Women's Pictures - Amy Heckerling's Fast Times At Ridgemont High

The Film Experience is proud to welcome back Anne Marie and her series "Women's Pictures" after a month long hiatus. September's episodes (each Thursday) will focus on Amy Heckerling. If you missed previous subjects, Anne Marie's series on female directors already covered Ava DuVernay, Ida Lupino, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Agnes Varda, Kathryn Bigelow - Editor
 

The days are getting shorter, the weather is turning colder, and just as you perfected your righteous tan, the bell rings and it's back to school you go! Anne Marie here, after my own (all too brief) summer vacation, ready to celebrate Back To School month with the female filmmaker who has exercised as much influence on the Teen Film genre as John Hughes: Amy Heckerling! While Heckerling's ouevre has run the gamut from slapstick to parody to fantasy, she's best known for two genre-defining high school films made a little over a decade apart: Clueless (1995), which we will cover later, and Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982), the topic of today's lesson.

When Heckerling set about making Fast Times at Ridgemont High in the early 1980s, she wasn't looking to define a genre. There wasn't yet a teen film genre to define. John Hughes was still two years away from making Sixteen Candles, and American Grafitti, now pointed to as the first teen film, was already almost decade old with few major successors. What drew Amy Heckerling to Cameron Crowe's script about high school students was the realness of its characters. Fast Times At Ridgemont High was no nostalgia-tinged look backward at youth; it was an expose written by Cameron Crowe, who'd gone undercover at a high school for Rolling Stone to observe contemporary teens. Fast Times at Ridgemont High was something new: high school from the teenager's perspective. [More...]

Click to read more ...

Official Foreign Film Submission Oscar Charts. Plus Trailers

Twenty-one Official Submissions for the 2015 Foreign Language Film Oscar race have been announced! That's just under a third of the list given the usual amount of submissions but things are already weird and wild with a colorful LGBT drama (Xenia from Greece), a disaster movie (The Wave from Norway), more documentaries than usual already including animated and 3D offerings (Palestine, Switzerland, and Panama), alongside your more usual type of competitor like World War II focused entries (Germany and Hungary, which I'm currently predicting for nominations) and historical epics (South Korea)

The foreign film charts are a major project each year behind the scenes and we're so proud to have raised the profile of this awards category over the past 15 years. The Film Experience was literally the first website to cover it in detail (all the way back to our humble beginnings) and slowly but surely the fever spread. As did all things Oscar. Now, everyone does it! It's no longer "ours" so to speak -- not that one can own an Oscar topic -- but we're still justified in feeling the pride of original adoption. And if we don't pat ourselves on the back who will since we get no damn respect from the larger online film culture. Ahem.

Greece's XENIA and South Korea's THE THRONE

MAIN FOREIGN FILM PAGE

• Current Predictions and All Time Stats & Trivia on This Category

SUBMISSION CHARTS

• Afghanistan through Estonia
Will Brazil send The Second Mother? Will Argentina send festival-premiering crime drama The Clan? Info on Official entries from Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, and Croatia.
• Ethiopia through The Netherlands
Mexico has a 14 film shortlonglist. Info on official entries from Finland, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, Kazakhstan, and Luxembourg
• New Zealand through Vietnam
Speculation on The Philippines. Info on official entries from Norway, Palestine, Panama, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela

AFTER THE JUMP... TRAILERS FOR 16 OF THE 21 SUBMISSIONS (THE ONES I COULD FIND) IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

Click to read more ...

Emily Watson is nobody's mother (this time)

Here's Murtada on a favorite actress we'd like to see more of.

Watson at the press confrence

The paparazzi might have been more interested in jurors Diane Kruger and Elizabeth Banks. The trades were into what jury head Alfonso Cuaron had to say. Most of the press coverage had more pictures of her co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin and Jason Clarke. But on the first day of the Venice Film Festival we had our eyes for Everest star Emily Watson.

It was nice to see her smiling and looking good. As the only woman from the film making the press rounds - seems Robin Wright, Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Debicki had other plans - naturally eyes gravitated towards her. This is a far cry from the frumpy mothers she has played recently in The Book Thief, Testament of Youth and especially The Theory of Everything. The latter was the nadir of that niche that was carved for her by casting directors. It was no more than a cameo and was hilariously lampooned by Nathaniel & company on the podcast. 

Watson was born same year as Nicole Kidman. She’s one year older than Naomi Watts, 2 years older than Cate Blanchett. Those actresses are still getting plum parts in major movies. It’s too soon for Watson to start competing with Julie Walters and Brenda Blethyn for parts. While she’s never been the glamorous star, her fantastic turns in Breaking the Waves, Hilary & Jackie and Gosford Park certainly make her the equal of the actresses mentioned. But perhaps the more apt comparison is with someone like Helena Bonham Carter - who coincidentally turned down Watson career-making role in Waves. Helena still manages a varied range of opportunities. (We acknowledge we might be blind to fantastic work Watson has done recently for TV in the UK.)

on the boat with her co-stars John Hawkes, Clarke and Brolin (courtesy of Brolin's instagram).

This is a long way of saying that we hope Everest is the beginning of a new exciting phase of Watson’s career. She plays the base camp co-ordinater who is the climbers' main contact to the world outside the mountain. The reviews have been mostly positive. Some singled out Watson as “heartrending’’, others expected more. We are just grateful she has more to do than be somebody’s mother.

What would you like to see Watson do next?

"luck or no luck..."

British diplomats, evil pharmaceuticals and The Constant Gardener

Andrew Kendall looks back at The Constant Gardener for its 10th anniversary...

"This whole machine is driven by guilt."

To look back, after ten years, at the overly stylised hand-held camera visual style of The Constant Gardener, it might not seem particularly noteworthy; but, the almost unintelligible camerawork of Fernando Meirelles' first English language film, just off the success of City of God, remains key to what makes The Constant Gardener one of the century's most effective (pseudo)-political thrillers. True, it has faded in history as one of the slew of dramas that tried to break into that impenetrable 2005 Best picture line-up. We remember it for Rachel Weisz’s luminous Oscar winning turn, but The Constant Gardener has more to offer than just its place in awards history – it’s an unflinching, exact, and effective film which has not lost its vigour in the ten years since it premiered.

More...

Click to read more ...