The Mystery Team was a trio of childhood friends who biked around their neighbourhood to find mysteries to solve – a missing diary, a marble down a drain, a windowsill pie tampering. They communicated via walkie talkie and charged their clients just a dime. The Mystery Team is in fact still the same trio, only now they’re high school seniors and if they have no idea how creepy and childish and inappropriate their behaviour has become, everyone else certainly does.
They manage to still get clients though, usually referred by Jamie (Ellie Kemper) but a new family on the block leads to their first ‘adult’ case – a double homicide with a side of stolen jewels. Again, everyone else knows that Jason (Donald Glover) aka The Master of Disguise, Duncan (D.C. Pierson) aka The Boy Genius, and Charlie (Dominic Dierkes) aka The Strongest Kid in the Neighbourhood are in way over their heads, but they’re gung-ho – especially Jason, who might feel his first ‘adult’ stirrings for the new girl next door (Aubrey Plaza).
Is this a good movie? Bottom line: no. There’s definitely humour in just how pathetic these guys are, how clueless, and in some ways, how sweet. But it’s really the only fish in the barrel, so they stretch it out of necessity, and it inevitably wears quite thin. They bumble around foolishly, stumbling upon clues apparently faster than the cops due. Suspicious? About as suspicious as a stripper’s cesarean scar, and yes, that will come up.
I suppose if you have some sort of Scooby Doo fetish, this might be up your alley (sorry, no dog). I enjoy Donald Glover (no relation to Danny) so I tolerated this. I’m not sure that everyone will be able to say the same, and I wouldn’t blame them for a second if they couldn’t.
Then Lola’s new boss (Justin Long) drops an opportunity in his lap: an interview in Paris, which is conveniently where rapey ex-boyfriend (Michael Nyquist) lives. Two birds, one stone? The movie is billed as a “psychosexual noir love story” but all you had to tell me is “Michael Shannon.” That man makes some damn interesting choices and I’ll always go along for the ride.
It’s hard to believe it was about three years ago that 
d remember just as Zach Galifianakis’ Joker suggested.
mother. She moves from cocktail parties with politicians to London’s air raids. But with such disparate films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Saving Private Ryan under her belt, you might say that Johnston was up to the task. We are first introduced to Cotillard in Allied as she’s wearing a purple dress ” I wanted her to look sexy and beautiful, but not in a “base sexy” way, so we put the sex [appeal] in the back because I knew we were going to see her first from the back. It’s a beautiful Italian fabric; very fine, very delicate silk with this silver shimmer through it, which picks up on the highlights on her.” Later, Cotillard is seen in a green evening gown “I wanted to do a classic column-style dress—very statuesque. I wanted the fabric to be quite liquid. When she’s on the move, she’s got this liquid quality to her, 
which silk satin does beautifully. Because it was nighttime, the light hit all those highlights [in the fabric]. Again, it’s this sort of old-fashioned quality, but it also had to be quite functional; she had to be able to run in it and do all those things. At one point she actually had a weapon underneath it, in the skirt, so there was a lot of stuff about that [laughs].” The costumes in Allied are indeed very beautiful, but that was something that sometimes felt disingenuous to me – like it didn’t quite fit into a movie set during wartime. The character does transition into more tweeds when she’s at home during the raids, but she’s always just a little too glamourous for my understanding of the time. Johnston has a long history of working with Allied director Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg; she received her previous Oscar nomination for Lincoln.
surreal, just what J.K. Rowling had ordered. She’s worked on Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Alice In Wonderland, for all of which she won Oscars. The secret to her success? “I’m controlling like that. I look at and approve every fitting, no matter who anybody is, and I am very controlling in how I want everything to look. It’s important: it matters, and you never know what you’re going to see. I learned a long time ago that you can’t control what happens with pieces you care about unless you’re there, so I’m there.” Fantastic Beasts takes place in 1920s NYC, in a universe where magic exists. “I love the fantasy stuff, I love that. That’s why I took on this movie. I like the challenge of it, and I like integrating fantasy into a period like this. You get to step out of it slightly and make something that’s a version of that time. Which is what movies have always done: in a way, they glamorise time.” How does she get her inspiration? “I reread a couple of [F Scott] Fitzgerald books, 
which are always fun to go back to because he’s very descriptive about the frenzy and the romance of the period. It has so much heart that it’s helped me, and this story has so much heart.” She tracked down period pieces from all over the world, hunting in all the best costume shops, but lots had to be made from scratch as there just aren’t a lot of period wizarding outfits to be had, no matter how hard one scours. Eddie Redmayne’s signature peacock blue overcoat is one-of-a-kind.
character, and each costume had to be built around the padding. “The performance costumes had a very specific aesthetic. They were overblown and a lot of her clothes she would’ve made herself or her friends made, so there was an amateurish feeling about them. But then also the way she dressed in her daily life had that quality of being childish and over-decorative.” Boyle used a consistent colour palette of “naive pastels”to bring Florence to life, and to delineate different costumes for different aspects of her life, all of which were fairly theatrical. Stephen Frears is full of praise for her work: “I barely need to speak to her as I know what she’s doing is going to be dazzling. I’ve worked with her for 25 years, so I’m very lucky.” Florence made all sorts of garish costumes and it’s a complete delight to see them recreated 
on the big screen, along with her penchant for accessorizing within an inch of her life. “I worked incredibly closely with Meryl every step of the way, we had a lot of discussion early on about how she would express her inner emotions in her clothing. [Florence] was a supreme performer, so her clothes were gorgeously outrageous. They were high camp but with a softness so she drew people in. And she had no embarrassment about how she looked.”
got the goods to back it up. Photos and footage of the first lady are so iconic that if even one brass button was out of place, people would notice. She worked with Chanel to get the famous pink suit down to perfection, even hand-dying the wool to achieve the perfect shade of pink (the actual dress is preserved in the National Archives and wasn’t available for consultation). Historical accuracy was important, but for filming purposes, so was duplication: “All the “original” pieces are handmade in our workshop. We needed to create more than one – we made five of the 
pink dress, for instance. Chanel supplied the buttons, the chain of the inside jacket, (“couture” detail for the weight of the jacket, and a signature…), and a label, in case the jacket would fall down [onto] the floor.” Since the film jumps between colour and black and white, the dresses sometimes had to be done in different shades so that our eye would not perceive a difference. Every piece in the film was true to Jackie herself “The elegance she showed in every situation, even while relaxing on holiday, proves this: she was never captured by surprise not looking perfect.”
dresses, after all? It would be an unlikely win for sure – in the past 20 years, 17 have been period films, 2 were fantasy-based, and last year was post-apocalyptic Mad Max. It might be argued that Chazelle’s La La Land doesn’t exactly feel strictly contemporary. With so many references and throw-backs to old Hollywood musicals, La La Land exists in a stylistic world of its own. Mia and Seb wore classic, timeless looks, and Zophres embraced a fusion of styles. “In my mind, there’s a bit of an arc to Mia. It starts off grounded in reality and by the time you get to the epilogue, she’s wearing that fantasy 
white dress when they’re dancing in Paris. I put a lot of fabric and I wanted it to feel like air.” Zophres looked to old Hollywood for inspiration and was deeply rewarded. “The two models for Mia were Ingrid Bergman (a poster adorns her bedroom wall) and Judy Garland. I found a pink halter dress for one of the montages that’s similar to the one Ingrid Bergman wore for her Hollywood screen test. For the Planetarium peak, Damien and I both landed on green because we both loved the image of Judy Garland in ‘A Star is Born,’ where she wears almost like a jade green dress.”
certainly in at-home rentals (Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby went from just $8.4 million pre-nomination, to gross over $90 million after its Best Picture win). It’ll put a fancy gold sticker on the DVD box in stores. And it’s a shiny piece of hardware not only for their office, but for any movie poster coming out of their studio for the next several years. Prestige!
nominees in order to judge accurately. But these Hollywood types are busy people! They can’t be hitting up the cinema like us regular folk! Solution: studios can send out free screeners so big important people can watch the contenders in the privacy of their own homes. It will cost the studio about $300 000 to do that (it’s a lot of free DVDs – and there’s always a chance of piracy) but that’s just a drop in the bucket when it comes to buying an Oscar.
That sounds like I’m joking and indeed I’ve never heard anything about Lonergan and any kind of pickle, but Harvey Weinstein is famous for being – er – quite competitive, stopping at nothing, including the nasty rumour mill, and lavishing expensive gifts on Academy members just out of the “goodness” of his heart, no strings attached (except vote for my movie or I’ll blackball you forever).
Joan Crawford hired a press agent to get her a win for Mildred Pierce. He kept her name in the news and planted items in the gossip columns. Still, she was too nervous to attend the ceremony, fearing a loss. Her agent, however, dispatched hair and makeup to her home while he covered for her: a fever of 104 degrees, I believe he said. She won, and when press raced to her house, she was sitting up in bed, full hair and makeup, sexy negligee, and an Oscar cradled in her arms. Success!
decide that since they’re so good at pretending, they may as well get married in real life too. They’re warned that “field romances” rarely prosper, but critics be damned, they marry anyway, with London blitzing away in the background.
retiring music throughout, but manages to speak directly to your heart. That’s sort of the catch with this film, you have to let go of the normal film-going experience, and just feel your way through this one.
trial aren’t wrong, they’re explored with new understanding, through a lens of his being a black man, sort of, but not really.
the LAPD be acquitted in he Rodney King beating. Here was a chance to right that wrong and make the system work for a black man for once. Everyone conveniently forgot that OJ had spent his entire adult life distancing himself from the black community and they made him a civil rights hero. His lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, played the race card and he played it hard “dealt it from the bottom of the deck” it’s said. And he got off. But instead of relishing his incredible good luck, OJ’s life continued to derail until he found himself in court once again, this time found guilty and sentenced to some 33 years in prison, whether or not his crimes truly warranted it. This, again, was retaliation rather than justice.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 