Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
The release date site to end all release date sites, Projection List, has launched.
At Slate, David Ehrlich on how a terrible Jennifer Aniston movie turned into this year’s Oscar Cinderella story.
The Oscars are a spectacle of such hollow pageantry that they make politics look like a meritocracy, and yet it’s nevertheless both flabbergasting and vaguely sinister that Cake—a smarmy and self-satisfied drama starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman suffering from chronic pain—has become the Cinderella story of this year’s awards season. Cake is so unappetizing that Cinelou Films (the upstart production company responsible for its financing) had to grow its own distribution arm in order to ensure the film’s release, effectively buying its own product. And yet, after three months in which the movie didn’t chart on a single critic’s top-10 list and remained hidden from public scrutiny following its Toronto International Film Festival debut, Jennifer Aniston’s unvarnished lead performance has received SAG and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. How on Earth did one of the very worst films of 2014 become a near–shoo-in for an Oscar nod?
For RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya revisits Public Enemies in a new video essay:
Jean-Luc Godard sends a note:
Watch Shia LaBeouf‘s latest project, a music video for Sia’s Elastic Heart:
At Cut Print Film, Amy Anna discusses what vampire movies teach us about humanity:
Take Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. Here is a wonderful little vampire flick about . . . a marriage. Someone wise once told me that the whole “‘til death do us part” thing was invented when people only lived to be 27 years old. Eternal life casts “ever after” in a whole new light. But there’s hope! Even with divorce statistics being what they are, there’s hope for true love and lasting relationships. Adam and Eve, the vampires in Only Lovers, have been married 140-plus years and they still adore one another, though they don’t always choose to live together. And even vampires have in-law problems, who knew? Adam and Eve refer to humans as zombies and complain that we ruin everything – the environment, the blood supply, everything. They have a point.