The Smithian

Tyrin Turner was in a rare and coveted position. By the time he was 22 years old, he’d starred in one of the most iconic films of the decade, befriended rising filmmakers, and been feted with nominations and acclaim. Janet Jackson even told him he had “some of the sexiest lips [she] ever saw.” Then, he disappeared from view.

more. and more.

Lionsgate has acquired screen rights to…Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Devil In The Grove: Thurgood Marshall, The Groveland Boys, And The Dawn Of A New America, by Gilbert King…Set in 1949, with Florida’s…orange industry as a backdrop, as citrus barons got rich on the backs of…Jim Crow labor, the novel tells the all-too-familiar story of four young black men falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl, and the NAACP’s legal team’s attempts to free them. It was a case that would bring an…attorney by the name of Thurgood Marshall into the…fray…

more.

more, plus a teaser trailer, here.

…of Hollywood’s top earners since 1980, a mere eight have not featured wizardry, space or time travel, or apocalyptic destruction caused by aliens/zombies…Hollywood continues to make science fiction and fantasy movies because disenchantment creates a demand for these stories, but disenchantment predates Hollywood. We were journeying ten thousand leagues under the sea or scarcely surviving a war of the worlds before the film industry began…

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The pirogi were warm, the honey-cherry liqueur was uncorked and the…bookstore in…Brooklyn, was standing-room-only. Dagmara Dominczyk, an actress familiar from films like “Higher Ground” and television shows like “Person of Interest,” was back in the old Polish neighborhood to celebrate the publication of…a novel that mirrors her own experience as a Polish émigré.

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Movies such as Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, The East, and Now You See Me, demonstrate how the public and the elite classes’ anxieties about the Great Recession and the future of the United States’ economy are being negotiated and resolved on screen. The Purge captures “the spirit of the age” quite well. It is a work that reflects the neoliberal national security state, a politics of meanness and cruelty where budgets are balanced on the backs of the poor, and the ways in which certain segments of the American people are marked as disposable human refuse…The Purge, while not a perfect film, is wonderfully ambitious in its efforts at being socially relevant and politically provocative…On those merits, The Purge is a scathing indictment of contemporary American politics, the mass media, and Right-wing politics in the Age of Obama.

“In playing the part of Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character, the way she appeared to me in the book.” —Hattie McDaniel

…the first African American to win an Academy Award, McDaniel won it for Best Supporting Actress for her role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind. She was born (the youngest of 13 children) in Wichita, Kansas, on this day in 1895.

…as as much to say about income inequality in 21st century America as it does about triumphantly swinging an ax into the spine of an amoral, wealthy college kid who’s trying to kill your family.

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[look of the hour]

trailer is here.

Carey Mulligan has emerged as the front-runner to play Hillary Rodham Clinton in Rodham, Temple Hill and The Arlook Group’s biopic of the former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state.

more.

[on the move]

…the Spanish star will become the oldest Bond girl ever.