Oscar History
Film Bitch History
Welcome

The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)

Follow TFE on Substackd

Powered by Squarespace
Keep TFE Strong

We're looking for 500... no 390 SubscribersIf you read us daily, please be one.  

I ♥ The Film Experience

THANKS IN ADVANCE

What'cha Looking For?
Subscribe
Sunday
Mar102019

Review: 3 Faces

by Murtada Elfadl

In 3 Faces, the latest from Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Taxi) we are plunged right into the story as images of a young woman on a smart phone talking directly to the camera. She is announcing that her life's in jeopardy because her parents have  forbidden her from realizing her dream of acting. She then seemingly kills herself. For the next 90 minutes we follow the recipient of this message, Behnaz Jafari playing herself, a renowned Iranian actress and Panahi himself as they travel to a tiny village near the Turkish border to investigate.

There’s a mystery to solve. What happened to the young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei)? But also a deeper moral mystery; who are the inhabitants of her tiny village? Are they as nice and welcoming as they seem at first blush when Jafari and Panahi meet them? Deeper still is the moral quandary of a society that could drive a woman to take her own life just because she wanted to be actress...

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Mar102019

Jan-Michael Vincent (1945-2019)

by Nathaniel R

Some stars burn bright and endure, others flame out. The latter was the case with Jan-Michael Vincent, a rising  star of movies and television in the 1970s. He's best remembered today from his leading role in the TV series  "Airwolf" but afterwards it was low profile movies (the kind we used to call "straight to video" - there doesn't seem to be a unified term for those movies anymore) and an increasingly diminished profile, his last screen performance coming in 2002. He died in February at 73 years old and the news was only just released a full month later...

Click to read more ...

Saturday
Mar092019

Jennifer Jones Centennial: "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"

Reader Request: You voted on which Jennifer Jones films we had to write about for her centennial and this was your top choice. So it's your fault, then.

One of the tag lines reads...

In each other's arms they found a love that defied 5,000 years of tradition!

'Defying tradition? But what's more traditional than Hollywood casting white stars in Asian roles?' he said sarcastically. Figured we should get this out of the way upfront and then try to ignore it: Jennifer Jones's last Oscar nomination came for playing Han Suyin, a biracial doctor, who falls for Mark Elliott, an American foreign correspondent (William Holden) in Hong Kong...

Click to read more ...

Friday
Mar082019

Open Thread for International Women's Day

Still sick. Apologies!  So herewith an open thread. I'll give you a prompt.

Name the first three actresses you ever loved in the comments! Mine were probably Hayley Mills and Maureen O'Hara (because The Parent Trap was my favorite movie as a wee tyke) and Natalie Wood (because I was obsessed with musicals as a kid and particularly West Side Story airings on television). The trifecta of Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathleen Turner, and Meryl Streep that completely done me in* at movie theaters happened a bit later. 

 *aka caused my actressexuality

Friday
Mar082019

A Golden Lion for Julie Andrews!

We woke up to wonderful news, to distract us from this hacking cold that's not going away *sniffle*, Julie Andrews has been named as the recipient of this year's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. She'll be honored at the 76th annual Venice Film Festival which runs August 28th through September 7th.

The film lineup won't be announced until later in the summer but this is exciting news to tide us over 'til then. We hope Julie is helicoptered & parachuted umbrellas in from the sky to accept her Golden Lion!

About this choice, the director of the festival Alberto Barbera says:

“At a very young age, Ms Andrews made a name for herself in the music halls of London and, later, on Broadway thanks to her remarkable singing and acting talent. Her first Hollywood movie, Mary Poppins, gave her top-tier star status, which was later confirmed in another treasured film, The Sound of Music. Those two roles projected her into the Olympus of international stardom, making her an iconic figure adored by several generations of moviegoers. Above and beyond the different interpretations that can be given to her two most famous films (and highlighting the transgressive value of her characters rather than their apparent conservatism), it must be remembered that Andrews went out of her way to avoid remaining confined as an icon of family movies. She accepted roles that were diverse, dramatic, provocative and imbued with scathing irony. For example, The Americanization of Emily by Arthur Hiller, and the many movies directed by her husband Blake Edwards, with whom she formed a very profound and long-lasting artistic partnership, a marvelous example of human and professional devotion to a captivating esthetic project that prevailed over the commercial success of the individual movies. This Golden Lion is the well-deserved recognition of an extraordinary career which has admirably parsed popular success with artistic ambition, without ever bowing to facile compromises.”