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Celebrities Praising Celebrities: The Best Tributes From the Annual “Time 100″ List

By Jason Bailey on

Time magazine released its annual “Time 100” this week — a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The list is, as usual, light on shock; it pretty much features the political figures, artists, athletes, and philanthropists you’d expect. What makes the feature compelling is the deployment of similarly well-known folks to write testimonials about the influential people they admire. Since we love hearing about the actors our favorite actors love, it warms our hearts to read, for example, Jon Hamm’s fan letter to his fellow AMC star Bryan Cranston. “Over the past five seasons,” Hamm writes, “I’ve marveled at Bryan’s ability to turn Breaking Bad’s Walter White from a feckless, terrified father and husband to a ruthless, terrifying father, husband and crime lord. The transformation is mesmerizing. The performance is fearless. Bryan is that good.” These stunt tributes don’t always work (particularly in the political realm — the only thing we want to read less than Sarah Palin’s tribute to Glenn Beck is Ted Nugent’s tribute to Sarah Palin), but when they do, they’re a joy to read. See our favorite celeb-penned tributes from the past five years of “Time 100″ below. … Read More

Film

The 10 Most Ludicrous Lines from ‘Vanity Fair’s’ Controversial Jessica Chastain Piece

By Jason Bailey on

Late last night, Deadline made some Internet waves by accusing Vanity Fair of pulling a post mildly critical of Jessica Chastain in deference to the Best Actress nominee. The post, which went live on January 25th (just before Oscar voting began), was taken down within 24 hours, and has since been scrubbed from their archives. Deadline’s Nikki Finke assumes a giant conspiracy (of course), but we’re intrigued by VF’s own explanation for the post’s removal: “We took it down because it ran counter to what a number of people at the magazine believed.” Having read the post — written by Deputy Editor Bruce Handy — in its entirety, we’re actually sort of buying that argument. It’s not that Handy’s piece (which Deadline reprints in full) is particularly rude or mean-spirited; it’s that it’s filled with ridiculous arguments and silly assumptions. Here are the ten worst lines. … Read More

Film

Oscar 2013: An Evening in Pictures

By Jason Bailey on

More than 30 minutes (and a good dozen Seth MacFarlane-induced cringes) past its scheduled end time, the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony finally drew to a close in the first few minutes of Monday morning. Since a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words — and we’re still too exhausted from last night’s festivities to pen a novella — here’s a selection of our favorite images of the night. Enjoy them — and the 12 or so hours we get until next year’s Oscar race… Read More

Film

Exclusive Supercut: “The Early Roles of Your Oscar Nominees”

By Jason Bailey on

Here at Flavorwire, nothing delights us more than the creative archaeology of an actor’s early years: the opportunity to observe raw talent in its embryonic form, to marvel at how far they’ve come, to observe the humble beginnings of bit roles and low budgets. For this exclusive supercut, we dug up some of the early film and television performances of the ten nominees for acting Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards. One of them, of course, has a much more slender resume (her early role is her Oscar-nominated one); the rest have decades of little breaks that brought them to Oscar night. Check them all out after the jump. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire’s Flick of the Week: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is the Film of the Year

By Jason Bailey on

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is a great American film: complicated, nuanced, searching, piercing, difficult — and yet thrilling and satisfying all the same. In dramatizing the nine-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, Bigelow examines some of the most pressing and important questions of our time; she’s asking what it is to be a “post 9/11″ American, but it’s a question she asks without actually, y’know, asking it. As with her Hurt Locker, a film that grows only more powerful and prescient, she’s patently uninterested in the pedantic. It is a film full of talk: in meetings, in interrogations, in negotiations. But she’ll do nothing so gauche as telling us what to think. The fully engaged audience gleans characterization through action, message through montage, and draws its own conclusions. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire’s Guide to Movies You Need to Stream This Week

By Jason Bailey on

Welcome to Flavorwire’s streaming movie guide, in which we help you sift through the scores of movies streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and other services to find the best of the recently available, freshly relevant, or soon to expire. This week, we’ve got titles from Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Nicolas Cage, Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke, Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Jason Sudeikis, and Alec Baldwin, plus an excellent documentary and what we believe is the greatest of all the Great Bad Movies. Check them all out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now. … Read More

Fashion

The Fug Report: Highs and Lows from the Week in Fashion

By Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan on

Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of the most memorable looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!

This week on Go Fug Yourself, there was a… Read More

Film

The Most Ingenious Re-Casting Decisions in Movie History

By Jason Bailey on

Men in Black III will roll into your local cineplex tomorrow (or tonight, probably), and while it is a film with some problems, there’s one element of it we can wholeheartedly endorse: Josh Brolin’s performance as young “Agent K,” the character played by Tommy Lee Jones in the first two MIB pictures (and part of this one). Brolin, who co-starred with Jones in No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah (though they shared no scenes), not only has the older actor’s vocal inflections down cold — he also nails TLJ’s no-nonsense attitude and dry comic timing. But even more impressively, it’s not just a great impersonation; he transcends the limitations of mere impression and creates a wonderful performance, making room within the established character for his own touches. That’s a tough job to do, and not one that has been done successfully all that often. After the jump, we’ll take a look at a few other actors that pulled it off. … Read More

Film

‘The Artist’ Is the First Big Winner of the 2011 Movie Awards Season

By Judy Berman on

It’s the most ambivalent time of the year! No, not the holiday season — the awards season, which is now officially underway. The New York Film Critics Circle has just finished announcing this year’s winners via Twitter, and its picks have certainly raised our eyebrows. Of course, it’s a surprise to no one that critics loved Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which took home two acting awards for its prolific principals, Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt, and an incredibly well-deserved cinematography prize. But it was French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius’ much-loved, just-released silent-era throwback The Artist that earned both their Best Picture and Best Director prizes. Also notable: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which we loved, didn’t win anything. Check out the rest of the critics’ favorites after the jump, and feel free to speculate wildly on what this means for the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Independent Spirits (which announced their nominees today) in the comments. … Read More