See "Mean Girls" on the big screen!

by Nathaniel R

"Get in loser we're going shopping to the movies." Just popping in to tell NYC readers about a chance to see Mean Girls on the big screen. I didn't want you to miss the opportunity because...

Show-Score.com is hosting a screening of the 2004 classic this Sunday (March 25th) at the lovely SVA theater in Chelsea. You can watch the movie with your own clique and here's the extra worth-the-almost-free-price-of-admission part:

UPDATED NEWS -Before the screening, I will be moderating a Q & A with a guest from the Mean Girls musical about adapting the film for the Broadway stage!

Here's the link to buy $5 tickets. Make sure to click on the blue "book now" box on that page so that you get this special private offer that I'm passing on intead of the normal price. If you come make sure to say "hi" to me as I am definitely more of a Cady than a Regina and won't talk about your effing ugly skirt behind your back. 

P.S. If you're somewhat new to The Film Experience and missed our massive 10th anniversary celebration of the film a few years back, make sure to check out that six post party. It was so fetch. 

ICYMI

by Nathaniel

The Film Experience will be back in a week. Before we dive headlong into 2018 catch up with highlights from the past film year...

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Review: Love Simon

Stepping in briefly from vacation to celebrate Love, Simon. This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad.

Vanilla is a delicious flavor. Especially if you’re in the right mood for it. Loving vanilla doesn’t mean you can’t love more daring or less common flavors. But you deserve a good scoop of vanilla on occasion. The best thing that can be said of Love, Simon — and this is stronger praise than it sounds — is that it’s very vanilla. Imagine a cross between classic rom-coms like Sleepless in Seattle and Never Been Kissed and then just flip it a teensy-tiny bit until it’s gay. Not queer, mind you; we’re going for vanilla.

Love, Simon, the new film directed by gay TV power-producer Greg Berlanti (Flash, Riverdale, Brothers & Sisters, etcetera), is based on the novel “Simon vs. The Homo-Sapiens Agenda”. Though the novel’s title (I haven’t read it) suggests something less pro-heteronormativity, the film version is quite happy with assimilation. The only thing about Simon (Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson) that “reads” as gay or at all discomfited by his suburban nuclear family life is his inner monologue in which he tells us about his “huge-ass secret”...

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RPDR All Stars 3: Finale - Everybody Say Love! Please!

by Chris Feil

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars has brought one of its most embattled seasons to an appropriately controversial conclusion. This season has been rife with drama onscreen and off that has made championing the show come with several asterisks and addendums. The show has dug itself into a hole of too many twists, an overestimation of its need for drama to excite us, and a mounting disinterest in the art of drag itself. And yet it remains one of the biggest platforms to showcase the glorious breadth of the queer experience, blessed with an audience that demands it approaches its own shortcomings.

And this week’s finale brought a twist that may have broken the fandom’s resolve in how much they can accept: the final four would be whittled down to 2 by a deciding vote of a jury of the eliminated queens. Once again, subjectivity became the season’s foremost battleground and unsurprisingly this makes for frustrating television when a competition is involved. How would a consensus shake out when every queen has already shown a different perspective on what makes a competitor worthy of the crown?

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Months of Meryl: Plenty (1985)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

Charles Dance and Meryl Streep in "Plenty"

#11 — Susan Traherne, resistance fighter turned diplomat’s wife with a gnawing sense of unease about the life she must lead.

MATTHEW:  “I just wish she were more ordinary,” a persnickety commercial director grumbles about an offscreen model hired to play the mother in a promo for dog food. “Will the audience identify?” he frets. We’re in England in the postwar 1940s and Susan Traherne, a former agent in the French resistance, is rolling her eyes through a mind-numbing advertising job that she will promptly vacate. The scene is quick but Susan walks out just in time for the director’s comments to resonate as a sly statement on the woman herself, the reliably erratic anti-heroine played by Meryl Streep in Fred Schepisi’s tepid cinematic adaptation of David Hare’s Plenty. Will an audience identify with a figure so brazenly, even coldly unconventional? And does such identification even really matter...?

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