Are you playing along at home?

Look at this cute portrait a reader made for me. You know him as "Seisgrados" in the comments!It's my birthday and I don't ask for much from y'all. Only that you obsess over actresses with us and constantly readjust your instant watch and DVD queues to play along with our many series! To maximize your enjoyment this week make sure to catch Spy (2015), "The Knick" Season 1 (2015), Oscar favorite Amadeus (1984), Agnes Varda's highly watchable masterpiece Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), The Tony Awards, seminal miniseries "And the Band Played On" (HBO, 1993), and any film starring Cara Seymour!

Today's Reader Assignments

1. ASK NATHANIEL (right now) ~ he needs questions for this Wednesday night's Q&A column

2. COMMENT - It's like blog fuel for the writers - pick any article

3. DONATE THROUGH SUBSCRIPTION- This blog is a full time commitment (as you can imagine) and it's been going forever to try and entertain you and it's always tough financially. If you subscribe for a small monthly donation ($2.50 or, you know, a cup of coffee) it helps a lot -- if only a few hundred more of you would do so it would make an enormous difference in stability.

cup o' joe : $2.50USD - monthly popcorn : $5.00USD - monthly movie ticket : $10.00USD - monthly

I ♥ The Film Experience

4. OR MAKE A ONE TIME DONATION for either your favorite series or something like "here's 5 bucks for each year I've been reading" If you specify why you're making the donation that would help. Let's say you want to support Anne Marie's "Women's Pictures" or Manuel's "HBO LGBT" project or whatever then I would know to pass your donation along to the writer responsible rather than keeping it for expenses.

KTHNXBYE

HAPPY UNBIRTHDAY TO ALL OF YOU!
Unless you share my birthday and then happy day, Gemini Twins!

Rose Byrne in "Spy"

Let's make this happen universe.

Or we'll all be as sad as Bulgarian clowns. 

FYC: "The Americans" For Best Drama Series

Team Experience is sharing their personal Emmy dream picks daily around noon. Here's Lynn Lee...

Even after three brilliant seasons, FX's “The Americans” remains criminally ignored by both the Emmys and the viewing public, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why.  Set in Reagan-era D.C., the series about undercover KGB agents posing as the ideal American family-next-door works like gangbusters as a pure espionage thriller, brimming with nailbiting old-school spycraft, graphic close-quarters fight sequences, titillating sex scenes, doomed romances, double agents, and an endless supply of amazing costumes and wigs. 

But it’s even more effective as a psychological portrait of relationships in which truth and lies, work and love, family and country, are inextricably intertwined.  At the center of this web are super agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, both spectacular), whose fake marriage has only recently evolved into a real attachment.  It’s this bond that moves us to root for them even as they do terrible things for a cause that we know will end up on the wrong side of history.  It also, however, complicates their already-complicated attitudes towards their mission. 

Season 3 ratchets this emotional tension up to an even higher level and takes the show into some of the darkest territory it's ever explored, as Philip and Elizabeth are forced not only to push their moral boundaries to the breaking point but to confront the growing suspicions of their teenage daughter, Paige.  That’s a storyline that could have gone wrong in so many ways, yet “The Americans” succeeds where a show like “Homeland” failed, in making Paige not an annoying distraction but a particularly poignant embodiment of the show’s central dilemma: can you sustain the trust that’s required to keep a family, a marriage, any meaningful relationship, together when the very foundation is built on lies?  

Related
The Americans is not quite entirely ignored. It recently won Best Drama Series at the "Critics Choice Awards" after 12 nominations (3rd consecutive for drama series). It has won no other prizes from that group. 

Previously on our FYC series
Lisa Kudrow, Best Actress | Jon Hamm, Best Actor | 20+ Contenders in Supporting Actress in a Drama Series

Random List-Mania: 40 Best Original Movie Songs of the 1990s

I can't let Dick Tracy go quite yet! All that discussion and no tremulous ode to Stephen Sondheim's brilliant song score? It won't stand! Every moment when Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) and 88 Keys (Mandy Patinkin) are in frame together is gold. 

(Eagle-eyed early 90s obsessiveness will know that Mandy Patinkin also pops up briefly in a celebrity-filled party scene in the Madonna documentary "Truth or Dare")

BEST ORIGINAL MOVIE SONGS OF THE 1990s
Beautiful Song Craft and/or Cheesy Epic Ballads For the Wins
* Oscar nominee ** Oscar winner 

1. "Wise Up" -Magnolia (Aimee Mann)
   technically this song first showed up on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack which is why it wasn't eligible for the Oscars for Magnolia but let's make an exception
2. "Sooner or Later"** - Dick Tracy (Stephen Sondheim)
   
   
   
   
3. "Gangsta's Paradise" - Dangerous Minds (Coolio)
   deemed ineligible by Oscar due to sampling -- people were obsessed with the scary new "is this songwriting?" world of sampling back then. What to make of it? 
4. "Stay" - Reality Bites (Lisa Loeb)
5. "Be Our Guest" - Beauty & The Beast (Alan Menken & Howard Ashman)
6. "More" - Dick Tracy (Stephen Sondheim)
7. "You Must Love Me"** - Evita (Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice)
8. "God Help the Outcasts" - Hunchback of Notre Dame (Alan Menken)
   
   32 more tunes after the jump

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Q&A Pt. 2: Rain Men, Paperboys, Oscar Greats

We had too many good questions last week to keep it all confined to one post. So now that you're read part one, so here's part two of the week's reader question roundup. I saved all the Oscar questions for this round to motivate me to update those Oscar chart this weekend. Ready? 

SONJA: Why do we mourn/rage about "undeserved" wins so often? In reality it doesn't change anything....

It's as useless as making your bed in the morning but we still make our beds, right? Or in my case throw the comforter haphazardly across the sheets - close enough! Listen, I consider it a sign of good character to mourn poor choices from awards bodies as long as one does so pointedly and briefly and doesn't allow it to become part of one's whole character like hating an actr- OH WAIT OOPS.  

People like to be dismissive about awards and say 'they don't matter!'  but it's simply not true. THEY DO. Awards permanently influence resumes and entire careers by way of their temporary affect on opportunities and, yes, praise (once considered a "great" it takes decades for the petals to fall off that rose... it took decades for people to start getting snippy about Al Pacino & Robert DeNiro's work!

Plus it goes in the history books. Baby cinephiles decades later still look these things up and watch the movies that were awarded to teach themselves movie history. I speak from experience. I know this to be true.

CASH: Dustin Hoffman's win for "Rain Man" baffles me...

more after the jump...

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