a short Tweetweek distraction

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The final dance in Dirty Dancing, but they’re dancing to The Muppet Show theme tune. pic.twitter.com/ldfjmm5JoQ

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) May 17, 2022

Social media has been hellish lately in tune with a country that's rapidly falling apart. So we haven't been as active for sanity reasons though we share the outrage. So for this tweet roundup, happy/funny showbiz stuff only as a silly diversion to brighten your morning as the week begins anew. More after the jump obviously...

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Judy Garland @ 100: 'Easter Parade'

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Mark Brinkerhoff on one of her most popular pictures...   

Judy Garland: physical comedienne. This may not be the descriptor that comes to mind when it comes to the one, the only, The Voice. But as superlatives go, it’s the one that fits like a dainty, sturdy little glove on the hand of a one-of-a-kind talent in her very prime.

At 26 (and newly a first-time mom to then-baby Liza), Garland, less than a decade removed from her superstar-making performance in The Wizard of Oz, was reemerging in MGM musicals with a proto-Barbra-Streisand-as-Fanny-Brice performance in what would become her second biggest hit of the ‘40s (following mega-musical, Meet Me in St Louis, four years earlier). Easter Parade is a Funny Girl period-adjacent set tale of a novice singer-dancer plucked from obscurity by a storied showman...

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Ranking the International Feature Film Winners

by Juan Carlos Ojano

From De Sica to Hamaguchi, the past two years of hosting the podcast The One-Inch Barrier has allowed me to watch all that films that were selected by the Academy for its International Feature Film category - 74 winners and 337 nominees (all but one title). While this category has had its issues over the years, it has also put an international spotlight on non-English language cinema on Hollywood’s biggest night. While the category has  always been far from a perfect encapsulation of world cinema, it's a great jumping off point as noted in the series finale.  (Cláudio Alves did a beautiful summary of our discussion - video included!). 

Here is my personal not-that-definitive ranking of the winners of the category. Things are very fluid especially in the midsection... 

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Babes on Broadway"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

A behind the scenes shot of Judy's first scene in "Babes on Broadway". She's a fountain of tears in the scene but laughing between takes.

History has a way of shifting truth from facts to a more universally agreed upon fiction. Though The Wizard of Oz is now the movie most associated with Judy Garland, it was not as universally beloved in 1939 when it first premiered. Though it was ostensibly "a hit," the sixth highest grosser of Hollywood's most mythic year, it also carried the whiff of failure since its large budget prevented initial profits. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor got a much much bigger immediate return on their Garland investment through her other 1939 musical. Babes in Arms (1939) opened just two months after Oz and proved a slightly bigger hit (again "at the time"). The Wizard of Oz proved that Judy could carry a massive picture all on her own but as follow up, the studio didn't get ambitious but reverted to the easier sell -- more "Mickey & Judy!'; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and today's topic Babes on Broadway (1942) followed... 

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One For Them, One For Me - Emma Thompson's 1994-95

A series by Christopher James

Emma Thompson's output between 1994 and 1995 couldn't be more different.

Do one for them; do one for you. If you can still do projects for yourself, you can keep your soul.

— Martin Scorsese: A Journey

Emma Thompson was on a pretty incredible run in the early 90s. Following her Best Actress win in 1992 for Howard’s End, Thompson had a consistent streak of great films. In 1993, she received two acting nominations for her work in The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father. On top of that, she was delightful in the critically lauded Peter’s Friends and Much Ado About Nothing (the latter perhaps the hottest film of the 90s). By 1995, she would win her second Oscar for Sense and Sensibility in the Adapted Screenplay category. Every track record is bound to have a blemish. Sandwiched in between Merchant & Ivory and Ang Lee is Ivan Reitman’s infamous Junior, better known as the movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant.

Was starring in an Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy the means to the end of getting her passion project made?

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