April. It's a Wrap

April tends to be a slow month here at TFE but we'll hopefully pick back up now for summer movie season which is also Emmy nominating season so expect more Game of Thrones and Fosse/Verdon shortly. If you're just rejoining us here are a dozen highlights from the month...

Donna Lynne Champlin in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019)

Best of April
• Complete West Side Story Casting - Meet the new Sharks and new Jets
• Serial Mom 25th Anniversary - Salim looked back at the John Waters classic
• Smackdown of 1972 -Donna Lynne Champlin and more special guests joined us to talk The Poseidon Adventure, stage to screen acting, and the difficulty of playing drunk scenes
• Farewell Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - Dan says goodbye to TV's genius musical comedy
• Oscar Rule Changes - Makeup and Hair and Foreign Film get minor adjustments
• Howard Keel Centennial - Lynn, Tim, Deborah, and Nathaniel looked back at three of his musicals and one late career sci-fi flick
• Beyoncé's Homecoming - Glenn on the hot concert doc
• Podcast Questions - Murtada and Nathaniel answer yours!

Most Discussed Posts
• Dumbo and Tim Burton - a list heavy look at the auteur's filmography
• April Foolish Predictions - Nathaniel's first crack at this year's Oscar charts
• Renee Zellweger turns 50 - Eric pens a love letter
• The New Classics - Michael's new column kicked off with an ode to Michael Clayton 

COMING IN MAY
Anne Hathaway and The Hustle, Disney's Aladdin, the celebrity fashion doc Halston, Amy Poehler's Wine Country, and Zhang Yimou's stunning wuxia pic Shadow. We'll also celebrate anniversaries for Midnight Cowboy, Julia, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, and Anne Heche.

Our 'year of the month' leading up to the next Smackdown (June 2nd, to avoid the holiday weekend at the end of May) will be 2001 so expect a good deal of that film year along with the 'now' of 2019 summer movie season.  Any requests?

"Endgame" breaks all the records. Is counterprogramming dead?

What did you see over the weekend? Or perhaps we should ask "Were you part of the record 1.2 billion global haul of Avengers Endgame?" Yes, we're living in the capitalist end times when one corporation (Disney) will soon control the entire world. Or 50% of showbusiness soon. With that in mind let's look at everything in wide release (that's only 13 films and just barely that with Endgame on 4661 screens) and their limited/platform counterparts... 

Weekend Box Office (Actuals) April 26th-28th  🔺 = new or expanded theater counts
W I D E	PLATFORM / LIMITED
1 🔺 Avengers Endgame $357.1 on 4662 screens *NEW*	1 🔺 Amazing Grace $519k on 245 screens (cum. $2.1)

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Game of Thrones "The Long Night" (S08E03)

previously

by Ben Miller

This weekend culminated with two of the most anticipated entertainment events in recent history.  While Avengers:Endgame was watched by everyone on the planet, Game of Thrones finally reached the Battle of Winterfell against the army of the dead...

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A new series on auditions begins with "Audition"

by Ginny O'Keefe

As an actress I have had my fair share of God-awful auditions. And good ones. And so-so auditions that I barely remember minutes after they happened. This is the life of an actress starting out in Los Angeles. Granted, I am in no way a veteran of the acting industry but I have been to a lot of casting calls and made a lot of self-tapes. So far I have never been yelled at by a casting director because I dropped a line or been told to take my clothes off to prove my dedication to a part. It's made me realize how embellished or exaggerated auditions can be in film and TV; normalcy just doesn’t sell. (There are actors out there who have had horrible and even traumatizing experiences, but this is merely from my perspective on how I have been treated to date.)

Now, I've joined my love of watching movies with my love of acting for this series. We'll discuss auditions from movies and TV and talk about how ludicrous or realistic they turn out to be. This week, to kick the series off, a dive into the deep end with Takashi Miike’s disturbing Japanese thriller Audition...

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Tribeca 2019: "This is Not Berlin"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca 2019. Here's Jason...

Most of us never have the benefit of being at the right cool place at the right cool time. Or even if we do we don't really get to realize that while its happening. It's only in hindsight that we can shape that experience into a start and finish; that our lives can be packaged for proper consumption. It's always too messy to start with --the hair's gotta come down and the high's gotta wear off before you can see anything straight.

That whole tale's right there in the title of This Is Not Berlin. Hari Sama's fierce new coming-of-age film does indeed not take place in Berlin, but rather astride the post-punk burgeoning New Wave art-scene of Mexico City in the mid-80s...

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