The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
The Film Experience is taking a brief trip to 1963 for the forthcoming Smackdown. That year's supporting Actor winner was Melvyn Douglas in Hud...
by John Guerin
Paul Newman as Hud makes me forget everything else. All my attention is funneled into those blue-grey eyes, the nucleus of Newman's swaggering energy. Hud emerges from this drowsy Midwestern tapestry like a geyser springing up from a desert. Why look anywhere else? The film hardly forfeits narrative or photographic attention from Hud, but he's not the only performer doing expert work in Martin Ritt’s 1963 masterwork. There's Patricia Neal's Alma, an iconic intersection of Southern exhaustion and eroticism. There's also Melvyn Douglas' Homer, which, to my constant surprise, remains perhaps the films best performance...
This week, Chris Feil's series on music in the movies ponders the concert movie...
Who killed the concert movie? While the subgenre never reached the commonality of the music video, that particular form’s rise is timed right around the concert film’s demise. But perhaps it was just a form that seldom met the heights of “you are there” excitement or insight into the performer as Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads’s Stop Making Sense.
For such a distinctive visually-defined group as the Talking Heads were in music video form, Stop Making Sense remains their defining document. As much as David Byrne is the creative spearhead of the band and that radical rebellious sound, Demme’s insight is what makes this more than just a filmed event or way to see a popular band if they skipped over your town. If a concert is a singular way to live in the full experience of a performer and their sound, Demme takes that to the next level by dropping us in the middle of this creative unit.
a silly game in which we fantasize about hanging with celebrities. So would you rather?
...fiddle around with Kate Beckinsale's gusset? ...hot tub it with Tom Holland and his BFF? ... dive into the Red Sea with Tom Cullen? ...drop dead on Fire Island with Matthew Wilkas? ...rock climb with Jesse Bradford? ...reminiscing about that play you were in in college with Garret Dillahunt? ...get a facial with Madonna? ...go see Hamlet with Laura Dern?
photos after the jump to help you decide. Do tell us which you'd choose!
Shove a professional sign or any diegetic text or hand-scrawled message in front of the camera and we go all bookworm eyes. Are they subliminal subtitles? That's surely up to the set decorator, prop man, production designer and director. In this new visual series (we previously did Silence of the Lambs- don't read anything into two queer serial killler pictures in a row, erp!) we'll share textual images from a film that use unspoken words to tell the story... or are merely fun period details.
This week's victim is the infamous homophobic serial killer movie Cruising (1980). Here are 28 photos of signs and messages and letters and whatnot from the film with a few notes on actual NYC history and a few asides to other pop culture wonders ...
• The Cut "I'm rooting for the Lannisters" fun piece on Game of Thrones (which I still read about on occasion even though I haven't watched since season 2) • /Film Guillermo del Toro's official tequila looks like it's from one of his movies • Vulture every Charlize Theron performance ranked. Interesting list though I quibble with the order (as they seem to equate the quality of the movies with the quality of her performance and Theron is precisely the star she is because she is often able to be good even in terrible pictures). Also Young Adult should be #1
• Playbill all star cast lined up for Steve Martin's next Broadway show (after his musical Bright Star), this one's a comedy called Meteor Shower • Browbeat the internet goes wild for old Russ Tamblyn dancing clip from 1956 • Tracking Board Nicole Kidman is in talks to headline a crime thriller called Destroyer directed by Karyn Kusama. Kusama is promising that though it's a genre film it's also "a beautiful character study of an incredible female" • Variety we were wondering when Ruth Negga would start lining up big roles after Loving. She'll star opposite Brad Pitt in the sci-fi movie Ad Astra • Awards DailyThis is Us has lost one of its Emmy nominations, costume design. • The Wrap this piece about Marvel's plans for Spider-Man got a lot of internet pass-around but it really doesn't tell you much other than they're going to make Spidey a thing in all the crossover movies
Two pieces about criticism/discussion of racial politics in movies/theaters right now
• American Theater a thoughtful piece on the counterproductive assault on Broadway's Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. (We haven't yet heard if the show is actually closing following it's poorly handled casting changes but it might... but the producers were apparently considering it) • Birth Movies Death a very navel gazing piece about being an ally and trying to navigate pop culture criticism in the current political climate and intersectional age
Exit Video Handsome talented Aaron Tveit is taking on the classic role of Bobby in another production of Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece (one of them, at least) Company. This one starts in a couple of days in Massachusetts so go if you live near there and report back. Here he is rehearsing...
Wednesday, August 9, 2017 at 3:30PM 
