The Emmy Nominations!!

The 69th Emmy nominations have been announced! HBO need not worry that Game of Thrones wasn't eligible this year, as they landed the most nominated drama anyway with Westworld. The early-in-the-season genre hit tied Saturday Night Live for 22 nominations each, followed by Stranger Things and Feud tying for second place at 18 each.

Most of the nominations follow Emmy's expected players despite the openings left by departed perennials like Thrones, though this year isn't without surprises or fresh faces. The major breakthroughs this year were Hulu (finally in the major races thanks to the success of The Handmaid's Tale) and our beloved RuPaul's Drag Race (scoring 7 nominations, plus one for Untucked).

The team will be sharing their favorite nominations and frustrations on what missed the cut later today, but our dream ballot should give you a hint of our thoughts. Here are the nominees in the top categories:

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DVD review - Smurfs: The Lost Village

Tim here. 2017 is shaping up to be a less-than-inspired year for movies in general, but particularly dire for animation (apologies to the Cars 3 superfans, I'm sure there's at least a couple of you in this world). The bar has fallen low enough that I even managed to convince myself that there might be some merit to checking out Smurfs: The Lost Village, which arrived on DVD this week. The first of three Sony Picture Animation features to come out in 2017 (the second, The Emoji Movie, is mere weeks away, and boy does it look like it will be bad), The Lost Village is the latest attempt to keep the small blue woodland homunculi called Smurfs in English, Schtroumpfs in the original French, viable as a marketable brand.

In an astonishing twist, it is not very good.

At least we can say this in favor of the film: it's entirely animated. The last two Smurfs features made by Sony (otherwise unrelated to The Lost Village) were live-action hybrids, in which little animated Smurfs came out to horrifyingly deal with the real New York City. Now, they're where they belong, in a busily designed magic forest, facing a proper cartoon villain and his cartoon cat. So far as that goes, honestly, The Lost Village is even a pretty nice film to look at...

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Stage Door: An Ode to S. Epatha Merkerson

Editor's Note: I've been away at the National Critics Institute in CT but will be back in a few days to regular blogging right here at The Film Experience. In the meantime please enjoy this review of one of the shows I saw in my absence, starring two of television's best actresses. The Roommate is playing through July 16th at the Williamstown Theater Festival and you should expect a transfer to NYC stages. - Nathaniel R

S. Epatha Merkerson in rehearsals. Photo by Daniel Rader

She wanted to be a spy… or a baker if espionage didn’t work out. It’s tough to square these  interchangeably silly abandoned dreams with timid Iowa retiree Sharon, standing right there in her well-stocked suburban kitchen. Sharon dreamt of being a spy? — Sharon!?!  Her new roommate doesn’t seem trustworthy but is right about at least one thing: Sharon shouldn’t “mummify” herself this early and needs to get out there and live.

I’m speaking like you know Sharon because I do. Sharon is fictional, you see, but the glorious actress S Epatha Merkerson and the playwright Jen Silverman have breathed such life into this rich idiosyncratic character in the new play The Roommate that for two hours I was convinced otherwise...

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Wakanda Forever!

Chris here. Everything for Ryan Coogler's Black Panther just continues to look better and better. We got a pretty rousing trailer a while back, and now EW has a whole slew of photos to tease next year's first Marvel extravaganza.

The photo set gives us a closer look at this star-packed ensemble and promises unique character design. Coogler is apparently drawing on both The Godfather and the James Bond series for his narrative inspiration, but these aesthetics take my mind closer to 80s and early 90s fantasy epics for their gorgeous genre craftsmanship. The go-for-broke oppulence of Ruth E. Carter's costume design looks to be a hybrid of sci-fi tropes and African influences, certainly the most eye-popping Marvel has delivered. If you've been begging Marvel to break its mold, it looks like Black Panther could be a superhero oasis of originality.

Some favorites after the jump...

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Soundtracking: "Blue Velvet"

This week, Chris Feil's soundtrack series covers a David Lynch classic...

David Lynch has used music to genius effect over his career, particularly drawing from 50s and 60s crooners to create a cinematic world displaced in time. But Lynch’s most definitive use of preexisting songs is in one of his most narratively focused masterpieces, Blue Velvet. This is the best example of how he distorts the wholesomeness of the sound to reveal darker tones beneath performative American culture.

Music is as much a piece of this suburban facade as any of Lynch’s hellscapes, announcing as much when it fades from Angelo Badalamenti’s operatic overture to Bobby Vinton’s title classic. A placid sky descends upon a thorny rose bush, gorgeously staining the picked fence’s rigid sterility like how Lynch poisons our relationship to the music. Vinton’s voice is tinny in its soulfulness, a swingy sanitized ode that matches Lynch’s picturesque neighborhood for quaintness. Musically, it feels as manufactured as this idyllic vision before us until it fades and morphs into something beastly beneath the manicured, bland exterior.

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