Stage Door: Isabelle Huppert is "The Mother"

Since we're in the thick of theater season with the Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Awards coming up, that means an extra stage review here and there! Here's Eric Blume...

One of TFE’s favorite actresses, Isabelle Huppert, currently stars off-Broadway in writer Florian Zeller’s new play, The Mother.  As you might guess, she kills it in Zeller’s non-linear play. The Mother is challenging and archly theatrical, with scenes being acted and re-enacted, timelines being blurred, and reality and fantasy being blended in gloriously unclear ways to achieve both a distancing and an immediacy.  This is intelligent and precise writing, not an easy ride for theatergoers, and demanding in its shifts both temporal and stylistic.

But Huppert is deep in character as always, sinking into the skin of the matriarch in the four-person family play...

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The Hugo Award Nominees 2019. Plus 75th anniversary Retro Prizes

With the weather warming up are you looking for spring & summer reads? For those of you who enjoy sci-fi / fantasy novels, you can always get recommendations each year from the Hugo Awards... though we wish these recommendations each year leaned a little more fantasy (the balance is definitely pro sci-fi with a few fantasy sprinklings). The nominations were determined by 1800 valid nomination ballots from members of the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon). If you'd like to be a nominator for 2020, you could join WorldCon this year.

Since this is a film site we'll start with their "dramatic presentation" prizes. 

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

• Annihilation, directed and written for the screen by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer (Paramount Pictures / Skydance)
• Avengers: Infinity War, screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Studios)
• Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler (Marvel Studios)
• A Quiet Place, screenplay by Scott Beck, John Krasinski and Bryan Woods, directed by John Krasinski (Platinum Dunes / Sunday Night)
• Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley (Annapurna Pictures)
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman (Sony) 

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

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List-Mania: Tim Burton x 5

by Nathaniel R

Since our Dumbo review didn't soar, or even materialize at all (oops), we should definitely turn some attention to Tim Burton today. Instead of a regular Tuesday Top Ten list... we're just going with LISTS plural. To make up for the lack of a proper Dumbo review, we're throwing FIVE of them at you today. While it's true that this decade of his work has left much to be desired, he's actually always been an uneven auteur. All throughout his filmography magic blooms in unexpectedly dire places OR weeds sprout up in otherwise magically lovely gardens if you catch our drift.

Burton is only 60 years old and since he's made films at a roughly one-every-other-year clip for his whole career, we hope he manages to rally his artistic instincts for one more classic before he retires in say, 2031 after another five pictures (spitballing!). He has directed 19 movies and we'd rank them like so...

ALL 19 TIM BURTON PICTURES RANKED

1. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
2. Ed Wood (1994) 
3. Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
   Tier 1. Masterpieces of their genres really...  spectacularly niche genres but still! Few films have this kind of consistent magic and uniquely memorable visuals from first frame to last...

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Doc Corner: The Compelling 'Roll Red Roll'

By Glenn Dunks

“She is so raped right now… this is the funniest thing ever.”

That’s one of the callous lines that opens Nancy Schwarzman’s debut feature documentary, Roll Red Roll. Played against misty images of an otherwise seemingly peaceful hamlet, the opening minute is not the last time we will hear those words, spoken as they were by a male high schooler as a young girl lay drunken and unconscious on the floor of his friend’s rec room. The words return later, this time in video form, as the boy in question laughs and smiles, his face radiating with some sort of queasy pride for his friends, two fellow high schooler students who would eventually be found guilty of rape.

It’s important to not beat around the bush here – after all, Schwarzman’s film doesn’t...

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Streaming Roulette April: The Dirt, Monster House, and Now Apocalypse

As is our practice we've selected a couple handful of titles and frozen the films at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up!) for this quick preview. At the bottom of the page, check out full listings for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO for April 2019. And please do let us know if you're dying to discuss any of the films. Maybe we'll select one to write up? Okay, let's go...

Holy shit. Barnabas!

Now Apocalypse, Season 1 (2019) on Hulu (with Starz add-on)
Pictured there are the four leads of Now Apocalypse all of them gorgeous / funny / frequently naked in the first TV series from Gregg Araki of 1990s new queer cinema fame. Araki's preoccupations haven't changed much (or at all!)  since the 1990s. A twinkish lead with floppy dark hair? Check. Constant drug use? Sex. Filthy language and explicitly sexual humor? Check. A preoccupation with supernatural kinds of rape? Check. A dumb but impossibly sweet and sincere straight hunk? Check. Impossibly hip but somewhat chilly woman with black hair? Check. Sexual fluidity for every character even those with a pronounced label or gay or straight? Check. Slutty female best friend with most of the best lines? Check. End of the world fantasies and paranoia? Check. Older predatory queers in abundance? Check. Aliens or supernatural occurences? Of course! The show is way too repetitive in the early episodes (lots of flashbacks to previous episodes which is weird for streaming shows since you've literally usually just been watching what you're now flashing back to) but about halfway into the season the short episodes start  to come together in fun ways, including a hilarious and much smarter way of folding back in on itself with an in-series webseries, wherein the characters are reenacting the early episodes and playing themselves badly or being played unflatteringly by actors hired to play them. 

She never blinked during the interview.

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