YNMS: Loving Vincent

Tim here. The official trailer for the upcoming animated feature Loving Vincent came out yesterday, just a couple of months after the long-delayed film picked up the Audience Award at this June's Annency International Animated Film Festival. We first heard about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's biopic of painter Vincent Van Gogh back in 2015, but the labor-intensive production missed a hoped-for 2016 release. Here, then, are the results of that labor.

It almost seems silly to run this through the Yes, No, Maybe So filter, because honestly, I've been a firm and immobile YES for a year and a half now. Some of the dialogue and cast choices push me in a bit of a Maybe So direction (when Chris O'Dowd speaks, all I can think is "hey, it's Chris O'Dowd as a voice actor!"), but I know that I'll be there Day 1, whenever Day 1 turns out to be here in the Midwest (it's September 22 in New York, September 29 in Los Angeles, and the rest of the country starts rolling out October 6).

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Best Supporting Actor 1963: Melvyn Douglas in "Hud"

The Film Experience is taking a brief trip to 1963 for the forthcoming Smackdown. That year's supporting Actor winner was Melvyn Douglas in Hud... 

by John Guerin

Paul Newman as Hud makes me forget everything else. All my attention is funneled into those blue-grey eyes, the nucleus of Newman's swaggering energy. Hud emerges from this drowsy Midwestern tapestry like a geyser springing up from a desert. Why look anywhere else? The film hardly forfeits narrative or photographic attention from Hud, but he's not the only performer doing expert work in Martin Ritt’s 1963 masterwork. There's Patricia Neal's Alma, an iconic intersection of Southern exhaustion and eroticism. There's also Melvyn Douglas' Homer, which, to my constant surprise, remains perhaps the films best performance...

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Soundtracking: "Stop Making Sense"

This week, Chris Feil's series on music in the movies ponders the concert movie...

Who killed the concert movie? While the subgenre never reached the commonality of the music video, that particular form’s rise is timed right around the concert film’s demise. But perhaps it was just a form that seldom met the heights of “you are there” excitement or insight into the performer as Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads’s Stop Making Sense.

For such a distinctive visually-defined group as the Talking Heads were in music video form, Stop Making Sense remains their defining document. As much as David Byrne is the creative spearhead of the band and that radical rebellious sound, Demme’s insight is what makes this more than just a filmed event or way to see a popular band if they skipped over your town. If a concert is a singular way to live in the full experience of a performer and their sound, Demme takes that to the next level by dropping us in the middle of this creative unit.

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would you rather...?

a silly game in which we fantasize about hanging with celebrities. So would you rather?

...fiddle around with Kate Beckinsale's gusset?
...hot tub it with Tom Holland and his BFF?
... dive into the Red Sea with Tom Cullen?
...drop dead on Fire Island with Matthew Wilkas?
...rock climb with Jesse Bradford?
...reminiscing about that play you were in in college with Garret Dillahunt?
...get a facial with Madonna?
...go see Hamlet with Laura Dern?

photos after the jump to help you decide. Do tell us which you'd choose!

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I Saw the Signs - "Cruising" for Prime Beef Cuts

Shove a professional sign or any diegetic text or hand-scrawled message in front of the camera and we go all bookworm eyes. Are they subliminal subtitles? That's surely up to the set decorator, prop man, production designer and director. In this new visual series (we previously did Silence of the Lambs - don't read anything into two queer serial killler pictures in a row, erp!) we'll share textual images from a film that use unspoken words to tell the story... or are merely fun period details. 

This week's victim is the infamous homophobic serial killer movie Cruising (1980). Here are 28 photos of signs and messages and letters and whatnot from the film with a few notes on actual NYC history and a few asides to other pop culture wonders ...

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