In Review: Ammonite

On November 9, 2020November 9, 2020 By ChrisLeave a comment

After delivering a stifled and stoic romance with God’s Own Country, Francis Lee returns with a film that is largely similar to his previous effort. Ammonite is a new closeted duet mired in harsh natural elements and punctuated with hungered sexual catharsis., and centered on a protagonist of few words. Again, Lee makes an unfeeling physical world to embody the limitations faced by gay people in a straight world; here it’s all crashing waves, frozen stone, and shaly mud. But Ammonite takes us back nearly two hundred years, offering a fictionalized account of paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and a love affair with the married Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan).

Continue reading →

A Peek of The Hollywood Reporter’s Annual Actress Roundtable

On November 18, 2015November 18, 2015 By ChrisLeave a comment

Every Oscar season, the major media outlets get the year’s most talked about artists in rooms for delicious conversations on their craft. The one I naturally anticipate the most: The Hollywood Reporter’s Actress Roundtable. This year’s participants are Cate Blanchett (Carol & Truth), Jane Fonda (Youth), Brie Larson (Room), Jennifer Lawrence (Joy), Helen Mirren (Trumbo), Carey Mulligan (Suffragette), Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), and Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs).

You can read the major points online now, along with some brief clips, but the full conversation should be online in the weeks to come (also to be available on Sundance TV beginning January 10). Be sure to also take a look at filmmixtape’s current Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress predictions!

If you haven’t seen the teases on Twitter, Variety’s always charming Actors on Actors series is coming soon as well.

Side note: kudos on the colors ladies! Brie’s sharp vermilion, Carey’s smooth mustard, Jennifer’s cozy sage! I’m starting to hate the phrase, but this is what YAS QWEENs are made of.

In Review!: “Steve Jobs”

On October 21, 2015November 15, 2015 By ChrisLeave a comment

The conceit of the “greatest hits” biopic has been dying out in recent years. Besides a certain predictability and generic result with even the most well-intentioned of them, we as audiences are becoming more comfortable with less strict adherence to accuracy and are asking for a more insightful connection to the figure depicted and to our cultural relationship to that figure. Steve Jobs, while populated with accurate details but wholely disinterested in strict factual depiction, is more of an impressionist experience in iconography.

Director Danny Boyle is no stranger to characters who see themselves as separate or outside of the flow, and the titular Jobs is a force pushing himself upstream against the current of other people’s limitations, as written by Aaron Sorkin. Expect verbal fireworks.

Continue reading “In Review!: “Steve Jobs”” →