Esther Williams @ 100: Million Dollar Mermaid

Team Experience has been celebrating Esther Williams Centennial with a three part miniseries. Previously we featured Thrill of a Romance and Neptune's Daughter. 

by Cláudio Alves

In some ways, Million Dollar Mermaid is both the quintessential Esther Williams movie and a departure in the screen siren's career. During the 1940s, Williams achieved cinematic stardom through self-knowing exercises in romantic silliness and musical extravagance, lighthearted productions that wore their escapist possibilities as a badge of honor. One can often feel the screenwriter's strain, trying to shoe-horn swimming scenes in stories that could function just as well without them. Even the baseball comedy Take Me Out to the Ball Game had to be retrofitted into having an out-of-place pool number where Williams gets to lip-sync while swimming under the gaze of Busby Berkeley's camera. Consequentially, MGM never presented Williams as a great dramatic actress, preferring to exhalt her natural charms, radiant presence, and aquatic athleticism.

Loosely inspired in the life of Australian professional swimmer, vaudevillian, and early movie star Annette Kellerman, Million Dollar Mermaid is a lavish biopic with inspirational aspirations...

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Category Analysis: For Drama Directing, will The Crown get the crown?

Team Experience takes a look at the episode submissions for all the major Emmy categories. 

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Unlike last year where eight nominees sprang from just three shows, the nominees this year were fairly distributed. Five of the six nominees were either season premieres or season/series finales. Fifty percent of the nominees in this category were women. In the shows nominated, only The Crown and The Handmaid's Tale have won previously. These are just some of the stats that might (or might not) help in predicting the winner of this category. The Crown is the frontrunner for Drama Series, but would that help with its two nominations here? Could The Handmaid's Tale or The Mandalorian snag a win? Could Pose win for its series finale? Or is the Bridgerton love for real?

Without further ado, the nominees...

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A Room With a View Pt 2: Sacred puddles and stuffy engagements

Previously in our deep dive retrospective into A Room With a View (1986), Cláudio considered Lucy Honeychurch's Florentine summer and the sharp storytelling instincts of one James Ivory in the director's chair.  Sensual Italy was viewed with both wonder and suspicion as proper English decorum played constant defence against passion. And, as Mr Emerson might add, played offense with its other sworn enemy "common sense". We also met the classic film's remarkable cast of characters (though there are three key introductions left).

A ROOM WITH A VIEW
(a three part miniseries)
part 2 by Nathaniel R

39:13 After Lucy and George's very decorum-breaking makeout sesh in the countryside, the parties involved have all high-tailed it back to their pensione to retire for the night. Their heads are still spinning from the events of the day. Particularly (poor) Charlotte's. "What is to be done? How do you propose to silence him?" is her four alarm question to Lucy. Lucy, for a delicious beat too long in the shot above, doesn't appear to be listening; we know exactly where her head is at.

Please note that this shot of Lucy comes brilliantly on the heels of a pan up from George running, elated, in the rain into stormy clouds. Cut to this beautiful frame of Helena Bonham Carter, her head still in that passionate storm, her glorious mane as wild as nature itself. Charlotte is brushing it so violently it's like she's trying to tame it...

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Luca Guadagnino @50: Melissa P

Happy 50th Birthday to Director Luca Guadagnino today! Here's a look back at his little seen sophomore feature

by Jason Adams

For Luca Guadagnino, the process of making his second feature film Melissa P. in 2005 was not a good one. The signs were all there in advance, if he hadn't been lured in by the big American studio Sony that was financing the film -- for one, well, Sony itself. The studio ended up being terrifically intrusive, shoving on a puritanical ending and even hiring an on-set handler for the filmmaker, and he's said he feels the finished project was more their work than his own. But even earlier than that he'd only been able to make it halfway through the novel One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed on which the film was based. A sort of modern The Story of O it tells the loosely autobiographical story of a teenage girl discovering her body alongside a few sado-masochistic tendencies, and he's said he found the book schlocky but that he thought he could patch over those bits with some psycho-analysis. And, of course, Cinema. Always that...

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NYFF Reveals 2021's Main Slate

by Jason Adams

Like a kid high on candy canes staring at the boxes under the tree on Christmas morning, wondering what wonders await, so go I, wild-eyed and very very awake now, ogling the just-announced roster of the New York Film Festival's "Main Slate" for 2021 (which runs from September 24 – October 10). Like three bears or bowls of porridge we'd already sized up the spectacular threesome that is Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth opening the fest, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog closing it, with Pedro Almodovar's milky-eyed Parallel Mothers sandwiched in the Centerpiece between, but now... now! Now comes all the meat and fixins and I, for one, am full to burst. Droolin' over here, everybody!

NYFF is often framed as an also-ran when it comes to the full Festival Season since it doesn't get a ton of World Premieres -- most of these movies will have played at Toronto or Venice or heck even back to Sundance (I see you, Passing -- no really I already saw you and reviewed you right here) -- but as my much-loved hometown fest I don't care what's first, I care what's best, and the curation these folks do remains to my eye top-notch...

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