SeanC

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.

Two Belgian women in the Grand Prix Final, what a time to be alive. And both actually from and training in Belgium, at that. Canada gets three of the six dance teams, another national best. Guignard & Fabbri get bushwhacked in Japan by the IAM mafia.

I enjoyed it a fair bit. I liked Hunter Schafer as Tigris (it seems like it took a few years for Hollywood to start putting her in things, unlike some of her Euphoria costars), though when you consider that both Tom Blyth and Fionnula Flanagan were clearly cast with an eye to somewhat echoing Donald Sutherland's accent/diction, plunking her Valley Girl-adjacent accent in amongst them was slightly funny. Rachel Zegler was pretty good. Her character is a bit on the theatrical side, which I suspect turns off some people, but she seems to be doing a Loretta Lynn impression for the music.

This is set right after Godzilla's initial appearance. Kurt Russell's character is looking quite spry for a 90-year-old, though this is a sci-fi property, so there could obviously be any number of explanations for that.

One of the optional choreo elements is the character step, which goes barrier-to-barrier and is most typically done at centre facing the judging panel (though you can see the much more uncommon long axis version in Carreira & Ponomarenko's free program). But skaters don't have to do it, they just like to.

It's not a requirement.

Happy to see Sofia Boutella getting a lead role in a major production like this.

Lajoie & Lagha stage their second dramatic near-upset of one of the teams ahead of them in Canada (after 2023 nationals, where they almost beat Fournier Beaudry & Sorensen). It's been very exciting watching these two's gradual rise over the years, they're IAM's first true development project (as opposed to an already-established senior team). Tough Grand Prix season for South Korea so far. Nice to see Peng back competing in pairs, though her new partner has some work to do.

As you say, it's clearly inferred, just not something Coppola focuses on. I don't think it's out of a desire to avoid making Priscilla look bad -- at that point, Elvis has been cheating on her basically the whole time, her having affairs is firmly in "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander" territory.

Gubanova has chronic back problems; it's been very evident with her spins the past two seasons.

Dance The French dance podium is a literal repeat of the previous year's podium, though I wouldn't say any of it was inaccurate. I've become a big fan of Lopareva & Brissaud's Mylene Farmer RD, which is one of the only instances of teams using non-English-language 1980s music. It's nice to see a French team repping for French artists, it's not like the 80s only happened in the USA and Britain. Below the podium, happy to see Lim & Quan continuing to make strides. Women Among the ladies, Nina Pinzarrone emerged on the junior scene during the pandemic so she didn't compete as much as she otherwise would have in those years, and then injury cost her her Grand Prix debut last year, so this was a great start. Loena must be so proud. Cool for Sumiyoshi to finally land the quad, though that was a generous rotation call. Isabeau's reaction to staying in first overall was cute. Two of the three French skaters did really well in the free skate, including Serna having what I'd call her best ever. Men Now that was a blazing finale. Britschgi with what will probably be the best fourth-place performance of the Grand Prix season, Kagiyama with a solid start to his comeback, then Malinin with what will almost certainly be the best silver medal performance of the season, and Siao Him Fa with a spectacular title defense. If the actual World Championship podium skate that well, it will have been a great event. Gogolev, iffy free skate, but I think on the whole this event was a positive for him. Pairs Woo, Lia & Trennt! I had thought they might win Skate America, but they did get their Grand Prix gold eventually, and by unexpectedly unseating the reigning World bronze medalists. The Kovalevs are now two-time Grand Prix medalists, remarkably. Shame about Ellie Kam.