Judy by the Numbers: "Snowflakes"

What on odd year is 1963 in the history of Judy Garland. 1964 marks the last year of Judy Garland's film career, and the boom of Judy's television career. The first of Judy's final two movies reunited Judy Garland with producer Stanley Kramer and actor Burt Lancaster, with whom she'd worked only two years before in Judgment at Nuremburg. By the early 1960s, Kramer was establishing himself as the prestige producer of hard-hitting social issue cinema. A Child Is Waiting, about an institution for developmentally challenged children, was no different.

The Movie: A Child is Waiting (Universal, 1963)
The Songwriter: Marjorie D. Kurtz
The Players: Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, Gena Rowlands, directed by John Cassavetes

The Story: While the majority of Judy Garland's career was dominated by Technicolor musical extravaganzas, the last few films of her career do signal an attempt at darker, "more serious" work. Surrounded by Method artists like Rowlands, Cassavetes, and (to some degree) Lancaster, Judy clearly embraced a more fluid, less "Studio" form of acting. Her improvisation with the students shows this transition. This scene, not a "musical number" in the conventional sense, sees Judy attempting to teach a song to her students through many tactics - banging on the piano, half-quiet mumbling, sing-shouting, etc - while playing a range of tensions in the scene, from timidity to irritation to joy when they start to get it right. It is a subtle musical performance.

Most of the drama in A Child Is Waiting happened behind the scenes between Kramer and Cassavetes, but ultimately no battles or cute children could save the film. It lost $2 million among mixed reviews, a frustrating end to an artistic leap on Judy's part.

YNMS: The Young Pope

by Laurence Barber

In the wake of House of Cards' success, it seems networks have all been clamouring to make shows about other worlds that are full of their own political intrigue. Netflix itself has the Gerard Depardieu-starring Marseille, which French critics savaged and everyone else mostly ignored, and the upcoming The Crown. In other ways, shows like Mr. Robot and UnReal seem partially derivative of this trend despite updating and resituating it. Now, in a joint production, Sky, Canal+ and HBO have teamed up to produce the latest project from Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino: The Young Pope...

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Back to School with Realistic Movie Professors

by Kyle Stevens

Professor Indiana JonesAfter teaching for years as a graduate student, then as a postdoc, and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor, I’ve finally started a proper position as Assistant Professor of Film Studies. As semesters begin all over the country, I turned to thinking about my favorite on-screen professors. High school movies tend to serve as microcosms of society; they’re all emotional peaks and valleys, in-groups and out-groups, and the goal is to get out. In college movies, from Animal House and Old School to Legally Blonde and The House Bunny, the goal is to stay on the rip-roaring ride of university life. 

Not surprisingly, college teachers don’t feature heavily in these movies. And in other genres where professors pop up, they’re not exactly realistic. Think Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, Natalie Portman in Thor, Hugh Grant in The Rewrite, and so on. (Propriety dictates that I not comment on the realism of Bruce Humberstone’s 1952 Virginia Mayo vehicle She’s Working Her Way Through College.) Television doesn’t fare much better, as the patently absurd characters in How to Get Away with Murder or Transparent attest. 

But here are my personal favorites. The Top Five Professors in Film..

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Doc Corner: 'Cameraperson' is Simply Extraordinary

Glenn here. Each Tuesday bringing you reviews of documentaries from theatres, festivals and on demand.

Cameraperson is the most extraordinary of documentaries. A compelling first-person visual memoir that intricately weaves some 15 years of filmmaking into a remarkably watchable cinematic patchwork quilt. A truly wondrous mix-tape that finds documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson taking directorial duties upon herself in the creation of a film about the creation of films. She utilizes b-roll footage, outtakes, and home movies to build, as if like free-form lego, a powerful portrait of not just herself, but the world we live in. Cameraperson is without a doubt the best documentary of 2016, and just maybe the best film of the year, period.

You have surely seen some of the films that Johnson has used footage from. Popular titles like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour from Johnson's frequent collaborator Laura Poitras, the latter of which makes a wonderfully obscure and unexplained appearance yet which only proves how impressively that doc was filmed. We’ve even reviewed some of them right here at The Film Experience like Dawn Porter’s Trapped, which was the very first title we reviewed in the Doc Corner.

No matter how many of the 24 titles Johnson draws from that you have seen, you haven’t seen them like this. And any that you haven't will no doubt rocket to the top of your must watch pile...

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Tom Hanks on 'La La Land'

Over the weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, Tom Hanks was on hand to support Sully (which was received positively). At a screening Q&A he got off topic to get effusive about our most anticipated festival player La La Land. The diversion began from discussing the difficulty to in getting an adult drama with no franchise potential like Sully made and how audiences are only craving new experiences at the movies. He went on to praise the boldness of its original songs and unfamiliar characters even though he's completely unassocatied with the film. (We just knew he was a musical man at heart!)

Hanks said:

When you see something that is brand new that you can’t imagine, and you think "Well thank God this landed"... This is not a movie that falls into some sort of trend.

We all understand the business aspects of it. It’s cruel and it’s backbreaking and take-no-prisoners. But there’s always that chance where the audience sees something that is brand new that they never expected, and embraces it and celebrates it... I don’t take anything away from [the studios] and there are some good movies that come out of that. But we all go to the cinema for the same thing, that is to be transported to someplace we have never been before.

Movies stars, they're just like us sometimes. Indeed, this is high praise for the film and its potential to provide a much needed unique cinematic experience to the masses. Aside from the commentary Hanks makes here, it's a reminder that one of the tinier treasures of Oscar season is hearing what movies filmmakers are taken with (apart from their own) - whether it's the commonplace 'actors on actors' pieces or the like.

Aren't you just dying to hear Emma Stone's thoughts on Sully now?