And the Oscar goes to FanFare
January 27, 2025 4:30 PM   Subscribe

THIS WEEK IN FANFARE... FIRST OFF (INSIDE): a list of 2025 Oscar nominated films with posts. NEW MOVIES: Universal tries rebooting the Wolf Man with director Leigh Whannell; Steven Soderbergh offers a new take on the haunted house in Presence; when a boyfriend steals the rent money, two friends go on an odyssey to stave off eviction in One of Them Days; Michelle returns as Captain Georgiou in Star Trek spinoff Star Trek: Section 31; a physicist uses a time loop and the help of a bright student to try to stop the literal black hole growing in her chest Omni Loop. AND IN TV: Canadian comedy North of North finds a young Inuk mother struggling to reinvent herself; new episodes of Abbott Elementary, Severance, The Pitt, and wrestling times two.

2025 Academy Award Nominated Films on Fanfare
Note: documentaries next week! Recently Released Movies
  • Wolf Man - Leigh Whannell (director of 2020's well-received reimagining of The Invisible Man tries his hand with lycanthropes. Julia Garner stars.
  • Presence - Steven Soderbergh tries to bring a fresh take on the haunted house film.
  • One of Them Days - Keke Palmer and SZA play best friends in a race against the clock to come up with their rent money when a boyfriend runs off with it.
  • Star Trek: Section 31 - Spinoff film from ST: Discovery brings back Michelle Yeoh as Captain Georgiou.
  • Get Away - Nick Frost and Aisling Bea play a couple whose family vacation runs into the path of a serial killer in this horror comedy.
  • Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat - Doc chronicles jazz musicians crashing the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
  • Omni Loop - Mary-Louise Parker stars as a dying physicist stuck in a time loop who seeks the help of a bright young student (Ayo Edebiri) to prevent her death.
  • A Different Man - Sebastian Stan stars in this A24 drama about an aspiring actor who undergoes a radical medical procedure that drastically transforms his appearance.
  • The Breaking Ice - Chinese drama about twentysomething ennui is 94% fresh on RT.
  • About Dry Grasses - Turkish drama about a teacher hoping for a transfer to Istanbul, but under scrutiny for inappropriate contact with a student

Older releases, new to FanFare:
  • Demon Seed - 1977 sci-fi horror yarn about an organic supercomputer stars Julie Christie.
  • Original Cast Album: Company - DA Pennebaker's 1970 doc chronicles the recording sessions by the original cast of the classic Sondheim musical.
  • The Artifice Girl - A team of special agents discovers a revolutionary new computer program to bait and trap online predators. Features Lance Henriksen.
  • Brotherhood of the Wolf - 2001 action-horror take on the werewolf set in 18th century France is considered a classic in the subgenre.
  • The Ipcress File - Michael Caine thriller from 1965 was acclaimed as "the anti-James Bond.
  • It Happened Tomorrow - 1944 fantasy finds Dick Powell as a reporter who finds an extremely early edition of the next day's paper.
  • Crimes of Passion - Ken Russell's 1984 thriller sees a woman who is a fashion designer by day and a prostitute by night hounded by two men: a married father of two children and a sexually repressed preacher.
  • Jazz on a Summer's Day - This documentary weaves together the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and its audience with images of the water and the town.
  • Scream 4 - From 2011, the last of the Wes Craven-directed installments in the classic meta-slasher franchise.
  • Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins - 80's relic action comedy about a cop who is declared dead, then trained to become an assassin. Fun if you can judge it relative to its era, but FYI, Joel Gray is in yellowface in this, so maybe you won't
  • Idiocracy - An average man frozen for an experiment in 2005 awakes in 2505 to find out he is now the smartest man in the world.
  • Daimajin, Return of Daimajin, and Wrath of Daimajin 2N222 tries something new, shoehorning in three kaiju movies to one post.
  • Adela Has Not Yet Supper Yet - Loopy 1978 Czech comedy about a detective whose search for a missing dog leads him to a carnivorous plant named Adela.
  • Sons of Steel - Wild Aussie sci-fi post-apocalyptic time traveling rock musical from 1988.
  • Benedetta - Horny nun drama set in 17th century France from Paul Verhoeven.
  • Three... Extremes - A 2004 horror anthology with segments from Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, and Fruit Chan.
  • Nosferatu, the Vampyre - Werner Herzog's 1979 take on the Transylvanian vampire, starring Klaus Kinski.
  • The She Beast - Transylvanians kill an ugly witch who, 200 years later, pops up as a pretty British bride (Barbara Steele) in this 1965 horror film with 75% fresh on RT, but questionably translated dialogue and semi-hilarious accents.
  • Queen of Hearts - A successful lawyer has an affair with her teenage stepson. No, not the French movie from last week. This is a 2019 Danish/Swedish thing.
  • Scream 3 - From 2000. The meta-slasher goes meta2 and Ghostface goes Hollywood, as Sidney and her friends visit the set of Stab 3.
Previous Films with New Comments on Fanfare Current TV Shows with New Posts
  • Dexter: Original Sin - Teenaged version of TV serial killer Dexter. on Paramount Plus.
  • The Pitt - Each episode of this Max medical drama is one hour of "real time." Noah Wyle stars
  • Abbott Elementary - City buses go on strike; the teachers experiment with hybrid learning.
  • Severance - s02e02 of the Apple TV hit about office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives.
  • AEW Collision and All Elite Wrestling Dynamite - Your wrestling fan buddy The Pluto Gangsta keeps you up-to-date. The latest in AEW wrestling airs on TNT/Max (Collision) and TBS/Max (Dynamite) in the US.
  • North of North - New Canadian comedy about a young Inuk mother trying to reinvent herself in her tiny Arctic community after her marriage falls apart.
Current/Recent Shows People Are Still Discussing in Recent-ish Posts and Comments Vintage TV Shows and Rewatches:
  • King of the Hill - Mike judge's long-running animated sitcom about the Hill family of Texas and their neighbors comes to FF with posts for a few favorite episodes.
  • Gilmore Girls - In a FF miracle, Navelgazer picks up where we left off in the GG season 1 posts... TEN years after they were abandoned.
  • Stargate: SG-1 - s02e04 "The Gamekeeper"
  • Person of Interest - the rewatch is still chugging along.
Books
  • American Rapture - CJ Leede's 2024 novel is a trip through an apocalypse, in which a virus makes the infected feral with lust, told through the eyes of a very sheltered, catholic teen named Sophie.
posted by DirtyOldTown (26 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
As ever, there are a ton of links and there is a ton of text. Flag with any errors you see with a note for the mods.

And in the meantime, if you spot something you've watched/read, stop and drop a comment, won't you?

Also: very few nominated documentaries have posts. We could use an assist for next week.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:30 PM on January 27


Thanks for this.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:45 PM on January 27


I may also do a special post for WWE’s Royal Rumble this Saturday, as I plan to be watching live. Live on television, that is, I’m not in the audience for this one! For the same reason, the Collision post may not go up until Sunday (with Wrestling Observer comments).

Unless of course someone else who watches Collision wants to post it themselves, it’s not like I’m claiming squatter’s rights on AEW programming.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:51 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]


Just to repeat basically what I said in the thread, Daimajin is a treat - scratches both the Samurai movie itch AND the Kaiju one.

Return Of Daimajin is very similar, with arguably better plotting and photography, but the copy I watched was pretty badly damaged and also a kind of corny dub. Woulda been worth it to pay to rent on one of the Services, but also messy bootlegs of kaiju movies are kind of a running theme in my life so I can't say I was disappointed by the experience.

Thanks for these wrap-ups DirtyOldTown! Hope it drive some more discussion back on the purple.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 4:56 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]


I’m doing my part! This week I found and then commented in an old thread about Le Retour de Martin Guerre/The Return of Martin Guerre.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 5:06 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]


an old thread about Le Retour de Martin Guerre/The Return of Martin Guerre

Because the "recent comments" function only goes to so many items, I am liable to miss a few threads with new activity, sadly, even though I do check a few times a week.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:12 PM on January 27


I am struggling to get thru Section 31 - I'm finding it quite not-good. YMMV.

These are not the highly-trained commandoes with cutting-edge Starfleet technology that one would expect of Section 31. These are … those other ones. The clearing-the-resume-drawer ones?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:43 PM on January 27


It’s possible for a culture to assume that only desperate remittance-men type rejects would join the dirty tricks forces. Might not be possible for our culture right now to show that.
posted by clew at 5:50 PM on January 27


New CBS Evening News premiered earlier this evening. Couldn't make a post on FanFare -- show name was not available for selection; I'm not even certain the show is germane for FF, so I'll opine here. Summary: Meh. Glossy magazine style is ok but would be more welcome for 60 Minutes. Both anchors need to stop loudly smacking their lips when they start to speak.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:14 PM on January 27


Also, I expect there's Rule 34 media out there covering Section 31, which sadly does not add up to 69 or 80085 as the more juvenile/sophomoric of us would have hoped. In fact, it's not even Numberwang.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:18 PM on January 27


I am struggling to get thru Section 31
You too, huh? I stopped it to go do stuff about halfway through. I'll find some motivation to pick it back up one day, but I'm not feeling any rush.
posted by Avelwood at 10:08 PM on January 27


Mod note: [Good evening, everyone! The Academy of Best Of and Sidebars would like to recognize this excellent post with a very special 🏆! Thank you all, and DoT for Best Director!]
posted by taz (staff) at 10:42 PM on January 27 [7 favorites]


It would be super cool if folks added to the Fanfare posts for the Oscar-nominated films which awards the film is up for.

I'll take Dune II , God willing.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 12:15 AM on January 28


Decent Oscar list this year except for the one glaring exception that's Emilia Perez, which like WTF. I loved Anora and Dune 2, thought Could've was super fun, am.as excited to see The Brutalist as I can be to see a 4 hour movie.
posted by Carillon at 12:42 AM on January 28


I’m really looking forward to seeing One of Them Days! A buddy comedy with Keke and SZA, sign me up!
posted by ellieBOA at 3:21 AM on January 28


Without spoilers, can someone explain what's the deal with Emilia Pérez?

I saw a reference in the rightwingosphere along the lines of "ha ha all the libs are crying because 'Emilia Pérez' got Oscar nominations" but I don't remember seeing any leftists or liberals mentioning it at all.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:02 AM on January 28


It's been very interesting to see the reaction to the actual Section 31 movie compared to the discussion in this thread on the blue regarding what people imagined it might be.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:56 AM on January 28


TheophileEscargot, I had wondered the same about Emilia Perez and a helpful MeFite (sorry, I forgot who!) steered me towards this as an explainer.

One of the recent FanFare comments from me last week was my baffled outrage at Kevin the Hunter.
posted by Kitteh at 5:23 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Thanks! That clears up a lot.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:40 AM on January 28


Huh, I just realised I've missed half the SG-1 rewatch because I've been refreshing and looking for the "next episode" link rather than watching the show page.
posted by lucidium at 5:41 AM on January 28


Kevin the Hunter

I feel like if the movie had taken off, this would be the name of the knockoff toys sold by the highway in Eastern Europe.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:47 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


Without spoilers, can someone explain what's the deal with Emilia Pérez?

I have not seen it so I cannot spoil it, but my understanding is that it's turn of the millennium style representation of trans people, i.e. a cishet filmmaker has Important Thoughts About What Transgender People Mean for Us All but does not seem to have actually spoken with any or thought too hard about it. Kinda dated "I'll speak on their behalf" [does so badly] kind of shit.

Someone can feel free to correct me if I am off, as I am only attempting to summarize what I have heard second-hand.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:49 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


I would like to bring up this conversation that started with DOT announcing the acquisition of John Woo films and then went on to discuss who's who of boutique labels that I found fascinating
posted by Higherfasterforwards at 7:38 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


I feel like if the movie had taken off, this would be the name of the knockoff toys sold by the highway in Eastern Europe.

Kevin the Hunter could share a shelf in your action figure case with Robert Cop.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:23 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


I love that, Halloween Jack!

We've become huge enthusiasts of weird off-brand toys. Please enjoy a few from our photo collection, including Change Robot (Changed the Samurai!), JusticeHoers (why would Superman need to turn into a car? Unknown threat confrontation), Deformed Excavator, and Fmgeblings!
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:36 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


A bit of time travel

After rewatching Labyrinth (1986) the other day, I was curious to see how the film was discussed in FF. Here we go, nealy 10 years ago
posted by ginger.beef at 12:26 PM on January 28


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