Throwback Thursday FYC: sex, lies, and videotape (1989)

Our 1989 25th anniversary celebration continues...

Have you ever seen sex, lies and videotape? Steven Sodebergh won the Palme D'Or at Cannes for his very first film and somehow it wasn't all downhill from there. The film, which was a minor box office hit, was crucial in planting the seeds for the American indie boom of the 1990s but when Oscar nominations rolled around the Academy played it very safe largely shunning both of the year's most provocative critical darlings (the other being Do the Right Thing which we honored earlier this summer in a post just like this one). I spotted these FYC ads on eBay and thought I'd share them.

Andie MacDowell has won a lot of harsh criticism over the years for various performances, most notably Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (for which she was dubbed over by Glenn Close) and Four Weddings and a Funeral but she's really wonderful in this picture and in Short Cuts. Blame Steven Soderbergh and Altman if you must but don't even try to deny it! 

More...

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Yes, No, Maybe So: The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Tim here, with a peek at the new trailer for one of the year's biggest remaining animated releases. "Big" in the sense of "very, very small, but of peerless interest to animation buffs". Namely, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, the latest film by Studio Ghibli, and the second-to-last before their indefinite leave of absence. It's just a teaser, but with less than two months before GKIDS releases the film, it's probably the best we're going to get.

Yes

• Director Isao Takahata's films aren't as widely known in the States as his colleague Hayao Miyazaki's, but they might honestly be better on a title-by-title basis. He favors simple, human-driven scenarios, which he then depicts using innovative, unconventional visual styles.
• Like this visual style, for example:
  
  
  Whatever else it is, the colored-pencil look is going to make it the most unique animated film of 2014.
• So dramatic! The ominous music, the non-stop momentum, the collection of mysterious locations. I have no clue what's going on, but it's obviously very serious.

No

• GKIDS isn't releasing a version with the original Japanese audio to theaters, and their dub cast doesn't raise a lot of hope: Dean Cain? Mary Steenburgen? Beau Bridges? The '90s wants their B-listers back.

Maybe So

• There's absolutely nothing here to indicate the content, so it's selling the movie entirely on two brand names, Ghibli and Takahata. Those are trustworthy brand names, but not infallible.

I'm 100% a Yes on this one. Takahata isn't infallible, but he's damn close, and the artwork, especially in movement, is eye-wateringly beautiful.

Who else is joining me in the YES column for this one?

Thoughts I Had... while looking at sudden Ant-Man stuff

Ant-Man (2015) has only been filming for a few days and already we have a first image, a complete cast list, cute tweeting between cast & director, and so on. It's the new age of filmmaking in which you can be totally sick of a project before it ever nears post-production. I kid, sort of. I'm not sick of Ant-Man yet but I'd rather be watching it than wondering about it.

Nevertheless let's do what we do. My thoughts as they come to me without censorship...

• If TFE were like most movie blogs I would immediately start theorizing what the license plate "D69W01Y" could possibly mean. Is it a secret message? the code name of some scientific invention? a codebreaker to unlock the titles of all those announced Marvel movies in the pipeline?
• But TFE is not like most movie blogs and we'd rather live in an imaginary world where people got more excited about films that exist already. Or intense upcoming dramas about Women Who Lie To Themselves™. Online film culture seems to be solely reserved for wondering about the minutae of new superhero movies.
• minutae. Hee! Get it? Ant-Man. Because he shrinks. (I'll be here all week.)
• What if Ant-Man crosses the bridge and meets Ape-Men? That's where they live!
• Everyone I know loves San Francisco except for me. Maybe I should give it another try?
• What's in the bag? I hope it's the Wasp all shrunken already. I'm so starved for female superheroes

more after the jump

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A Year with Kate: Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962)

 Episode 34 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn enters the golden age of her career.

This late in A Year With Kate, I really didn’t think I could be surprised anymore. After 8 months watching 34 movies spread over 3 decades of Katharine Hepburn’s life, I believed that I had a pretty firm grasp on who Kate the Great was and how she performed. I espoused the popular wisdom that Kate was best when she played women similar to herself: strong women, smart women; women rarely beaten and never broken. None of these could prepare me for Mary Tyrone, the morphine addict in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Katharine Hepburn, for the first and possibly last time in her career, played a completely crushed woman, and it’s unlike anything else she ever put to film.

Before you rush out to rent a copy, a warning: Long Day’s Journey Into Night isn’t fun. Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play is equal parts art and exorcism. He changed names, but otherwise told the story of his family: his alcoholic brother “Jamie” (Jason Robards Jr.); his stingy father “James,” who’d once been a great actor (Ralph Richardson); his morphine-addicted mother “Mary” (Katharine Hepburn); and even “Edmund” (Dean Stockwell), his young, depressed doppelganger who is diagnosed with consumption. Director Sidney Lumet kept O’Neill’s posthumously-published Pulitzer Prize-winner mostly intact. Instead, Lumet focused on bringing it to the screen with visual sophistication through long takes and abrupt extreme closeups. Later adaptations of plays, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, would owe a lot to this film stylistically.

This is the kind of role I’d never expect Katharine Hepburn to be able to play. Mary Tyrone is childish before she succumbs to her addiction and downright infantile after. With no discernible thread of rationality holding Mary’s thoughts together in her haze, each emotion she shares is real but disconnected to the one before it, which requires Kate to switch from memory to accusation to denial to forgetfulness multiple times in a scene. True, the Kate-isms and the Bryn Mawr accent are there, but how to discuss the rest of this performance?

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I thought, "hey, I can link, I can link." but now I know that I was wrong, 'cause I missed you ♪ ♫

Criterion Collection Pedro Almodóvar write about his experience making Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down (1990). I so love that one. So weirdly romantic in spite of its whole Stockholm Syndrome business
Natasha VC Brad Pitt before and after makeup. Hee
In Contention Tapley wonders if Eastwood's American Sniper will have an impact on Oscar with its Christmas release
The Dissolve John Lithgow has revealed that Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (which he does voice work on) has been completely reimagined
Buzzfeed investigation into 80s arcana: who deserved credit for Flashdance and didn't get it?

 

The Hairpin the best friends of romcom heroines, in order
The Guardian on "my favorite city in film: Blade Runner's LA
i09 Have you ever wondered how Replicants are made in Blade Runner?
Salon interesting piece on Lauren Bacall (and Bogey's) political activism which the obits have steered clear of mostly
Chiseler Bacall's recent death also prompted this look back at Humphrey Bogarts first actress wife, the now forgotten Mayo Methot
AV Club Keanu Reeves moves to television for a series called Rain about a half Japanese half American assassin but...
/Film ...there's also a TV show being developed based on Keanu's hit The Devil's Advocate in which he is not involved. Strange timing, eh?
RogerEbert.com interviews Ira Sachs on Love is Strange. That finally comes out this month. Do NOT miss it 
Cinema Blend Johnny Depp to star with his teenage daughter in Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers. I do not understand what's going on with that career. I really don't 
Empire Bradley Cooper to headline a new franchise based on the "Mack Bolan" book series about a man at war with the Mafia

Off Cinema
Towleroad Portia de Rossi surprises Ellen DeGeneres on their anniversary
Entertainment Junkie on the Emmy contest for "Best Writing in a Drama Series"
Taye Diggs dancing. That's all. That's enough.
AV Club looks back at the seminal single "Stay" from Lisa Loeb. God, I loved that one. I can't remember if it was written for Reality Bites (1994) or not but if it was Oscar made the worse choice in not nominating it

The Stuff of Nightmares
Cinema Blend Chinese movie theaters projecting audience texts onto screen. 

ahem... I used to worry about keeping The Film Experience PG-13 because I knew teenagers were reading and when the site was first created you didn't want to be labeled NSFW because it shut you off from tons of traffic and search engines and so on and so on. And now I just feel like the biggest prude every day since even mainstream websites that people read at work print photo galleries of "bulges," naked celebrities, and charity events involving random civilians stripping. Case in point in the past 24...

Gawker imagining what's inside Jared Leto's pants courtesy of a quote from Alexis Arquette
Jezebel imagining what Disney Prince Charming dicks look like. 

So basically I am a prude and singing "Class" from Chicago right now as I type this. But I click on all these links, so, guilty.