SeanC

The 2018 rules changes cut time from the men's and pairs free programs so that they're the same length as women and dance, and as a result each lost an element; for men in was the eighth jumping pass (they now do seven, like the women) and for pairs it was the side-by-side spins.

A 1989-set neo noir about a discontented gym employee (Kristen Stewart), an aspirant bodybuilder (Katy O'Brian), and a heap of trouble that they become entangled in. This is, first and foremost, a visceral film, both in its sensuality and its bouts of explosive violence (one particular postmortem depiction drew audible gasps from the audience at the screening I attended). All of this is accompanied by a solid streak of black comedy, and (even moreso than your average crime movie) a willingness on the part of the script not to insist on its characters always being likable and morally upright. Stewart and O'Brian play off each other very well, aided by solid supporting performances from the likes of Ed Harris and Anna Baryshnikov. Marvel Studios could have saved a lot of VFX money on its She-Hulk series if they had just cast O'Brian in the title role, painted her green, and digitally enlarged her somewhat. She's a striking screen presence who we will hopefully see more of in the future.

It might change an aspect of Children of Dune, but Villeneuve isn't planning to make that one anyway.

Alia isn't born, so by implication it's been less than nine months since the initial Harkonnen assault.

The main reservation some had with respect to the first film was that it was very much the first half of a story rather than a truly independent film in its own right. The release of Dune: Part Two secures the place for Villeneuve's duology as one of the great genre achievements of our time (whenever he gets around to making his planned Dune Messiah adaptation, one imagines it will become one of the great film trilogies). The first film heavily advertised the presence of Zendaya, whose actual screentime did not nearly live up to that billing. But that is certainly not the case here, and it becomes very apparent that Villeneuve's single most significant alteration to Herbert's Dune is the revised role of Chani. While not unimportant to the narrative, Chani was never one of Herbert's more nuanced characters, but that would not suffice either for a director like Villeneuve or a star like Zendaya. Chani, it turns out, is thematically crucial to the story of Dune: Part Two, in ways that in equal parts builds on the bones of Herbert's story and slightly (or significantly) revises details. The script bestows flesh and blood onto the bones of the narrative that did not really have that previously. It augurs for further and more interesting revisions to Dune Messiah as well. As with the earlier Dune, Villeneuve's touch with visual effects is noticeably distinct from what we see from many other contemporary cinematic franchises. Both shooting locations and even pure CGI creations have a sense tactility and weight bestowed up him by the director's camera and lighting, and you can tell that like James Cameron, all the time has been taken necessary to make things feel real, despite the fantastical nature of so much of what is onscreen. Bonus points also for the deployment of Anya Taylor-Joy, another of my favourite actresses, in a role so obviously suited for her that it might as well have been a fancasting assembled based on Tumblr gifs.

Already a thread: https://forums.primetimer.com/topic/139899-priscilla-2023/#comment-8202028

This is a relatively minor detail, but all the characters keep referring to "Sir Winston Churchill". He was not a knight in 1943; that wouldn't happen until ten years later, as part of the leadup to the Queen's Coronation.

Morrible's parts in "The Wizard and I" and "Thank Goodness", for the record. A couple of lines in each case, in neither case very challenging.

Most of the roles are played by people with musical theatre background. The exceptions are Yeoh and Goldblum, but Madam Morrible barely sings and both she and the Wizard are really just sing-talking.

Her and Tantoo Cardinal.

In addition to a bit of realism, having the other boys around a bit longer creates more opportunities to show some additional sides of Angus' character that you wouldn't get if he was just interacting with the teachers the whole time.

Now with presidential endorsement. I hope that leads to more people checking it out.

Zac Efron gives the performance of his career in this. At times, the streamlining of the stories of the other Von Erich siblings does feel like an absence in the narrative, despite the commendable efforts of the actors portraying them. That said, this is an emotionally affecting tale, and Efron hits highs as a dramatic actor that I've never seen from him previously. This is one of the best male entries in the weepie genre in quite some time, and represents a real shift in tone for Durkin, whose earlier directorial efforts were much more opaque.

The film is missing an appropriately Dahl-esque comeuppance for Mrs. Scrubbit, I think. Despite making use of certain key elements of the 1971 film, this feels very much like Paul King essentially took the concept of a magical candymaker and ran off in his own direction with it, rather than trying to do a really direct lead-in to the source material, and on the whole I think that was a good idea. I enjoy that King took the idea from the original book that the Oompa-Loompas get paid in cocoa beans and expanded it to the point where this entire universe seems to be centered around the importance of confectionery goods.

William's opinion matters more because he's the heir and Harry isn't.

There was no legal segregation in England, though of course quite a few gathering places were informally segregated since most countries also did not have non-discrimination laws for public gatherings. This was also a source of tension whenever American troops went abroad to Canada or much of Europe in this time because many white American soldiers expected segregated bars, movie theatres, etc. and attempted to impose those norms on the locals (or black soldiers serving in other Allies' armed forces). There was a very famous court case during the war years where a black cricketer from Trinidad successfully sued a London hotel for refusing him accommodations.

The "hot dogs" bit (which sets the tone for the whole movie) and the reveal of Elizabeth's ridiculous-looking film project.

The film is (among other things) a dark satire, and it both begins and ends with a gag. Comedy is a defensible classification — also, it’s the studio that submitted it there, not the Globes themselves.

The judges may not share the concern. My favourite photo from the event. Down in the JGP Final, Jia collected her fourth major event silver medal. Poor girl, no wonder the Korean media calls her the Silver Fairy. Mao 2.0 finally landed the quad toe, meanwhile. Very impressed by the junior pair Kemp & Elizarov, who got silver here. They've had awful health issues the past year, including him having a collapsed lung.

Bradley Cooper directs and stars in the this biopic of the composer/conductor/musician-of-all-talents Leonard Bernstein, alongside Carey Mulligan (first-billed) as his wife Felicia Montealegre. I have to say, Cooper directs the hell out of this. I imagine there'll be some people who find the film's aesthetics gimmicky, but the synthesis of 40s to 80s filmmaking styles worked extremely well for me. Like the introduction shot for Mulligan, done like a postwar romantic melodrama entrance. And the use of fantasy/allegorical space to represent relationships and the passage of time early in their relationship is really cool (before, by the later part of the film, it becomes a lot sparer, almost like a Bergman film of the era).

She doesn't. Portman did nudity in the Wes Anderson short film Hotel Chevalier.

Forgot to mention, I laughed at the final gag that Elizabeth was doing all this seemingly in-depth character research for what looks like a cheap Lifetime-type project.

Todd Haynes' latest blend of satire/melodrama is loosely inspired by the lives of Vili Fualaau and the late pedophile Mary Kay Letourneau. We're introduced to the household of Joe (Charles Melton, a long way from Riverdale) and Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore, longtime Haynes collaborator). Gracie molested Joe when he was 13 and an employee at the pet shop she managed, and after becoming pregnant by him and serving a jail sentence, they married upon her release and had two more children. Into this inherently tense situation arrives Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), the star of a TV medical procedural Norah's Ark, who is going to be playing Gracie in a TV movie and wants to learn more about the subject of her portrayal. A number of reviews and comments have described May December as camp, zeroing in on the impact of the deliberately discordant, melodramatic use of music at certain points, though Haynes himself has disagreed with this and has called the score an attempt to jolt the audience's engagement level. I'm not sure the use of music really adds much to the proceedings, but in any case, there's a number of different things at play here, from a comedic examination of the media industry's use of scandals as grist for entertainment, to a bit of a satire of method acting, to a more serious examination of how the stunted Joe is pushed into reckoning with the seriousness of what was done to him. Awards discussion for the film is rapidly cohering into a push for Melton, who is excellent as Joe, the film's most obviously sympathetic character. Moore and Portman are both in top form as well, though what they're asked to do is a lot less naturalistic and a bit more opaque from an audience perspective. At times it seems like Haynes is playing with a dynamic akin to Ingmar Bergman's Persona (see: the poster), other times calling back to the Douglas Sirk melodramas that he is so obviously inspired by and most directly mimicked in Far from Heaven.

Not sure why they needed Nelson Rockefeller's first name, there's only one Rockefeller VP.