FYC: "The Good Place" for Best Comedy

Team Experience are sharing their Emmy hopeful favorites. Here's Sean Donovan...

The Good Place was one of the quietest critical successes of the 2016/2017 television calendar, amassing a small but loyal band of followers. They attended to every minuscule detail of the show’s terrifically nuanced mythology. Yet, of all the Emmy FYCs The Film Experience has been doling out these past two weeks, this feels like one of the farthest reaches. The Good Place is perfectly in the lane of a future cult classic. But that's the problem. To become a true cult classic, your greatness must somehow allude the powers that be at the time. 

For the uninitiated, The Good Place follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) who, following her sudden death in the pilot, finds herself in the afterlife, specifically the carefully non-denominational “Good Place,” presided over by cheerful architect Michael (Ted Danson)...

Click to read more ...

Emmy FYC: Difficult People, Season Two

By Spencer Coile 

Emmy season is a treacherous time. With so many scrambling to campaign for their favorites, it is incredibly easy to get lost in the mix of all the names and shows being talked about. Difficult People, however, is not  a show that should merely be talked about. Much like its leading characters, it requires heavy shouting. 

Wannabe actor/comedians and best friends Billy and Julie (played by Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner respectively) are two of the most wretched, vile, and selfish people to hit the televisual landscape in recent years. They attempt to cloy and scratch their way to the top. Season two of Difficult People is practically breathtaking in how quickly paced it is, and it should also go without saying that it is utterly hilarious... 

Click to read more ...

Ten Little Linkies

morning news items, or recommended stories / essays

• Boy Culture Comic gold Teri Garr interviewed about her MS (which sadly ended her career, she's now confined to a wheelchair) and her famous co-stars (still loves Dustin Hoffman, was not a fan of Gene Wilder)  

• Forbes asks that the internet stop trying to make the most powerful woman in the movie world (that'd be Wonder Woman) into a victim with constant outrages. She's a hit, enjoy her.

Eight additional stories after the jump including a Downton Abbey reunion, Emmy hopefuls, Batman Returns and more...

Click to read more ...

Director Joel Edgerton's "Boy Erased" Heads to Focus, While the Author of the Memoir Addresses Concerns

By Daniel Crooke

Give or take a big, broad Black Mass or two, Aussie toughie Joel Edgerton has proven himself to be a craftsman of restraint throughout his most recent crop of work, and continues to surprise audiences by subverting their expectations of how a man of his hulking size and stature should emote on the big screen. His performance in last year’s criminally undervalued Loving buries deep currents of sensitivity beneath the protective creases of his brooding face, and he manages to say more and speak louder through the locked intensity of his body language than the volume of his voice in Trey Edward Shults’s apocalyptic downer It Comes At Night. 

However, his most compelling work as an artist to date has been behind the camera...

Click to read more ...

Q&A: "Strong Female Characters" and Future AFI Honors

Okay last round of reader questions before we have to ask for a new batch. These are culled from the last "Ask Nathaniel" column as well as the open thread. Let's talk Wonder Woman and Oscar, "Strong Roles for Women," and more.

MARIE: Who are the next 3 women that should win the AFI Life Achievement Award?

NATHANIEL: A timely question since Diane Keaton just won hers. But I had to look back at who has previously been nominated to come up with an answer. Living female winners number only five: Diane Keaton (2017), Jane Fonda (2014), Shirley Maclaine (2012), Meryl Streep (2004), and Barbra Streisand (2000) with the other twelve winners in this new century being men (both actors and directors have won). It's actually a tough question because they have to be alive and *really* famous to get this honor and also elderly (though Streep was young for this honor taking it when she was 54ish I think). They also have to be American (for the most part) so I looked only at people who are almost 60 or older and this is what I came up with...

 

I would probably choose from among these five next:

Click to read more ...