I’ve seen The Wife. It’s surprisingly decent for half the runtime, then totally sabotages itself in terms of story. Close is easily the best thing about it, and it wouldn’t just be a career Oscar if she won. Definitely more impressive than Gaga, at least.

McAdams, Regina Hall (for Support the Girls), Helena Howard (for Madeline’s Madeline), Julianne Nicholson (for Who We Are Now) and Charlize Theron (for Tully) would be my dream Best Actress line-up this year, and I wonder how many Academy voters have even heard about more than two of these movies.

She’s over 50 so maybe even with all her current success she still feels the need to take on every role just so they don’t suddenly forget she exists. It’s always nice to see her, anyway.

I mostly liked this, it’s really at least as much a dark comedy as a drama and it’s a solid one, especially the 2nd Incident which plays like an Arrested Development episode. The 3rd Incident is the only one that didn’t work for me because it stops taking the piss out of Jack and shows him as professional and in…

Given that Cannes premiered this one even they know they overreacted to what was a dumb joke on his part.

Yeah, because a stoned teenager whose little sister just got decapitated partly because of him is going to think rationally about what to do next. It’s also important that he knows what happened but didn’t actually see it, therefore it’s easier for him to be in denial - it’s a major trait of his character that he’d…

They should’ve known better than to try and improve on perfection.

I’ve seen it, enjoyed it, and, honestly, not sure what about it is hard to understand. I mean... it’s exactly what it says on the tin. I thought it was a fun and touching way to pay tribute to one of the towering works of the medium by summoning so many different kinds of movies and TV shows that were shot on the same…

I was shocked by how unfunny I found it. Gimme stoic/cool Grant over mugging Grant any day.

Dafoe did pick up the best actor prize in Venice anyway so I guess he’s not complaining.

Perhaps he was just curious to see what would happen and did not actually expect such a retribution. He’s shown as bored and disaffected throughout (openly yawning both times a new girlfriend of his entertains the group they’re in, saying how he never cried in his life, etc), so maybe the excitement of the…

Happy to hear that! I myself can’t wait to get my hands on volumes 1 and 3 now.

Touch of Evil has very unexpectedly become my favorite of his, too. I found it really enervating the first time I saw it, 7 years ago, but rewatched it just last week, and everything about its energy and nightmarish vibe suddenly felt so RIGHT.

Welles doesn’t appear in front of the camera in this. 

My biggest faves are Polanski’s Macbeth and Branagh’s Much Ado, with Chimes following closely. I can imagine it getting better on repeat viewings though. Same with his Othello and Macbeth.

I’ve been reading Orson Welles: Hello Americans, the second volume of Simon Callow’s currently three-part biography, and he does a great job of puncturing certain myths about Welles and instead outlining, in painstaking detail, what the man was actually after (at least in the 1940s) - namely, that he had the ambitions…

My favorite touch is the look of perverse pride mixing in with the pain and disappointment in that scene. Indeed his boy is now King.

After F for Fake there was also 1978's Filming Othello, where he sits and talks into the camera about his approach to and production of Othello, and includes his discussion of it with two of the actors plus clips from an audience Q&A. It’s good stuff, obviously doesn’t have FFF’s density but Welles on his own still…

Was “stop reading at the end of this paragraph if you want to go in fresh” not there when you read it?

It’s almost always best for a story to begin at the latest possible moment. Hit the ground running.