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.)
Excerpted from a June 1944 edition of the Hartford Courant, "America's oldest continuously published newspaper".
Fourteen years later, the couple divorced. No clipping available but the following photo is believed to have been taken during the couple's 1957 Christmas party.
I've never seen Frank so soused.
This tragedy need never be repeated in Hartford or Iowa or Massachusetts or New Hampshire or Vermont or D.C. or New York now either.
Since we have a great roster of erratic contributors here at TFE, we should use them more often, right? What has Team Experience been watching?
What's the best and/or worst thing you saw this week?
Kurt (Cinema de Gym): The best thing I saw this week was Page One: Inside the New York Times, a doc that filled a little empty spot in my soul. Of course it's slanted so as to exalt the Gray Lady, but so what. It's thus far the most comprehensive film we have to address where we stand in the world of media, and thank GOD for the invaluable David Carr, a shut-up-and-listen voice of reason who defends the fundamentals amidst legions of people blindly barrelling toward an all-digital climate of media without merit. The worst thing I saw was Bad Teacher (my review) which couldn't even appeal to my sinful love of hating on goody-two-shoe types ("Bad Santa" this is not) and it contains the year's worst character in Lucy Punch's Amy Squirrell. She's unwatchable.
Robert G: Best: Noriko's Dinner Table--so many questions, so few answers. How could Suicide Club become more confusing and addictive with a sequel? Worst Thing: 8213: Gacey House--I have a high tolerance for bad horror. This overloaded my circuits.
JA: I'm sort of completely and totally obsessed with Adrien Brody's brief bit as Dali in Midnight in Paris right now. I can't stop hearing him pronounce "RHINOCEROS" inside my head. He says it so many times that the word loses all meaning and becomes this jumble of sound, all nonsense, which is obviously the point - hysterical nonsense.
Robert (Distant Relatives): I caught up with the 1962 samurai film Hara-Kiri. It's always great to have even high expectations exceeded and see an old film that still feels modern and poignant.
Craig (Take Three): The best thing I saw this week, cinematically, was Bridesmaids, which was a daftly hilarious experience. (Yes, there categorically should be Oscar nods for Wiig and McCarthy. I ain't kidding.); worst thing, sadly, was Dario Argento's The Card Player (2004) apart from a ludicrous scene involving a life-or-death poker match played on train tracks to a pounding techno score.
Alex "BBats" The best thing I saw this week was a documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival called Salaam Dunk about a group of Iraqi female students playing college basketball. I love sports docs (ESPN's 30 for 30 was amazing) and the concept of one focusing on women in the middle east was too interesting to pass up. It was a well balanced film about positive changes that are coming to the region while keeping the problems and challenges in clear perspective (I always forget that Iraqis call the war "The Invasion") The girls are all so wonderful and their coach is hilarious and so caring towards his students. Definitely check it out when you get a chance. Didn't see any terrible things this week, but will say that Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, while having great moments and acting, was a very emotional confusing movie. It's like a revenge drama where revenge is taken within and often against oneself.
Andreas (Mix Tape): The best movie I watched was John Ford's unduly obscure Two Rode Together, which is essentially Jimmy Stewart & Richard Widmarkreenacting The Searchers. The film is dripping with moral ambiguity & gets really emotionally intense toward the end; also, the usually lovable Stewart plays a total scumbag. It works. I loved the movie.
REGARDING CARS 2 I (Nathaniel) meant to write a review but every time I sat down to do so I was just angry. I hated -- and I do mean h-a-t-e-d -- the decision to make Pixar's absolute worst character "Mater" the lead of a nearly two hour movie. I figured I had to ask if there was anything salvagable in the concept of anthropomorphic cars.
Which movie car would you willingly spend two hours with?
Jose: The Phantom Carriage so I could grab Cars 2 and send it to hell where it escaped from! (*sob* I really tried to like it.)
RobertG: What could be better than a ride on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? A ride where the flying car lets you know how to avoid the Child Catcher and just have a good time.
Michael (Unsung Heroes): I would like to see a full length feature starring the second hand police car driven by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in The Blues Brothers. It would have a nice deadpan sense of humor, its radio would play nothing but great rock and roll, and unlike the insufferable Mater it would be a car of few words.
JA: My first thought was Sam Raimi's 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, which has made an appearance in all of his films. It could star in its own documentary - I bet it's got stories to tell. Like, I've always wanted to know what having a 23 year old Bruce Campbell sitting on you was like.
This is where we get off."
Kurt: I have a soft spot for the Batmobile from the 60s TV show/movie, which actually just made an appearance at my favorite local theater (alas, I missed it). The car reminds me, of course, of watching the show (Pow! Thwack!), but also of being dragged to auto shows with my dad, which I hated in the moment but now think of fondly. They always had cars like the Batmobile at those things. I imagine the Batmobile and I would discuss chasing Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt, how it was ever able to sleep with all those Batcave gadgets buzzing, and if there's any competition among the other Bat vehicles (that Batsub will cut you!).
Alex "BBats": I wish the car from The Car (1977) would follow Mater across a bridge...
YOUR TURN, READERS... What have you been watching and which movie car would you gladly see anthropomorphized for a couple of hours?
The Lost Boy Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is just a few days away from joining the top gro$$ing documentaries club. JobMob check out what some celebrity acting resumes look like Sociological Images Some off flick backstory on that DDT spray scene in The Tree of Life. I wanted to soak in that scene, didn't you? Tom ShoneTerminator 2 turns 20 years old this week. What a stroke of genius casting Robert Patrick was. Old Hollywood great my-how-time-changes-things quote from Kim Novak on the initial failure of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Movie|Line Remember those omnibus films celebrating Paris and New York. It's official: Sydney, I Love You plans to move ahead in early 2012 The Wrap looks at the reasons that the superhero crop of 2011 isn't really delivering as expected at the box office.The last sentence, though, is an unintentionally hilarious negation of the 'there's too many of these' thesis statement. It goes like so...
The good news for the box office: New installments of Batman and Spider-Man are due out next summer, with fresh incarnations of Superman and Iron Man following soon after.
off cinema The Daily Beast backstage at Men's Fashion Week Low Resolution ranking the hotness of Wimbledon men Slant reviews Björk's new single "Crystalline". I love this bit:
Bjork's most esoteric album to date, 2004's Medúlla, is also among her best, and so my policy is to indulge Mrs. Matthew Barney in all pretensions so long as the music works.
Bill still makes her red eyed and weepyLet the Season 4 premiere of HBO's hit series True Bloodbe a lesson to all future showrunners. This is what happens when your show has introduced non-integrated plotlines for each and every member of a huge ensemble cast. This is what happens when you try a time jump so popular post Battlestar Galactica and don't trust the audience to just reconfigure the pieces on their own. This is what happens when you back yourself into storylines that maybe weren't good ideas to begin with. I speak of Jason Stackhouse becoming the paterfamilia (of sorts) for a whole den of barely human hilbillies and a certain reveal about our heroine. To quote Sookie (Anna Paquin) herself with the same annoyed/surprised/this-is-stupid inflection from the Season 3 climax...
I'm a fairy?
And what is it that's happened, exactly?
The show's premiere episode "She's Not There" proved to be a random disjointed mess, forced to spend the entire hour on reintroductions to every character since we've missed a whole year of their lives (as has Sookie). I can't speak for television ratings but if True Blood hadn't already peaked in terms of the number of fangbangers gathered for each episode, this premiere had garlic all over it. Wouldn't it automatically repel new viewers?
Fairy-Land
"She's Not There" kicks off with a weirdly dull and anachronistic (for this show) opening. Sookie is trapped (though she doesn't yet know it) in an alternate fairy dimension which looks like a gaudy Maxfield Parrish knock-off painting with no-budget set dressing. Sookie doesn't eat the glowing fruit which turns out to be a good idea -- the side effects are both nasty and uglifying.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 3:47PM 
