Stage Door: "The Cher Show" and "Aint too Proud"

by Nathaniel R

Musical theater has its own version of limited and wide release / indie and blockbuster if you will. The analogy is far from perfect but those movie groupings are sort of comparable to Off Broadway and Broadway. Every Broadway show is trying to be a four-quadrant blockbuster.  

One of the safest routes to a quick buck (if not necessarily continuous sales) is the jukebox musical. Not all of them try to double as biographies of whoever's songbook it is but many do. That way they're easily marketable, excessively familiar, and can rely on nostalgia and sight-unseen goodwill to fill the house...

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New Podcast: Us, Dumbo, The Beach Bum, and Gloria Bell

by Murtada Elfadl, Chris Feil, and Nathaniel R

 

Now that 2019 movies are more than underway, a new season of the Podcast is upon us! 

Index (55 minutes)
00:01 Julianne Moore is Gloria Bell
12:30 Jordan Peele's Us starring Lupita Nyong'o  [MAJOR SPOILERS]
33:30 Tim Burton's Dumbo
40:00 Randomness
42:50 Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum and Matthew McConaughey's strange year
52:00 Randomness

Supplemental Reading
• Film Comment Gloria Bell review
• Murtada's Beach Bum review
• Chris's Us review
• Jason's Serenity review
• Paulina García's great performance in the original Gloria

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Gloria Bell, Us, Dumbo

Howard Keel Centennial: "Annie Get Your Gun"

Our Howard Keel Centennial celebration begins. Here's Nathaniel R...

What is the lasting legacy of Hollywood's biggest musical of 1950, Annie Get Your Gun? The best remembered thing about it may well be its place in Judy Garland's storied career; she was infamously fired well into production, marking in some ways the nadir of her career, and fueling the mythology of that comeback of all comebacks with A Star is Born (1954) after a four year absence from the big screen. But that's not the movie as it exists today, only what could have been. And "could have beens" are many with this troubled production which lost its original star (Judy), its first two directors (Busby Berkeley and Charles Walters) and one key supporting cast member (Frank Morgan as Buffalo Bill, who died after filming began) on its way to its final cut.

The first shot of Howard Keel in "Annie Get Your Gun"

Though "Annie Get Your Gun" has had a long healthy life on stages, big and small (including three Broadway runs: 1946-1949, 1966, and 1999-2001) it's most lasting cinematic contribution is the introduction of Howard Keel as a leading man...

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Happy National Siblings Day!

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Fontaine and de Havilland in 1967 at a Marlene Dietrich show

“I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister Joan, because she has none.”
- Olivia de Havilland, according to her “will,” age nine

 Apocryphal? Who can say. Delicious? 100 percent!

 

Though chronicled to death (at TFE and elsewhere), the purported feud between the most famous siblings of Hollywood’s Golden Age endures like no other. Why? Because it seems silly and pointless in retrospect, as most sibling rivalries and familial angst do. But rather than dwell on the negative, let’s turn our attention to more positive outpourings of mutual love and respect, shall we?

 

Here are 10 of the more famous (in some cases infamous) siblings over the years on the ties that bind—and unbind—them to each other, not to mention the public’s imagination...

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Game of Thrones. The Final Season Approaches

Though The Film Experience has not covered Game of Thrones in the past beyond the occasional mention, a couple of our contributors are big fans and since the final season is the television event of the year, we're opting to break tradition and cover each episode. Here are Eric Blume and Ben Miller, who will be writing up the final episodes, to grill each other on their experience of the series to date if you'd like to join them in this refresher. - Editor.

ERIC:  Ben, I’m excited about working on this project with you. Let's start at the beinning: Have you been a fan of the show since the first episode, or did you join somewhere in progress?  What made you fall in love with it?

BEN: I got into it on the ground floor.  I was never much of a fantasy book reader (no Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings), but this seemed like one of the first shows where people were genuinely excited for the potential of what it could be.  I knew a few people who had read the books, but I went in fairly cold and with an open mind.  You also have to keep in mind of what HBO was doing at the time...

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