to choose the best movie posters from all 83 Oscar winners. I'm telling you about this because West Side Story (1961) is not in their top ten at this current voting tally and that is yo-yo, schoolboy... KRUP YOU, voters!* You'd think that this would be the one type of voting where the most recent movies wouldn't automatically win from familiarity because it's a visual marketing opinion, not a "which movie is your favorite?" question.

The famous poster conveys two things that you'd think wouldn't go together. It gives us the gritty edge of inner city stories and the transcendent power of the musical genre and it manages both in perfect harmony. It's just Reason #100,721,009 that Saul Bass was a buggin' ever lovin'* genius. I have the West Side Story poster framed on my wall right next to the All About My Mother poster as they're maybe my two favorite posters of all time.

Go vote... and tell us what you selected in the comments.

*Creative profanity courtesy of the immortal West Side Story, the 50th anniversary of which we'll celebrate this coming October.