Tribeca 2019: "Ask Dr. Ruth"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason

A personality-based crowd-pleaser similar to what we saw last year with Won't You Be My Neighbor and RBG, only with heaps more clitoral commentary, director Ryan White's Ask Dr. Ruth doesn't break any documentary molds. It's content to merely bring us the life story and work of itty bitty sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer. And Dr. Ruth's too warm-hearted (not to mention itty bitty) to go about straight-forwardly smashing molds anyway. The iconic personality is more content to sneak in, make you comfy, offer you a cookie or two, and ease all of your deepest secrets out first...

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A deep dive into the Tony race for "Best Actress in a Play"

by new contributor J.B. 

Tatiana Maslany, Glenda Jackson, and Annette Bening are just a few of the many acclaimed actresses in the running for Best Actress nominations on Broadway this season

In recent years, the Tony category of Best Actress in a Play has featured some of the most impressive line-ups of nominees of any major award show. Don’t believe me? Since 2015, 18 women have been nominated for the award. Of those 18, six are Oscar winners (four of whom are two-time winners), five are Oscar nominees, two are Emmy winners, one is a Golden Globe winner, one is a BAFTA winner, and one is a four-time Tony nominee who has only appeared in one Broadway production for which she was not nominated for a Tony. The five most recent recipients of the “Triple Crown of Acting” distinction have all won a Tony in this category within the past ten years. That trend continues this year, with a well-decorated and very star-studded group of women, including bonafide legends of both stage and screen, vying for spots in the race. But who will be nominated? Who should be nominated? And who will win?

Here’s a closer look at who’s in contention for nominations this coming Tuesday, and which factors will weigh in their favor and against it...

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Tribeca 2019: "Come to Daddy"

Team Experience reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams

Come to Daddy opens like a big-screen reboot of Schitt's Creek, with Elijah Wood working his best elaborate David Rose ensemble of flappy black fabrics without discernible seams. He's yanking a wheelie suitcase through a no place field. Slowly, the cinema happens -- the field gives way to the trees, a forest, a gorgeous coastline, all while Elijah's Moe-hairdo and black nail polish paint him as a rank outsider in this place of nature and wonder.

Soon enough we see that he's doing what all us fancy city boys must do at one point or another -- he's going home. Except not entirely...

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Chita Rivera Awards, Cher, and Film Choreography.

by Nathaniel R

Isnt It Romantic?

Did you know that Oscar once had a category for dance? Well, "Dance Direction" to be particular. Which is not quite choreography but close. The category was held for three years and discontinued after the 1937 Academy Awards. Despite the first three to four decades of Oscar ceremonies arriving in a time when movie musicals were plentiful, the Academy Awards never instituted a choreography category. The sole example, apart from Dance Direction was a special Oscar for Jerome Robbins for West Side Story (1961), a redundant trophy in a way since he also shared the Best Director Oscar win due to his choreography and dance direction on that immortal classic (currently being remade). 

At any rate, the Chita Rivera Awards, which sprung back to life three years ago (they were once called the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards)  DO give awards to movies for their dance sequences in two separate categories, in addition to their primary focus which is honoring Broadway and Off Broadway achievements...

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Tribeca 2019 "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"

Team Experience reporting from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams...

I always think of Amy Poehler's funny line on SNL about "soggy board-games and cat skeletons" when I think on the concept of hoarders. Sad people beside blackened sinks. But what if the hoarder's instincts turn out to be less a mental illness -- something more, grander? Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project uncovers that exception in a woman who obsessively recorded 35 years of news programming, from the Iran Hostages through 9/11 and up to Sandy Hook. And in the process the film argues that, as with superstition being science we just haven't yet confirmed, perhaps some of Marion's documentarian's madness wasn't madness, but prophecy...

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