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Hey, what are you getting me for my birthday?

yours truly

I'm just saying. It's this Friday so you don't have much time!

I suggest a donation to the site (see side bar) or, better yet, a subscription. There are three options on the pull down. But if we only had 300 more subscribers at the price of a cup of coffee a month things would be easier to manage.

Your suscription dimes make an enormous difference to The Film Experience in terms of stability and budget to dream bigger. Consider...

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

I ♥ The Film Experience

THANKS IN ADVANCE

For those who can't commit to a dime a day, consider a one time donation for an article or a series or an you were glad you didn't have to live without. Or toss us a nickel for every time you looked at an Oscar chart last year (no wait. none of you can afford that! that shit adds up!)

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Review: A Million Ways to Die in the West

Howdy, y'all! Here's Dancin' Dan with a contrarian opinion on last weekend's 'other' new release, which was not greeted so kindly. - editor.

Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West is not Ted. That much should be obvious. It does not include a talking teddy bear and takes place in the Old West. But it bears repeating: A Million Ways to Die in the West is not Ted.

Frankly, I hate even making the comparison, but I kept doing so all throughout MacFarlane's seriously funny send-up of Old Hollywood Westerns. Right from the opening moments, it's a step up from Ted's television-quality visuals: Cinematographer Michael Barrett sends us soaring through Monument Valley, site of many of the greatest Westerns ever made, and Joel McNeely concocts a perfect old-fashioned Wild West score. But what really makes the difference here is the humor. For the most part, it's less foul-mouthed than Ted, except when it comes to Sarah Silverman's prostitute Ruth, who giddily talks about all the things she does with her male clients but not with her fiancée Edward (Giovanni Ribisi).

Click to read more ...

A Year with Kate: The Sea of Grass (1947)

Episode 23 of 52: In which Tracy and Hepburn make a Western because why not?

A lone figure looks out over a vast, unending prairie. A wagon traverses rocky desert trails. Virgin land, a justice-seeking posse, a citified lawyer who brings civilization riding on his pinstriped coat tails. The Western dominated American film for over half a century with images like these. It stands to reason that two American stars and a director on his way to becoming a (controversial) American legend himself would take aim at the genre. The Sea of Grass, the resulting collaboration between Elia Kazan and the Tracy/Hepburn team, is an epic story covering multiple generations in the New Mexico Territory. It’s a Western, but not struck from the same heroic mould that John Ford was making them in Monument Valley. The Sea of Grass is meaner, more melodramatic, and ultimately a maverick mess of a movie.

The Sea of Grass comes so close to being a great film.  Spencer Tracy plays Col. Jim Brewton, a rancher who’s spent his life herding cattle on the millions of acres of untouched prairie that spread across New Mexico. He marries a St. Louis girl named Lutie (Kate Hepburn), who loves him but can’t love his untamed wildlands (not a euphemism). She tries to bring the people to the prairie, or her husband home to bed, but she can’t tame nature or the Colonel. These are familiar archetypes to anyone who’s watched more than two Westerns: the Lone Hero and the Prairie Wife. He is the champion of the settlers, she is his pure-hearted moral compass. Right? Well sure, up until the part where Jim causes the death of a few farmers, and Lutie runs away to sleep with the Judge (Melvyn Douglas) and bear his illegitimate son. And that’s just in the first hour. Suffice it to say, John Ford would not approve.

Cowboys and cynics after the jump...

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Twins: Eva Green and...

each day at 2:22 a twin post dedicated to all you Geminis reading - one of us... one of us...!

Eva Green keeps winning the spotlight in 2014. In March she took every MVP notice for 300: Rise of an Empire (though I must ask 'was their competition for that title, really?). In May she headlined the premiere of the new Showtime series Penny Dreadful (which we briefly discussed here). Right on the heels of that her hotness made the MPAA all sweaty again (they freaked out over her film debut as well) and they vowed that her character poster for Sin City: A Dame To Kill For woudl never see the inside of theaters. They've since changed the poster to get it approved. (They are so reliably weird.)

Eva's fanbase is ever growing but she's still mysterious onscreen and off. Did you know she has a twin?

Click to read more ...