Untitled Woody Allen Picture Shoots This Summer

by Nathaniel R

Chalamet & Fanning and Woody on the set of the ill-fated "A Rainy Day in New York"

For as long as we've been conscious of the movies, there's been a Woody Allen movie released every single year. That clockwork regularity ended with Wonder Wheel (2017). Amazon refused to release the completed picture A Rainy Day in New York which was meant for 2018 when the bad press kept mounting and some of that film's cast (Rebecca Hall and Timothée Chalamet, among them) disowned the film due to media pressure from the Farrow family's accusations against the director (unchanged since 1992 -- Woody was never officially charged after two separate investigations -- but revived very publicly/frequently since early 2014). The filmmaker and Amazon Studios are, last we heard, still in a pricey legal battle over their broken contract (even if you dislike Woody, one wonders what argument Amazon Studios could possibly come up with that's a winning one since they went into that contract with full knowledge of the accusations)  but Woody has the greenlight from other sources for his 2020 picture, as yet untitled, which will begin filming in July...

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Reading List: The Lammy Winners

by Nathaniel R

Looking for summer reading to occupy your non-movie theater / beach time? The 31st Annual Lambda Literary Awards were held this monday for the best in LGBTQ writing. NYC performance icon MX Justin Vivian Bond (Can You Ever Forgive Me, Shortbus, Kiki & Herb) was the MC and we've listed the winners of their 24 regular categories after the jump. If you've read any of these books do tell if they'd make intriguing movies... 

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Soundtracking: Moulin Rouge!

by Chris Feil

Perhaps it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge! was in 2001. The thing about masterpieces is their legacy sometimes overshadows the context that birthed them. But at the time, the musical was a massive gamble and creative leap, helping to relaunch the genre that had died a slow death at the box office and to cultural  cinematic tastes. Just as Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet had aggressively re-imagined its text for the MTV set, he delivered something even more drug-fevered to the musical, shattering notions of what the genre’s limitations were and how it could exist in the modern era.

Musicals may be more commonplace now, but they have yet to be as audacious since. But as much as Luhrman’s trippy, frenetic stylings play nearly twenty (gasp!) years later as its most obvious innovations, it was Luhrman’s music choices that were the biggest shock to the system for movie musicals.

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Halston'

By Glenn Dunks

Once again, The Film Experience and Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week is Halston, a fashion bio-doc about the famed American designer.

He was arguably the most famous out homosexual in America; feted by magazines and talk-shows, lauded in name by celebrities from coast to coast. A man of a certain time who emerged timeless; a pillar of an industry that had remained strikingly insular until his brand helped bring it to the American masses. Roy Halston Frowick left his impressionable mark on history early on, designing First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s iconic pillbox hat and translated that mark of destiny through a career that weaved down runways, across discotheques and into department stores.

His life is given an appropriately razzle-dazzle treatment in Halston from director Frédérick Tcheng. Told through the unusual narrative device of a fictional, unknown woman researching his life through video tapes, Halston is one of the more formally interesting examples of the fashion bio-doc genre and is infused with an atmosphere that is as slinky as one of his bias-cut dresses while also embracing his extravagant Manhattan lifestyle of chic glass offices, limousines and cocaine that evoke an era of lavish and queer excess.

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The New Classics - Happy-Go-Lucky

Michael Cusumano here to discuss a scene I find myself thinking about all the time.

 

Scene: Scott's meltdown
When you pause to consider how mundane the actual events of Mike Leigh’s films usually are, it’s funny to think how many moments from them lodge permanently in the memory.  Barely a weekend goes by that I don’t see some kind of world-ending cataclysm portrayed in expansively budgeted detail and what does my brain return to over and over again? Lesley Manville in Another Year retreating to her glass of white wine or David Thewlis in Naked stalking a security guard through the dark to harangue him about the meaning of life.

The famous Mike Leigh technique of crafting screenplays from extensive improvisations yields scenes that unfold with the convinction of real life...

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