Thoughts I had... while staring at this poster of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"

...Or, rather:  thought, singular.

This is actually brilliant counter-intuitive poster design. It takes Tammy Faye's most famous features... those bright blue eyes absolutely imprisoned in mascara and eyeshadow, and obscures them. Biopics invite you to gawk at someone famous and get to know them better. This one is is all 'don't look don't look. The shame!'

Love it. Can't wait to see Jessica Chastain's work. (Previous thoughts on the trailer here)

The Honoraries: Danny Glover in "To Sleep With Anger"

We'll be celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career. First up is Danny Glover.

First and foremost, a big fucking congratulations to Danny Glover, whose long, reliable, multi-pronged career is tremendously deserving of the Jean Hersholt Award he will be awarded this year. 2021’s absolutely superb group of Honorary winners makes it all the more fucking absurd these shows aren’t televised, but that’s a whole other tangent. We here at The Film Experience are paying tribute to our favorites among Glover’s remarkable body of work, and when pressed about my favorite of his performances, I immediately went for Charles Burnett’s 1990 feature To Sleep With Anger.

As with Places of the Heart, Glover’s arrival comes just around the fifteen minute mark, by which time we have not only met most of the cast but have gotten acquainted with To Sleep With Anger’s unusual tone...

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Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair and Fests are Festing

by Jason Adams

I don't know about you but I've entirely lost all concept of time -- is it really time to start gearing up and delivering news about fall movie festivals? Wasn't it just Sundance a literal second ago? Next thing you'll tell me it's not 2020 anymore. Anyway while I was busy slowing sliding down the wall of my shower with a stunned vacant look on my face the New York Film Festival was announcing its Opening Night film for this year's 59th festival -- Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring Denzel Washington and Lady Frances McDormand, will kick it off in the city that never sleeps on the night of September 24th. That's 64 days away! Here's their descriptor of the flick:

"A work of stark chiaroscuro and incantatory rage, Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition. In meticulously world-weary performances, a strikingly inward Denzel Washington is the man who would be king, and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand is his Lady, a couple driven to political assassination—and deranged by guilt—after the cunning prognostications of a trio of “weird sisters” (a virtuoso physical inhabitation by Kathryn Hunter). Though it echoes the forbidding visual designs—and aspect ratios—of Laurence Olivier’s classic 1940s Shakespeare adaptations, as well as the bloody medieval madness of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Coen’s tale of sound and fury is entirely his own—and undoubtedly one for our moment, a frightening depiction of amoral political power-grabbing that, like its hero, ruthlessly barrels ahead into the inferno. An Apple/A24 release."

Other names of note in Joel's take on the Scottish slaughter-tale of yore include Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Ineson (so basso-profundo memorable at Thomasin's pops in The VVitch), and the always memorable Harry Melling. Meanwhile names not of note specifically include Ethan Coen, who didn't work with Joel on this one? I hope the Coens TM are okay. I have a lot invested in that brand loyalty. What do we think -- will this one get the Coen name back in the Oscar business or what? 

Doc Corner: (Belated) Shark Week — 'Playing with Sharks' and 'Fin'

By Glenn Dunks

Sally Aitken’s Playing with Sharks and Eli Roth’s Fin are two very different documentaries but share common ground. Not just in that they are both about sharks, but because they each want to use their platforms to advocate for the preservation of the ocean’s perfect predators. Neither film reaches the heights of other better, similarly themed films (in recent years, I stump heavily for Karina Holden’s Blue), but it’s something of a sad indictment that their very existence is important as the environmental crises happening in our oceans appear so far from being solved.

Aitken’s film chooses to focus its lens on Valerie Taylor, a famed Australian diver whose role in some prominent Hollywood productions (you may know of one called Jaws, but also Blue Water, White Death in 1967) led to being a conservationist. Fin on the other hand is a most unexpected non-fiction diversion for Roth; a film more akin to The Cove than the gory horror features that he is better known for.

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The Honoraries: Danny Glover in "Places in the Heart"

We'll be celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career. First up is Danny Glover who turns 75 today. Happy Birthday to a fine American actor!

by Eric Blume

Danny Glover shows up about fifteen minutes into director Robert Benton’s 1984 Oscar winner Places in the Heart, looking dapper and handsome in his worn suit, with an effortless charm that belies his character’s backstory.  He insinuates his way into the life of widowed Edna Spalding (that year’s Best Actress winner, Sally Field) and into the film’s narrative. Sadly he always stays on the sidelines but Glover provides a radiance and a verve that display his burgeoning talent and resourcefulness.

Places in the Heart marked Glover’s first large-scale film role, and he seizes the role of drifter Moses and does everything he can with it...

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