Okay, a quick morning links roundup, because having spent most of the week away from the computer does a number on your ability to keep up with stuff! (I saw Reign, though, so we’re going to be okay.) Putting together an Oscar prediction list? I have a mildly grumpy one about who will probably win (and who secretly should) at Philadelphia Weekly. If Lupita Nyong’o loses on Sunday I am gonna have words with literally everybody. And at the AV Club, Vikings is back! They’re still working out some stuff… Read more »

This weekend, I’ll be taking part in another Victorian Gothic event! Last year, we discussed vampires, their absolutely-not-a-metaphor consumption of human bodies, their absolutely-a-metaphor thirsts for young ladies, and their lasting appeal as monsters, during which I tried very hard to read an excerpt from Carmilla without making constant Jim Halpert faces at the subtext. Success: marginal; there’s so much subtext in some places that you can honestly barely wade through it to the actual text. This year, I’ll be reading about Hayward’s lady detective, who I initially began reading… Read more »

Let’s talk about Ned Ryerson. Ned Ryerson has less than five minutes of screen time in Groundhog Day, one of the greatest films Harold Ramis ever made. He’s also one of the most well-deployed comic script beats (and performances) in all of cinema. (If you read the title of this post in his voice or the first instance of his name as “Ned! RYERSON!” then you know I’m right.) Groundhog Day, in which Phil the weatherman learns a lesson through the purgatory of reliving the same day over and over,… Read more »

(The glamour!) I went into Pompeii hoping for the best – when I went to I, Frankenstein hoping for the best, it was amazing, and Kiefer Sutherland as the most Canadian Roman general of all time had some camp promise. Sadly, the movie’s continual moments of camp promise ended up subsumed under the gladiator stuff (a soup of every gladiator thing you’ve ever seen) and the love story, in which Cassia, the daughter of a powerful rich family who end up unable to leverage either of them at any point… Read more »

By 1927 there were twelve girls who danced all night and never gave names, but by then the men had given up asking and called them all Princess. “Hey, Princess, dust off your shoes? It’s Charleston!” The men would have called them anything they wanted to be called, Dollface or Queenie or Beloved, just to get one girl on the dance floor for a song. But in that flurry of short dresses and white skin and ribbon-tied shoes, Princess was the name that suited; it seemed magical enough, like maybe… Read more »

Red-carpet season continues across the pond, as London hosted the BAFTAs on Sunday! They’re always interesting, with a mixture of UK actors and Hollywood celebs and such a wide range of outfits that I feel as if the Stylists’ Guild classifies BAFTA as a free-for-all and just does whatever. We’ll be making quick work of it – it’s a rising red-carpet presence, so the photos tend not to be of a Golden Globes density yet. It’s still red-carpet, of course, but I feel like this is something of a testing… Read more »