"Casting a 5-foot-11, rom-com heartthrob in a role traditionally played by dwarf actors was what the film’s director, Paul King, called 'a real lightbulb moment.'"

"'You go, 'Hugh Grant’s an Oompa-Loompa! Yes, please!"' he [said]. Or maybe, 'No, thanks,' if you’re a performer with dwarfism who’s been typecast in bit parts your entire career, now confronting a future in which even those can be CGIed to fit the frames of A-listers."

From "Hugh Grant is an Oompa-Loompa now. What’s left for dwarf actors? Hugh Grant’s casting as an Oompa-Loompa in ‘Wonka’ feels to some like the latest in a long line of slights against dwarf actors" (WaPo).

What to watch from the Criterion's "80s Horror" collection?

 

You can see the huge set of titles here. 

We chose the one where Hugh Grant says "I hear you're having trouble with a snake."

Pagan vampires, a two-hundred-foot worm, and a profusion of phallic imagery collide in Ken Russell’s typically outré take on Bram Stoker’s most infamous novel. On an excavation in the English countryside, an archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovers a mysterious skull that he comes to believe belonged to the D’Ampton Worm, a mythical snake-like creature thought to have been slain long ago by an ancestor of aristocrat James D’Ampton (Hugh Grant). The strange presence of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) and a series of unexplained disappearances soon hint that the legend of the D’Ampton Worm may be far from dead.

Did we laugh? Of course, we laughed!

Why didn't I see it back when it came out (in 1988)? I loved Ken Russell. "The Devils" was on my list of 5 favorite movies. And, as a law clerk, I'd worked on the case about "Altered States." But I was influenced by the reviews of the time. Which ones, I can't remember, but Roger Ebert wrote:

People expect something special from Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as “Women in Love,” “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” “The Boyfriend,” “Tommy,” “Altered States,” “Crimes of Passion” and “Salome’s Last Dance.” Every one of Russell’s films has been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about “The Lair of the White Worm” is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square. 

Not enough wretched excess!

"I'm only going to mention that great moment in film when Emma Thompson learns that Hugh Grant is not married."

That's the highest-rated comment in an article in The Guardian titled "Behind the Candelabra proves it: our greatest romances are gay/As Soderbergh's Liberace biopic hits our screens, why is it that homosexual love stories now work so much better than hetero?"

Reading that comment, I got chills, bodily chills, that preceded my conscious recollection that the reference is to the movie "Sense and Sensibility," which recollection caused me to get chills again, and then I recalled how I felt about that scene at the time, and then — I am not kidding — I got bodily chills again. I'm stunned to realize that every time I simply remember Emma Thompson at that moment, I have a physical response.

Here's the moment.

"All you can do while you puzzle over it like a board game is try to figure out which member of the hammy all-star ensemble, unrecognizable in lurid makeup..."

"... wigs, period costumes and rubber prostheses, is playing which man—or woman—while the viewer-unfriendly screenplay squirts and splatters all over the place.... I mean, Hugh Grant as a bloodthirsty cannibal?"

Did you know Rex Reed was still writing movie reviews? 

Here are some trailers for "Cloud Atlas."

Are you still following the Wachowskis, who are no longer the Wachowski brothers?

On Saturday, Lana Wachowski (co-director of the "Matrix" franchise and "Cloud Atlas") received a "Visibility Award" from the Human Rights Campaign for her recent decision to publicly come out as transgender. In a powerful 25-minute acceptance speech, Lana spoke about the pain she went through growing up and how she developed self-acceptance. Video. Transcript. Q&A with the Hollywood Reporter.

From the transcript:

Andy and I have not done press or made a public appearance including premieres in over 12 years. People have mistakenly assumed that this has something to do with my gender. It does not. After The Matrix was released in ‘99 we both experienced this alarming contraction of our world and thus our lives. We became acutely aware of the preciousness of anonymity -- understanding it as a form of virginity, something you only lose once. Anonymity allows you access to civic space, to a form of participation in public life, to an egalitarian invisibility that neither of us wanted to give up.