Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson

We've been celebrating actors all month, and today one of our most legendary deserves a double dose of celebration: Jack Nicholson turns 79!

Nicholson is currently enjoying a low-key retirement. He hasn't been seen on the silver screen since James L. Brooks misfire How Do You Know, but his monolithic legacy of landmark work still feels fresh and the films rewatchable. We're lucky to still have an actor with us who can continue to inspire awe with performances like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's McMurphy or The Joker. It's saying something that he's Oscar's most recognized actor, but has plenty of worthy unnominated worthy performances to add to the heap - Batman, Carnal Knowledge, and even The Shining.

Yes, he remains Oscar's golden son. His winning performances - Cuckoo's Nest, Terms of Endearment, and As Good As It Gets - are a great example of the range of his talents: ferocity, graceful humor, and rascally sexuality. He very nearly missed a fourth win with About Schmidt, his most recent nomination and a performance that showed him to be an actor still ready to stretch and take risks.

If Nicholson wants to enjoy this retirment from acting, who can blame him with the long list of his films we still have to enjoy? Hopefully, even without a new film on the horizon, we'll see Jack back on an Oscar telecast in his usual from row seat, sunglasses and smiles. Admit it, you've missed him every time he's not there.

Happy Birthday, Jack - but come back soon, we miss you! What's your favorite Nicholson performance, nominated and not nominated?

Wilding Out at Tribeca

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on "Hunt For the Wilderpeople".

About a year ago director Taika Waititi showed us the homier side of Nosferatu & Co with the vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows... and the very next thing I knew he was being hired to direct the third Thor movie for Marvel. I always felt like a step was missing in there, and sure enough here's Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the adorable little rainbow bridge he took on over to the big leagues.

An adaptation of the well-loved 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress by New Zealand's favorite author slash adventurer Barry Crump, Wilderpeople feels more like a proper Movie than Shadows did - whereas that was a collection of funny bits hung together by silly string, this time out there's a more novelistic approach, with explicit chapter titles and also things like a beginning, a middle, and an end. An emotional journey, if you will! One that doesn't skimp on the giant pig monsters (which okay let's be honest, those are probably what got him Thor 3).

City slicker, street urchin, and roundly rejected foster kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) shows up to his latest familial assignment with a boar-sized chip on his shoulder, which Aunt Bella (a sweetly no-nonsense Rima Te Wiata) immediately sets about slaughtering. Uncle Hec (don't call him Uncle), played by Sam Neill with a beard it takes you a few minutes to find a face under, doesn't want any part of Ricky's rigamarole, but cue the heart strings as they're eventually forced to work together against the odds and find common ground, the music swells, a hug in front of a sunset in slow-motion.

Hold up though - thankfully the film is aware of those smarmy cinematic precedents (smarmy classics like the Stallone arm-wrestling epic Over the Top come to mind) and without being cutesy about it demolishes the cliches through good old fashioned hard-fought and battle-fatigued excellence. It's funny and true and a fine wilderness adventure to boot, snuffling out all emotional beats at its own pace, when it damn well feels like it, to the tune of its own drummer and the toot of its own horn section. It's like Rushmore in the bush - yes, it's Bushmore. Straight up magestical, people. Grade: B+

Farewell to the Prince

The beautiful ones,
You always seem to lose.
-"The Beautiful Ones"

Glenn here with some words about today's very sad news about the death of iconic musician and sometime actor/director, Prince Rogers Nelson. “Purple Rain” wasn’t the first time I ever heard Prince. Hell, I wasn’t even alive when the all things purple took over the zeitgeist in the summer of 1984. No, the first time I think I was consciously aware of who I was listening to was in 1991 when I laid eyes upon a video for the single “Diamonds and Pearls” on early morning music television. I was young, but already obsessed with music; making sure I watched the top forty countdown on Rage and recording my favourite videos from Video Hits onto an over-growing pile of VHS. I had been clocked into Madonna for a year or so by this stage, and Michael Jackson was regular fixture of my music listening habits with “Black & White” becoming a pop culture phenomenon at roughly the same time Prince came into my world. He was so different to anybody I'd seen before - his small frame and wild hair so at odds with the image of maleness that, especially growing up in suburban Australia, was preoccupied with overwhelmingly over-the-top masculinity.

If you ever need proof of some sort of other-worldly intervention in play in this life, then consider those three musicians were all born within just a couple months of each other. (More after the jump)

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Tribeca: Custody

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on "Custody".

"I wanted to have the film center on female characters." That was James Lapine in a post-screening Q&A of his latest film, Custody, which premiered this past week. And boy has he delivered. Steering pretty far from familiar ground for him (he of Into the Woods and Six by Sondheim fame), Lapine has crafted a mosaic-like portrait of the labyrinthine bureaucracy that are the family court proceedings in New York City. Sara Diaz, a young single mother of two (Catalina Sandino Moreno, putting those wounded eyes to great use), finds herself embroiled in a custody battle when an accident leaves her son with a black eye that forces the school to call child services. Sara is assigned to a freshly minted lawyer, Ally Fisher (Hayden Panettiere, in her most mature role to date) who quickly realizes there's more to this case than her client leads on. This makes pleading her case at Martha Schulman’s court all the trickier, especially as the city is still reeling from a previous tragedy caused by a failure in the system; all involved are committed to not letting another child be sent back to a negligent household.

The structure of the film is such that we see the court proceedings but also get to know these characters: we see Schulman (Viola Davis, imperious and sympathetic in equal measure) as she struggles with marital problems, and see Sara adjusting to the increasingly frustrating ordeal of being separated from her kids, while Ally finally attempts to bring closure to a family secret. And while these three actresses are fantastic all around, coloring their interactions with the complexity and nuance which Lapine's script demands, it is Ellen Burstyn, in two key scenes as Ally’s grandmother, that gives everyone a master class in acting. She's helped by a prickly (and at key times light-hearted) script that grapples with Big Issues but wraps them in personal stories that never feel (solely) didactic. 

That is, until the last 20 or so minutes when Lapine inexplicably gives Viola and Catalina two monologues that play like bluntly-written thesis statements for the film. They’re impassioned pleas that nevertheless sell the screenplay short, giving viewers who would dub this a "TV movie on the big screen" all the Law & Order/Boston Legal comparisons you'd ever need. 

Grade: B / Performances all around: A

Thoughts I Had... The "Cafe Society" Poster

Look at this amazing poster for Woody Allen's Cafe Society (2016). The film will open the Cannes Film Festival and also, a little closer to home, the Seattle Film Festival this May. It will play near you this August as counterprogramming to Suicide Squad and Pete's Dragon.

After the jump, thoughts I had as they came to me unedited. Share yours, too, why don'cha...

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