The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Anecdote / Conjecture time. I finally caught the Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene (thoughts forthcoming but definitely in the "must-see!" division) which is the star-making, or at least actress-making, debut of 22 year-old Elizabeth Olsen who is the younger sister of the famous/infamous Olsen Twins.
Critics screenings at the New York Film Festival often end with a mini press-conference and the writer/director Sean Durkin and Olsen (who seems to go by "Lizzy") were on hand today to answer questions. If you've ever been to a Q&A you'll know that most people preface their question with some sort of comment about their own feelings for the movie -- usually ass-kissing praise since the stars are present and stars have wondrous heinies.
One reporter, justifiably thrilled by Olsen's work as Martha says this to Lizzy:
I wanted to compliment you on the interiority of your characterization. You didn't externalize it the way some people do by being "insane" visually and that interiority was very engulfing and very convincing in comparison to some of the performances we've seen... it was a relief, actually.
LOL. I wonder who on earth she could be dissing...
The peacock network brings us the TV season's first cancellation. And whaddya know? It's their new show with the brightest plumage, "The Playboy Club". I've been soaking up the general response to this show and "Pan Am" with some interest since they're the two shows that Mad Men spawned, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and the most flattering form of theft.
It's unkind to speak ill of the dead so I want to thank The Playboy Club for shining such a bright spotlight on Broadway babe Laura Benanti as she sang onstage and bitched backstage. She was the show's indisputable MVP for its very short run so some other series would be smart to snatch her up. I normally don't wish "series regular" status on Broadway's headlining musical stars because it makes them vanish from the stage but my friends and I have held a comic grudge against Benanti for years since it took us four times of paying for her shows to actually see her perform. Maybe we had terrible luck but... well, let's just say itseems like her understudies go on... A LOT. [Updated Editor's Note: There's a reasonable explanation in reader comments as to why Benanti was absent from shows so much in the Aughts. Terrible injury.]
Though Pan Am is appreciably better as reviews suggested, the emphatically polarized 'two thumbs up/all thumbs down' greeting is something I couldn't really get behind as they have/had some of the same strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths: Great, sexy, and showy choice of milieu in that it's a potentially fine breeding ground for multiple stories and visual pizazz, a sassy leading brunette that's fun to watch (Laura Benanti / Christina Ricci), and super attractive men in suits. Weaknesses: Period setting plays all cosmetic with no soul, depth, or nuance (don't get me started on the dialogue in either show... way too modern), beautiful leading blonde who is dull to watch (Amber Heard / Margot Robbie ... is the actress just not bringing it or are these characters too blank) and uneven acting.
So what's the decisive factor in one show winning instant fans and the other a speedy cancellation? I'm thinking confidence, both behind-the-scenes (who knows what executives are thinking) and onscreen. Pan Am struts through its airport like it owns the world and that dead bunny had something of a nervous twitching tail. Confidence in your own voice, even if you're still finding it, goes a long long way towards being heard.
This doesn't need an entire post to itself but if you haven't heard you should know that SHAME, the eagerly awaited Hunger follow up from visionary Steve McQueen will open on December 2nd. That's the one that stars the naked raw talents known as Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. Yay! I'd tell you that I'm seeing it this week but the press screenings at NYFF this year have been more difficult than in past years... so I plan to see it this week.
LINKS Rope of Silicon has first pic of Russell Crowe as Superman's father in Man of Steel. I get why the capes are that muted color but it's still weird to think of SuperPeople with muted color palette costumes. Movie|Line Awesome inimitable director/personality Werner Herzog will play the villain in the Tom Cruise vehicle One Shot. As TFE's unsung hero Michael put so well on twitter "The only thing that would make that Werner Herzog news cooler is if he's playing Werner Herzog." Hollywood and Fine on the shifts of star generations and how that plays into The Ides of March with Ryan Gosling vs. George Clooney. It's a smart piece though some of the claims are suspect (like DeNiro and Pacino still having great work in them...uhhhh) MNPP Luke Evans Seven Times
The House Next Door Jaime N Christley is a dissenting voice on Mexico's critic's darling Miss Bala Frankly My Dear.... War Horse newbie Jeremy Irvine already has his follow up picture. He'll be in the umpteenth Great Expectations adaptation. This one for director Mike Newell.
Vanity Fair Johnny Depp is the new cover boy and apparently he hates being photographed (uhhhh) and he says yes to all the stupid money for his kids (Uhhhh... what kids need $300 million dollars? Isn't becoming a hack really for your kid's kid's grandchildren at this point? $300 million for the Pirates franchise alone.) Unsolicited advice: Take a challenging role soon, maybe by a new visionary writer/director who nobody would think to bankroll without you, do it for scale and rediscover your gift. Just sayin'. Antagony and Ecstasy Mr Brayton, one of the best critics on the net and a twentysomething cancer survivor, reviews the twentysomething cancer comedy 50/50.
Today's Recommended Watch The making of that infamous nippley The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo poster set to the film's score.
Ten years ago tomorrow, the bad cop / good cop drama Training Day debuted in theaters. It was a relatively inauspicious debut (for our purposes) in that, though the film was an instant hit, Oscar fanatics weren't really breathlessly awaiting its debut like it was a 'prestige picture' per se. The film surprised and wound up with two nominations for its leading actors, one in lead (Denzel Washington) and one in supporting (Ethan Hawke) because that's how Oscar do.
All it took was a couple of awesome soundbites and a sense that Denzel Washington was peaking as a movie star with that loss for Malcolm X still a regularly discussed Academy embarrassment and *BOOM* Julia Roberts was all
I love my life!"
.... and it was Oscar Number Two for Denzel!
Were you watching?
King Kong ain't got shit on him.
Oscar #2 let Denzel into the slim ranks of actors with two competitive gold men. Here's the complete list in the order it occurred (because I like to make things difficult for myself).
Luise Rainer (The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth 1936-1937)
Bette Davis (Dangerous and Jezebel 1935-1938)
Walter Brennan (Come and Get It and Kentucky 1936-1938) *
Spencer Tracy (Captains Courageous and Boys Town 1937-1938)
Fredric March (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Best Years of Our Lives 1931/32-1946)
Olivia deHavilland (To Each His Own and The Heiress 1946-1949)
Vivien Leigh (Gone With the Wind and Streetcar Named Desire 1939-1951)
Gary Cooper (Sergeant York and High Noon 1941-1952)
Anthony Quinn (Viva Zapata! and Lust for Life 1952-1956)
Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight and Anastasia 1944-1956) *
Peter Ustinov (Spartacus and Topkapi 1960-1964)
Shelley Winters (Diary of Anne Frank and A Patch of Blue 1959-1965)
Elizabeth Taylor (BUtterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf 1960-1966)
Katharine Hepburn (Morning Glory and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? 1932/33-1967) *
Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet and Airport 1931/32 -1970)
Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront and The Godfather 1954-1972)
Glenda Jackson (Women in Love and A Touch of Class 1970-1973)
Jack Lemmon (Mister Roberts and Save the Tiger 1955-1973)
Jason Robards (All the President's Men and Julia 1976-1977)
Jane Fonda (Klute and Coming Home 1971-1978)
Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite 1969-1978)
Melvyn Douglas (Hud and Being There 1963-1979)
Robert DeNiro (The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull 1974-1980)
Meryl Streep (Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice 1979-1982)
Jack Nicholson (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Terms of Endearment 1975-1983) *
Sally Field (Norma Rae and Places in the Heart 1979-1984)
Dustin Hoffman (Kramer vs. Kramer and Rainman 1979-1988)
Jodie Foster (The Accused and Silence of the Lambs 1988-1991)
Gene Hackman (The French Connection and Unforgiven 1971-1992)
Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway 1986-1994)
Jessica Lange (Tootsie and Blue Sky 1982-1994)
Tom Hanks (Philadelphia and Forrest Gump 1993-1994)
Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules 1986-1999)
Kevin Spacey (Usual Suspects and American Beauty 1995-1999)
Denzel Washington (Glory and Training Day 1989-2001)
Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby 1999-2004)
Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood 1989-2007)
Sean Penn (Mystic River and Milk 2003-2008)
* They won again after this for a total of 3 Oscars (except Hepburn the all time leader with 4 competitive acting wins)
The thing I find most interesting about seeing them all together like this is that it instantly reveals that if someone is going to win a second Oscar it usually happens quickly after the first... 3 to 6 years being common. (which immediately makes you wonder about people by the name of Helen Mirren, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Kate Winslet). The list also shows us that the late 1930s were just brutal for actresses whose names weren't Bette or Luise, that the 1970s were the most friendly towards previous winners and that 1938 and 1994 are strange anomalies, years in which three of the four Oscar winners had already won gold. It's only so long before we have a year with all four since there's a first time for everything.
Third time acting wins have only happened in 1940, 1968, 1974 & 1997
Only four people have ever won more than two acting Oscars and the last to join the club was Jack Nicholson in 1997 for As Good As It Gets. The universe assumes that Meryl Streep will be the fifth, but will she? Quite a few two-timers are still working.
Answer Me These Questions Three
Which three double winners did you find most deserving of both?
Which three would you immediately remove if you had a time machine?
Who do you think is joining the two-timer ranks next?
Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 7:12PM 
