It's National Donut Day!

On this crucial day, as you scarf down a delicious free pastry at various places offering them, remember the great Tangerine (2015) and share your donut, bitch.

Which of the following celebrities, all pictured with donuts (because The Film Experience is nothing if not committed), would you most want to share a donut with?

BEAUTY BREAK - CELEBRITIES w/ DONUTS

Reese Witherspoon

More pastries (and also celebrities) after the jump...

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Streaming: J Edgar Drinking Games & Elizabeth's Golden Foreshadowing

Do you purchase or rent DVDs movies anymore or just wait for streaming -- however long that takes? If you do the following titles have emerged in the past week on Blu-Ray or DVD: The Finest Hours in which Chris Pine gets a man vs. ocean movie cuz Chris Hemsworth got one;  Gods of Egypt which is terrible but in so-bad-it's-great way; How to Be Single which is better than you'd think but way overstuffed but you should probably see it for another great performance variation on "the boyfriend" by Jake Lacy (he's got that market covered but he's so good at it with no two characters feeling like the same guy); Pride & Prejudice & Zombies which is fun for what it is if nothing more; also new are Race, Risen, Triple 9, and Zoolander 2. 

But on to the fun part, New to Streaming. Because, to quote the one and only Carrie Fisher:

Instant gratication takes too long.

Let's do our fun little freeze frame game on new streaming titles. The following films were frozen on one image completely at random to see what showed up. They're all new on either Netflix of Amazon Prime. Ready? Let's play!

J Edgar (2011) on Netflix

Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh's baby has been kidnapped.

A fun drinking came while streaming J Edgar in five easy steps
1. Take a drink every time you wish Clint Eastwood wasn't terrified of color
2. Take a drink every time you wish Tom Stern would throw a damn light on the set for once
3. Take a drink every time you see bad old age makeup in closeup
4. Take a drink every time you're glad AMPAS dodged a bullet on this one and it's not part of Oscar history
5. Die of alcohol poisoning. 

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

You said when artists dream they dream of money.
...I must be such an artist.

Love this movie. Stockard Channing was just sensational in it. (And what a great Best Actress year 1993 was)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and more after the jump...

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Great Moments in Gay - Bring it On

In Great Moments in Gay, Team TFE looks at our favorite queer scenes in the movies for Pride Month. Here's Kieran Scarlett on Bring it On (2000)

Peyton Reed's Bring it On is one of the best high school movies of all time. It's best to get that out of the way first in any writing about the 2000 flick about the politics of high school cheerleading. It's often dismissed, forgotten or written off as a trifle, which couldn't be further from the truth. It so stylishly inhabits its own cinematic universe and does such an excellent job of world building--something that's often missing in a lot of high school movies where the environment can sometimes feel generic or a retread of superior movies. Its first scene brilliantly employs a Greek chorus-style device set to a cheer routine to introduce the world and its characters. And it manages to do so much more gracefully than a similar device in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, arguably a more high-minded film. Bring it On is not a guilty pleasure. It's simply a pleasure.

The way Jessica Bendinger's script handles so many issues feels revolutionary. This was 2000 mind you. Right in the middle of that murky period when it was being sussed out whether campy punchlines or true humanization would become de rigeur for queer representation in film and television. [More...]

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Review: Me Before You

If you were hoping for a weepy respite to the superhero stockpile, don't expect Me Before You to be your antidote. Consider this British would-be tearjerker the date movie equivalent of Batman v Superman: both ghastly and flat, and inert when it should be its most heart-stopping moments.

Based on the popular novel by Jojo Moyes (who adapted her own work), Me Before You stars Game of Thrones ingenue Emilia Clarke as Lou, a floundering and chatty young woman who takes a job caring for a local moneybags (and recently quadriplegic) Will Trainor (Sam Clafin of The Hunger Games saga). Will's mother (a shockingly underused Janet McTeer) has more on her mind than caregiving in hiring the girl, and Lou's effervescent warmth begins to thaw the man's dejected anger. The ensuing romance is rife for hot button discussion points and earnest emoting, but its clunky beigeness fails to stir much audience response...

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20 Years of TV History

what TVs looked like in the 90s (history of sets here)Here's a must read for the day. Over at HitFix, Alan Sepinwall has reached his 20th anniversary as a TV journalist/critic . It's a fascinating piece on 20 years of writing about TV and how much has changed in that medium since 1996. It's a fun history and nostalgia ride, particularly if you're interested in serialized TV (the best assett of TV but it took decades for TV to get there). I love most of the article and I'll save the highlights for your reading there.

But I do want to vehemently disagree with this statement I've bolded below even though the general idea now that "everything is better with TV" is totally true.

I can appreciate nostalgia for those days, if for no other reason than that the beat was easier to cover when there weren't 400+ original scripted series airing every year. But nearly everything about watching and writing about TV is so much better now than it was 20 years ago. The technology is better, giving us stunning imagery (imagine Lost or Breaking Bad shot for standard-def in the old aspect ratio) and easy access not only to the best of what's on now, but most of recorded TV history.

As someone who likes to curate my own viewing experiences, rather than leave the programming to the fancies of contracts/conflicts  between studios with both Netflix and Amazon, I am growing increasingly frustrated with acccess to both movies and television. It's getting worse not better (especially with movies) as everything splinters with "exclusivity" and things either stream or are  just not available since physical media is going the way of the dinosaur. Many TV shows I've tried to watch for research purposes or silly side pieces over the past few years have been unavailable to stream anywhere with prohibitively expensive DVD prices (if they're on DVD at all) like, oh, say Emmy favorite "Family" (1976-1980) or even something as recent as the failed CW show "Tarzan (2003)" which I had hoped to include in the Swing, Tarzan, Swing! series we've been doing on weekends. That's just two examples that have come up recently. But lots of times when we're considering a Centennial series on a famous star, their TV work is unavailable, period. Not one bit of it. That's especially true of telefilms which seem to evaporate as soon as they air, unless they were made in the last 15 years when everyone starting taking TV more seriously. When we were celebrating Mercedes McCambridge recently it felt like the exception and not the rule that I was able to rent her appearances on both "Bewitched" and "Charlie's Angels". Hell, even if you just want to watch something from last season (like "American Crime" S2) often streaming services will only let you watch the last few episodes aired and not the whole season, so if you're late to a show you probably have to wait a year or two until one of the streaming services picks it up.

But enough complaining. What are you most grateful in the evolution of this medium?