#director Brittany snow

[dailybrittanysnowpics]

Something about her in a hat 🌹❤️

[godzillachloe]

Even an earthquake can't stop her from being cute

[sensiblethingtodo]

I've been really lucky that Kendrick is a good friend of mine and I was in the edit when she was prepping her movie, and we really kind of went back and forth on things that we were doing or if she needed, you know, she doesn't need any of my advice, so it's not necessarily about that, but it was quite of sort of like picking each other's brains on a couple things, which was cool. - Brittany Snow I spoke to Brittany Snow on the phone, and she, in a very role-reversal way of our relationship, gave me the most casual pep talk, which was literally in a very flat voice: "You'll get on set, and you'll know what to do." And it was just like, "Yeah, okay." That's usually how I find myself talking to her, and I think I was expecting this flowery, long pep talk, and she so cut to the chase that I was like, "Okay, damn girl. I'll just figure it out, I guess." - Anna Kendrick

[143bc]

Directors Club 🌹❤️

[becabeale143]

New Directors Club 🌹❤️

[uncloseted]

Was Chloe from Pitch Perfect canonically gay? 👀

Sort of. Within the actual movie, there’s a lot to suggest that she’s attracted to women, but it’s never made canon. The most explicit it gets is when she says, “You know Beca, we’re really close, but I think this trip is going to really let us discover everything about each other. You know, one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t do enough experimenting in college.”

However, Rebel Wilson claims that there was a Beca-Chloe kiss filmed for the movie, but it’s not in the final cut of the movie or in the deleted scenes on the DVD, and during the Pitch Perfect 2 Director's Commentary, it's mentioned that Chloe and Beca have crushes on each other. Plus, Anna Kendrick has said that, "There’s a specific fandom that ships Beca and Chloe, my and Brittany Snow’s characters from Pitch Perfect, so I feel like it would be a real betrayal to not choose Brittany. I mean, our characters are pretty much in a lesbian relationship. As far as we’re concerned, they’re secretly in love." So I think at least one of the writers, the director, and Anna Kendrick intended Chloe to be interpreted as queer, but that something else prevented them from including it in the movie.

So I think if that counts as canon or not depends on whether you feel like Word of God/Word of Saint Paul is canon or whether you feel like the only canon is what’s in the actual movie.

[bodybybane]

‘He’s Just The Sweetest Man’: Brittany Snow Shares Friendship With Dave Bautista That Led To Key Role In Her Directorial Debut Parachute https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/just-sweetest-man-brittany-snow-220600347.html

[chlobeale]

Parachute Movie | Director BRITTANY ANNE SNOW + actors Courtney Eaton and Thomas Mann.

[dweemeister]

Best Live Action Short Film Nominees for the 96th Academy Awards (2024, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up goes with my thanks to the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California for providing all three Oscar-nominated short film packages.

If you are an American or Canadian resident interested in supporting the short film filmmakers in theaters (and you should, as very few of those who work in short films are as affluent as your big-name directors and actors), check your local participating theaters here.

Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Oscars. The write-up for this year's Documentary Short nominees is complete; expect the write-ups for Animated Short soon. Films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

The After (2023)

From Netflix, Misan Harriman’s The After is perfectly adequate during its opening minutes as business father Dayo (David Oyelowo) plays along with his daughter, Laura (Amelie Dokubo), as they travel to meet her mother, Amanda (Jessica Plummer). Everything following those first few minutes is, charitably, a filmmaking disaster. Once a black-clad attacker stabs Emily and tosses her off a bridge. Though Dayo and a few other bystanders have successfully restrained the murderer, Amanda, in dismay, throws herself off and commits suicide. Fast-forward a year later and we see that Dayo has left his previous jobs and now works as a rideshare or taxi driver in London. In between ferrying passengers to and from their destinations, he listens to the final voicemail from Amanda, gazes longingly at a family photo, and reminisces about the past.

The After lost almost all of my goodwill after the horrifically staged murder scene (from which the film never recovers). Grief – how one processes it, the stages it takes, how it affects our relationships with others, and any residual trauma – is en vogue in modern short filmmaking. Way too many films touching upon this subject have little to add – cinematically, thematically – for the audience; the most worthwhile films in this subset will filter grief through a specific cultural lens. The After accomplishes neither, despite Harriman’s claims that his screenplay, co-written with John Julius Schwabach, took the Black Lives Matter movement and the isolation of COVID-19’s height as inspiration (the murderer is not a police officer nor is there an implied racial animus; there are no signs of the pandemic here). The final scene, involving a family that Dayo is transporting to their posh home, is unbelievable tripe – contributing nothing to this dreadful exploration of grief. The placement of Birdy and Rhodes’ “Let It All Go” is sheer musical tastelessness. All that remains is David Oyelowo’s performance and, no matter how much he splays out his body in sadness, this film needs more than that to save itself. It might not even have a prayer.

My rating: 4/10

Red, White and Blue (2023)

Going into Nazrin Choudhury’s Red, White and Blue, I suspected, with a title like that, that there was some political bent to the film. I may have detected its messaging later than I would like to admit, but that is not where my significant reservations towards this film lie. Somewhere in present-day Arkansas, single mother Rachel (Brittany Snow) works at a diner afternoons and evenings. She often has her two children, older sister Maddy (Juliet Donenfeld) and younger brother Jake (Redding Munsell), over after school so she can watch over them while she works. After a generous tip from a customer, Rachel (whose fridge magnets hold layers of unpaid bills) forms a plan to take Maddy on a short road trip northwards, leaving her brother temporarily in the care of a family friend. It seems strange that she is only taking one of her children on this trip, but – in a shocking plot twist – we learn that Maddy (who, if this short takes place in its release year, is ten years old) needs an abortion.

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, found that having an abortion is not a constitutional right, overturning years of precedent in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Effectively, this turned abortion regulation over to the states. Arkansas was among those states that made abortion illegal. The outrage stemming from Dobbs v. Jackson was Choudhury’s impetus to write and direct Red, White and Blue. Politics and cinema have intertwined ever since Vitagraph Studios filmed a series of propaganda shorts in support of the Spanish-American War in 1898. But Red, White and Blue commits the age-old mistake by prioritizing its messaging over cinematic craft. Dull lighting and camerawork, merely satisfactory performances, and a lengthy driving-musical montage that does little for characterization or narrative make for an awkward, stilted viewing experience. Its reveal is an extreme situation that could have been just as powerful if Choudhury instead used a more pedestrian example.

My rating: 6/10

Knight of Fortune (2022, Denmark)

Also known in its native Danish as Ridder Lykke, Lasse Lyskjær Noer’s film is rich with Scandinavian humor. In other words, absurd situations amid dark or tragic moments – your enjoyment may vary. The film, available via The New Yorker for American, Canadian, and Mexican audiences, features the elderly Karl (Swedish actor Leif Andrée), who has has just arrived at the morgue to see the body of his late wife. He purposefully delays opening the casket to view his wife’s body by attempting to fix a flickering light nearby and using the restroom. In the restroom, he encounters his next-stall neighbor, Torben (Jens Jørn Spottag), also there for his respective decedent wife. Karl continues to avoid seeing his wife’s body by accompanying Torben into the room where his respective wife’s body lies. If the shenanigans regarding the broken light and the bathroom stalls were not already an indication, this is no conventional narrative about grief (yet another nominee about grief!) as Knight of Fortune further plunges into the absurd. Andrée and Spottag – neither of whom have had significant credits in films distributed beyond Central Europe – are both fantastic here, imbuing the relationship between Karl and Torben with pathos despite the peculiar situation.

Noer, who also wrote the screenplay during a time of personal loss, reminds audiences that grief takes numerous forms, and refuses to pass judgment on any of the grieving characters. The humor is never at the characters’ expense either. What makes Knight of Fortune valuable is its depiction of a grieving man who will do much to postpone his final goodbyes and permitting the audience to laugh (as laughter, strange as it may sound, has a place in grieving). Andrée’s performance and Noer’s direction and tonally controlled writing allow the audience to empathize easily with the protagonist’s plight, amid the unfamiliar and cold glare of the morgue’s flat lighting and its eerie quiet.

My rating: 8/10

Invincible (2022, Canada)

Vincent René-Lortie’s Invincible qualified for the Academy Awards by winning Best Live Action Short at the 2022 Chicago International Children’s Film Festival. Despite CICFF’s moniker, this is not a short appropriate for younger children. Here, we follow fourteen-year-old Marc-Antoine Bernier (also known as just “Marc”; Léokim Beaumier-Lépine in a terrific lead performance), as he has just spent a weekend with his family on an idyllic leave from a juvenile detention and rehabilitation center. Now, back within the center’s gates, Marc has made a critical decision. Before that fateful moment, René-Lortie allows us glimpses of Marc's life at the juvenile detention center: Marc’s attempt to cause havoc to his cell’s fire-extinguishing sprinkler system, a class in which the students share the poems they have composed, and the joys of swimming in the outdoor pool. Soon after, Marc-Antoine escapes. While on the run, he steals a car and commits suicide.

At the top of the end credits, René-Lortie reveals that this film is a tribute to his late friend, Marc-Antoine Bernier, and Invincible is a retelling of his friend’s last hours. According to interviews, René-Lortie and the Bernier family are unsure whether or not Marc’s death was an accident or a suicide. Whatever the case, Marc was clearly troubled.

René-Lortie uses a 4:3 aspect ratio to “entrap” our protagonist in the frame, but, disappointingly, he does little else with the Academy ratio. In yet another missed opportunity in an otherwise fine film, René-Lortie fails to submerge the viewer into Marc’s psychology (René-Lortie is absolutely not framing his friend as unknowable), which makes some of Marc’s actions less understandable in the moment. Nevertheless, René-Lortie deserves plaudits for this sensitive tribute to his absent friend.

My rating: 7/10

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

Since it has been some time since I last reviewed a Wes Anderson movie, I must admit a bias: I am an Anderson skeptic. Not a popular position to take, but the aesthetic rigidity of Anderson’s movies has only served to take me out of his movies emotionally. One of Anderson’s principal aesthetic influences, director Yasujirô Ozu, also made films that were just as aesthetically rigid. But Ozu’s style, with an unmoving camera and naturalistic acting, never interferes or undermines the emotions he tries to evoke.

Not so with Anderson, as evidenced in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a 39-minute Netflix production based on Roald Dahl’s short story of the same name. With partial narration from Ralph Fiennes playing Roald Dahl, Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) happens upon a book recounting a Dr. Chatterjee’s (Dev Patel) observations of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who can see things without using his eyes. Inspired by this account, Henry, a serial gambler, decides to learn from Imdad’s meditations and, after almost four years, learns how to read playing cards just by examining their backsides. Eventually, Henry, realizing he has not much time to live, donates his considerable blackjack winnings to children’s hospitals and orphanages.

What I appreciate most about Henry Sugar is its dedication to presenting itself as set-bound. Anderson’s 4:3 screen aspect ratio and off-Technicolor palette combines with stagehands immaculately wheeling parts of the set on- and off-camera for when the story requires it. This takes immaculate blocking and a keen eye for movement – something Anderson clearly has in spades. However, where some are claiming Henry Sugar to be the cinema’s response to audiobooks, I must digress. Henry Sugar adapts the entire Roald Dahl text, and it often seems as if Anderson is intentionally having his actors rush through the material in order to keep the film under the forty-minute limit that defines a short film. There is little to no room for thespian interpretation and inflection as they enunciate the text. For me, this is only slightly better than reading Dahl’s text in a monotone voice. If the production design was not so impressive, this would be an otherwise insufferable experience.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

From previous years: 85th Academy Awards (2013) 87th (2015) 88th (2016) 89th (2017) 90th (2018) 91st (2019) 92nd (2020) 93rd (2021) 94th (2022) 95th (2023)

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[justthegreat1]

Blood, Sex, and the American Dream: X review

Pictured above is the “X” poster. Image credit: A24

I’m aware that this movie came out on March 18, 2022 which makes me a little late to do this review, but it’s better to be late than never covering this movie. The reason I haven’t covered this movie yet is because I didn’t have a Tumblr account or the “X” DVD yet. So, let’s just cut to the chase and start this review. I’m going to give you my spoiler free thoughts on this movie.

X is a 2022 slasher horror film directed by Ti West who also produced and edited this movie (The House of The Devil and The Sacrament). X is produced by Jared Connon, Scott Mescudi, Dennis Cummings, Jacob Jaffke, Harrison Kreiss, Ashley Levinson, Sam Levinson, Karina Manashil, Peter Phok, and Kevin Turen. The soundtrack is done by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe. The cast involves Mia Goth as Maxine “Max” Minx/Pearl, Jenna Ortega as Lorraine, Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) as Jackson, Martin Henderson as Wayne, Owen Campbell as RJ, Brittany Snow as Bobby-Lynne, Stephen Ure as Howard, James Gaylyn as Sheriff Gentler, Simon Prast as Televangelist, Geoff Dolan as Deputy, Matthew J. Saville as Officer Mitchell, and Bryony Skillington as Store Clerk.

The plot:

A group of actors set out to make an adult film in rural Texas under the noses of their reclusive hosts---an elderly couple with a farm and boarding house for rent. But when the couple catches their young guests in the act, the cast finds themselves in a desperate fight for their lives in this tantalizing slasher from writer-director Ti West.

Positives:

One positive I have about this movie is the cast, each cast member played their parts perfectly…especially Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega. I think that every horror fan must have seen the Jenna Ortega scream scene in the trailer, and it gave me chills when I was watching that scene. That might have been one of the best screams I have ever heard…in my opinion. The characters were extremely likeable, and you feel bad when something awful happens to them…the movie also makes you sympathize with the villains in this movie…especially the character of Pearl.

Pictured above is Jenna Ortega in X (2022)

Image Credit: A24

The second positive I have about this movie was the special effects as it seems like every kill has been done practically which has been missing in modern horror films…okay not all modern horror films. The special effects in this movie are amazing and the makeup and special effects department deserve more credit. The elderly makeup on Mia Goth makes her look unrecognizable.

The third positive I have about X was the atmosphere as I feel like they nailed the 70’s aesthetic with the clothing choice, the cinematography, and the music. It felt like a 70’s-late 80’s slasher which is one of my favorite eras in horror history.

Pictured above is Mia Goth as Pearl in this stunning red lighting.

Negatives:

The only negative I have about X is that the motives of Pearl and Howard aren’t clear, we get hints throughout, but it doesn’t pay off. However, don’t let that negative affect your viewing of X as this movie is rewatchable.

My overall thoughts:

After watching this movie, I can say that this is an excellent throwback to late 70’s-early 80’s slashers. This is a fun movie, and it gives you likeable characters to keep you invested. Oh, and I forgot to mention that this movie keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Where to watch X?

X (2022) can be watched on digital retailers, Showtime, Blu-Ray, and DVD.

[beca-mitchell]

As someone who grew up in the 00’s era of peak young celebrity (when The Olsens, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes etc were everywhere at all times) I don’t think Brittany Snow gets enough credit for riding through that wave of celebrity culture that physically and mentally broke down so many.

I mean yes she had her personal struggles, but that time, even though for fans it was like magic, for a lot of those celebs it was a living hell hole of over saturation and invasion they couldn’t escape from.

For Brittany to have come from there era, as someone with a steady, consistent career, and a well adjusted head on her shoulders and an awareness of how badly it could’ve gone, is a testament to her as a person and the work she has put in to come out the other side.

Don’t get me wrong, I know for a lot of these girls they were victims of child star circumstance, being fed to the lions by men in suits at such a young age whilst being expected to act and behave like grown ups, but that in itself speaks volumes of her character.

Because if you think about that time and how young she was when she started, and how different the industry was then pre me too and all these things we’re now aware of in terms of predatory executives, it could’ve very easily gone down a very different road. For her to be standing here now as an actress, producer, director, mental health advocate on the precipice of an exciting new chapter of her career, makes me feel like a proud parent having grown up alongside her.

i had a similar thought actually bc somebody on twitter brought up that old magazine cover/spread with all the young stars of the early 2000s (you know the one)

she has also been through a lot as a child actress. it's not to romanticize the situation at all because it's horrible what she went through in terms of mental and emotional health. i'm incredibly proud of her too :') i hope we can all support Parachute when it comes out!

[dailybrittanysnowpics]

[godzillachloe]

[movies-to-add-to-your-tbw]

Title: Pitch Perfect

Rating: PG-13

Director: Jason Moore

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Rebel Wilson, Skylar Astin, Ester Dean, Hana Mae Lee, Alexis Knapp, Ben Platt, Adam DeVine, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kelley Jakle, Shelley Regner, Caroline Fourmy, Wanetah Walmsley

Release year: 2012

Genres: comedy, romance, music

Blurb: College student Beca knows she does not want to be part of a clique, but that’s exactly where she finds herself after arriving at her new school. Thrust in among mean girls, nice girls, and just plain weird girls, Beca finds that the only thing they have in common is how well they sing together. She takes the women of the group out of their comfort zone of traditional arrangements and into a world of amazing harmonic combinations in a fight to the top of college music competitions.

[143bc]

Stand up! 🌹❤️

[becabeale143]