Whether You've Been Naughty... Or Nice...

Happy Holidays from The Film Experience! Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year... whatever you're celebrating.

But most of all... Happy Moviegoing.

Blogging will resume on Monday morning. Coming next week: Interviews with Corey Stoll, Charlize Theron and Jessica Chastain. Plus: more on War Horse, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Iron Lady, and The Artist. And Nathaniel's Top Ten List and the Film Bitch Awards Kick Off.

You'll stick around, right?

'War Horse': Stage vs. Screen

Kurt here. I am not, by any stretch, an authority on theater, and it's only recently that I've been able to collect a good number of playbills. But I can say, without hesitation, that the Broadway production of War Horse is the best thing I've ever witnessed on stage. I saw the show last Sunday, three days before I caught Spielberg's big-screen translation. In technical terms, the play is flawless, so staggeringly well-executed that, at intermission, my partner and I just gave each other wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks. The story, as expected, is one of very typical structure, with a found-and-lost-and-found-again relationship between and adolescent boy (Albert) and an almost preternatural stallion (Joey). But the stagecraft, while clearly taking some inspiration from Julie Taymor's The Lion King (and, perhaps, the Daniel Radcliffe incarnation of Equus), feels wildly extraordinary, at once awesome and minimalistic in its design.

I've decided that what makes the play so potent, beyond its meticulously made yet intentionally haggard horse puppets, and its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history projection screen of a backdrop, is its fierce, unannounced insistence on getting in your space, nearly assaulting you when it's time for stagehands to hurriedly crisscross the performance space with barbed wire, line the aisles with pennant strings to prep for a recruitment scene, or pilot a massive, makeshift tank across an implied, strobe-lit battlefield (another highlight is an ultra-stylized, oversized bullet that's carried from the crowd and spun like a drillbit before striking a key character on stage).

And how does Spielberg's version measure up to all this? I did my best to not allow my first War Horse experience to make me biased against my second, and it's true that the two works are very different beasts. I was, however, keeping score as I basked in the orange glow of Spielberg's impossible skies, for this equine weeper's path to the screen yields a lot of pluses and minuses. Let's take a look (spoiler alert!) at how Spielberg bettered the material, and how he fell short of the merits of its past life.

Peter Mullan and David Thewlis

PLUS: Albert's Father

In the play, Albert's father, Ted Narracott is an irredeemable, profoundly hateable character (seriously, like please-shoot-him-right-now hateable). A drunk and alleged military deserter, he makes a pile of horrid choices—including impulsively selling Joey—and never considers for a moment how they will impact his son...

Fathers, Tradition, Human Animal Bonding after the jump

Click to read more ...

Yes, No, Maybe So: "The Hobbit" and "Prometheus"

Just a short time after similarly DRAMATIC (!) black and whiteish teaser posters for the new Batman and Spider-Man movies arrived, posters for the two other 2012 event movies, Prometheus and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey also emerged. Each poster gives us a character's back spotlit as they enter the fantastical of their movie which awaits us too. It's easy to project yourself into the image as you walk into the bright light of... the familiar unknown?

The weird thing about event movies is that they're promoted as if there was only one ONE MOVIE TO RULE THEM ALL but they all seem so interchangeable from a distance. Maybe that's because they're always sequels so the journey we're about to take isn't so unexpected. Even Prometheus is a sequel. Sort of.

The movies all seem interchangable until the trailers arrive to differentiate them. So let's break down Prometheus and The Hobbit after the jump with our "Yes, No, Maybe So" Expectation Management System.

Click to read more ...

Stocking Stuffers From the Movies

One person's treasure is another one's junk so for my bi-weekly column at Fandor, I'm looking at what's naughty and what's nice about a few top Oscar categories... like Best Actress, Original Screenplay and more.

In the meantime, since I may have the lowest key Christmas ever known chez moi, I've been thinking a lot about my favorite part of secular holiday rituals and it's totally stocking suffers. So herewith a list! Tis the season of list-making.

BEST STOCKING STUFFERS FROM 2011 MOVIES

Mr Timms photo via Cinema Blend

• Mr. Timms from Rango.

• A fedora from The Adjustment Bureau. Better than any transit card for getting through a city quickly.

• Those neato contact lenses in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol which make perfect replica printouts of what you're looking at if you blink twice.

• A gift certificate for a one day shopping / grooming makeover with Crazy Stupid Love's Ryan Gosling.

• Gloves with which to Drive without leaving fingerprints behind.

Pick a toy, any toy

• A toy from Papa Georges' shop in Hugo, any toy.

• A stogie from Sigmund Freud's personal collection in A Dangerous Method or maybe Albert Nobbs's dream shop.

• A baseball signed by Brad Pitt. It's hard not to get romantic about baseball... or Brad.

• Must Have: a miniature picture book of Mike Mills illustrations from Beginners. He drew them himself though Ewan helped a little at the end.

• That "Naughty or Nice" meter from Arthur Christmas with which to judge future friends, lovers, clients, or business partners. 

• Hal Jordan's power ring.

• Pearl necklace from Consolata Boyle's costume department from The Iron Lady. 'Absoloooootely non-negotiable!'

• A movie makeup kit from Super 8.

• A pair of boat shoes to go jogging with George Clooney in.

• The vial containing a mermaid's tear from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

• A Hello Kitty t-shirt signed by Charlize Theron.

• Thor's hammer. Though maybe that wouldn't fit in a sock?

Which stocking stuffers are you hoping for Sunday morning?

The Year in Gay Characters

Year in Review... more to come, too.

Though you know I am unfond of J. Edgar, it was super easy to make a list of the best gay characters without the noisiest ones: ol' Hoover and his much abused man Clyde. For my weekly column at Towleroad, I thought I'd wrap the year with a list on the Best LGBT movie characters of the year so click away if you'd like a few notes on Pariah, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Potiche, and even Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Okay, the latter I only imagined but I like to engage with the movies in unexpected ways. Don't let filmmakers box you in; practice freeform movie watching!

Because the holidays are all about spreading oneself thin, I'm also a guest today at AfterElton. I met AfterElton's Brian Juergens at a Madonna event -- it's true, I met the Queen herself (M, not Brian!) but more on that in February when the embargo breaks -- and he was cracking me up with his insane Oscar predictions like "Best Supporting Actor Jim Parsons as Charlotte Phelan in The Help". Hee.

So I had to bring him back to reality, set him... uh... straight. Such a killjoy I am! An Oscar man's work is never done.