Thankful for... Deborah Lipp

This year for our "thankful for" column we're mixing it up a bit and interviewing our team to share our gratitude for them. I first met DEBORAH LIPP through a mutual obsession with Mad Men. I'm proud to call her a friend and had the pleasure of attending her wedding several years back.

Deborah has a busy life (new books out!) so we dont see her around these parts much but she began popping in on occasion way back in 2012. As a James Bond fan she's written about her 007 favourite 007 films (and lots of other Bond posts). She's also wondered if Notorious is Hitchcock's only feminist film and since she loves romoms she's sung the praises of several here including Kissing Jessica Stein, Moonstruck, and and Four Weddings and a Funeral. She most recently popped in to review the final Daniel Craig Bond film No Time To Die.

Our short interview follows...

When did you first fall in love with the movies?

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Movie-Adjacent Grammy Nominations!

by Nathaniel R

"Sour" and "Montero" -definitely two of the most talked about albums of the year.

Each year when the Grammy nominations are announced we dive in to find notes of interest for cinephiles and/or general movie/tv enthusiasts. Jon Batiste, who took home the Oscar for Best Original Score for Pixar's Soul last spring, leads the Grammy nominations with 11 citations. But before we get to the movie stuff, we should acknowledge the three top categories: album, record, and song of the year...

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Thankful for... Juan Carlos Ojano

This year for our "thankful for" column I'm interviewing the team (well, the non-shy ones) so you can get to know them better and so I can express my sincere gratitude that they're showcased here on the site. Today, JUAN CARLOS OJANO.

Juan Carlos lives in the Philippines and began writing for The Film Experience in mid 2020. We were all trapped inside due to the COVID-19 pandemic at the time. Human connection was scarce so thank the cinematic gods for zoom sessions with Team Experience! Juan Carlos shares our collective TFE passion for actresses + Best International Feature Film. He put the latter into action creating the podcast "One Inch Barrier" where he reviews each year of that competition. He got personal with a Call Me By Your Name piece, revisited Spotlight, wrote numerous odes to The Handmaid's Tale,and just launched a biweekly series on female directors called "Through Her Lens" that I really hope you will obsess over. I'm already wondering which female directors he'll be looking at from the 00s and earlier when they were less frequently honored and discussed.

HERE'S OUR SHORT INTERVIEW...

When did you first fall in love with the movies?

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How Had I Never Seen..."Planes, Trains and Automobiles"

By Ben Miller

There isn't a long list of well-regarded Thanksgiving films, but John Hughes' 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles is defintely near the top of it.  It took me 30 years to catch up, but I finally have!. Featuring two pitch-perfect performances from stars Steve Martin and John Candy, the film continues to elicit laughter after all these years.

Neil Page (Martin) is an advertising executive on a business trip to New York City.  Eager to return to his family in Chicago for Thanksgiving, he attempts to hail a cab to the airport.  After losing a cab to Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon from Hughes' She's Having a Baby) and getting extorted by a lawyer, his cab is inadvertently stolen by Del Griffith (Candy)...

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For "The Humans" to Err is Human and to Forget Divine

by Jason Adams

Erik (Richard Jenkins), the patriarch of the Blake family, stands staring out a dingy window into the gray light of the alleyway -- excuse me, the "interior courtyard" -- behind his daughter's unfurnished and water-logged Chinatown apartment. His thoughts are clearly elsewhere, new worries freshly lining his already lined face, as something catches his eye, and then another -- is that snow? It's lovely, in its way, but distressing all the same -- having traveled into the big city for this Housewarming slash Thanksgiving dinner from the wilds of distant Scranton he's got to think about getting everybody home at a decent hour, and a snow-storm would have them trapped here, nary a bed in sight. (Having lugged a Mary figure there as their Housewarming gift the soft Biblical allusions to "no room at the Inn" seem let's say non-accidental.) He brings up this his most recent distress to Richard (Steven Yeun), his daughter's boyfriend, who doesn't see snow at all, instead offering the thesis that someone on an upper floor has just emptied their ashtray.

Snow to ash, and just like that beauty to death, a recurring happening in Stephen Karam's Tony-winning play turned A24's darkly funny and emotionally cataclysmic awards-season contender The Humans, out this week...

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