Sundance Kills Your Darlings In Interior Leather Bars

"Sex. Sex. Sex." That's a far more accurate and truer statement than the clichéd "Sex Sells" isn't it? Sex often emphatically doesn't sell. Sometimes it severely limits your market penetration... excuse me, saturation. So "Sex Sells" is an overstatement with lots of conditional clauses. But "Sex. Sex. Sex." that's just true, unequivocally! I'm not saying this because of this Kill Your Darlings trio's photo op I've just posted...

Daniel, Dane, and their Director John

poll by twiigs.com

...even though yes, director John Krokidas is totally 100% sexable based on this photographic evidence. (Tangent: Dane DeHaan turns 27 next month. Is he going to look like he's 30 when he's 60?).

I began this post with "Sex. Sex. Sex." because that's all I keep reading about from Sundance. Yesterday we covered the Cougar Island sexcapades of Two Mothers but apparently Sundance just keeps presenting the world with future MPAA challenges. Quoth Carpetbagger:

“I’ve seen five movies today, and it has been nonstop,” said a senior executive at a major Hollywood studio on Saturday night. “I’m no prude, but it’s a little much.”

NSFW James Franco, Amanda Seyfried, and Gay blah blah blah after the jump...

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"I'm gonna make a cake. That's what I'm gonna do"

If you feel like Julianne Moore got short shrift in our 10th anniversary celebration of The Hours, check out this excellent piece on the actresses "insularity" by sometime TFE contributor David Upton at Victim of the Time.

Laura is possibly the most striking example of this [insularity] – much more self-aware than Far From Heaven’s Cathy Whitaker, and much softer and timid than Savage Grace’s Barbara Baekeland, Laura can often barely maintain the performance, often slipping sentences that reveal her true despair into otherwise guarded conversations. 

Moore’s voice is probably the most vivid part of her performance in The Hours; a soft, mousy whisper, wavering with indecision and reticence. When she puts on a front of confidence, it momentarily strengthens, a striking declaration of her uncharacteristic decisiveness – “I’m gonna make a cake. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

Read the rest @ Victim of the Time.

Gangster Squad: Bullets and Boredom

Michael C here to kick off the movie year with my first review of 2013 for a movie I noticed had slipped through the cracks here at the Film Experience in the rush of Oscar Nomination Fever. But surely 2013 will get better than this! 

Gangster Squad is a film haunted by the ghosts of its superior cinematic ancestors. Some films do gain resonance from evoking earlier titles in their genre but Ruben Fleischer’s crime saga is such a creative void that it can’t wrestle the audience’s attention away from the specters of film noir past. So much more rewarding to occupy one’s mind with fond memories of Chinatown, than to watch characters we don’t care about exchange gunfire in action scenes we can’t follow for reasons not worth understanding. 

Penn vs. Brolin in "Gangster Squad"

The most obvious film intruding on Gangster Squad (2013) is The Untouchables (1987) - at times the new film borders on a beat-for-beat retelling of the earlier story with Al Copen switched out for Mickey Cohen... [more]

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The Linkmaker

Vanity Fair looks at the Lincoln costumes of first time Oscar nominee Joanna Johnston from sketch to still
LetterBoxd are any of you trying this new cinephile site out? I am. 
A Blog Next Door film scores to write to? (Joe Reid was just talking about this habit in that Hours piece). I used to write to the score to Talk to Her but lately I've found music distracting.
MNPP "Who died worse: Fantine or Talia Al Ghul?"
Gold Derby's Tariq Khan thinks Emmanuelle Riva is going to win Best Actress. I wish I believed him!

Empire Lance Armstrong: The Movie?
Coming Soon Here's most uncharted territory for the movies: elderly gay romantic drama. Ira Sachs will follow up his critical hit Keep the Lights On with Love is Strange starring Alfred Molina and Michael Gambon as long time companions who decided to tie the knot. 
Tom Shone interviews Spielberg for The Sunday Times (subscription required for full article)

With every movie, some more than others, you have to make the audience your accomplice." 

Towleroad Ryan Gosling on his abs and pecs. LOL. Gosling does always give good quote. Speaking of...
Frisky ...remember this classic "Meet Ryan's Abs" infographic? (I can't find the full thing anymore)
i09 sci-fi authors have a sense of humor about the gender politics of genre book covers 
Hollywood Elsewhere Marilyn at the 1950 Oscars? This photo looks fake to me but I love it still. 

Finally... did you hear that those Django Unchained action figures are being pulled by the Weinstein Co over debates that they have commercialized and trivialized slavery. Oh god. People are so frustrating. If you accept that the movie is historical fantasy fiction, aren't the dolls also exempt from this kind of moral outrage? Or do the $35+ dolls somehow shamelessly commercialize it whilst the $150+ million grossing movies doesn't? At any rate, pulling the dolls is no biggie for the Weinstein Co since the first series is already sold out (and given how many characters were in that series, was there ever going to be a second series?) and selling for $760 to $7,000 online (asking prices). I get that purchasing a slave doll has more uncomfortable connotations than buying a ticket to a movie in which Quentin Tarantino plays with his live action dolls playing slaves but isn't it basically the same thing in the end: a commercial product which makes money off a communal desire to create fantasy corrective narratives about atrocities of the past?

10 Years Ago, This Weekend, "The Hours" Won Best Picture at the Globes

Nicole Kidman was having a pretty great night. 

Meryl won for "Adaptation" and Nicole won for "The Hours"

Hanging' out on all sorts of red carpets with Meryl Streep usually helps in that regard. If you can't share scenes with her at least have her on your team by way of a shared movie.

Our 10th Anniversary Celebration of The Hours

• Nicole Kidman remembers her Oscar win (Exclusive Interview!)
• Breakfast with... Clarissa, Virginia and Laura Brown
• Epic Discussion Part 1: Ravenous Kisses, Fidgety Hands
• Epic Discussion Part 2: Score, Performance, Re-Casting

We hope you enjoyed this look back. I imagine The Film Experience would be more popular if it stuck to current movie news all the time like every other site but I cannot live without my retro celebrations. I'm greedy. I need films from all eras in my movie diet. 

This next part is for Hours and Film Experience Obsessives only...

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