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.)
I believe I've expressed my love for Raven of RuPaul's Drag Race before. I loved her ferosh wit and confrontational showmanship long before she owned me for good with her "I'm giving Michelle Pfeiffer Bitch" competition moment. Now, she's the main attraction (if you ask me) of Drag U, the spin off show with TV's most absurd premise: drag queens do makeovers on biological women. It's really quite quite perverse when you think about it. It's essentially telling women that their men will be hotter for them if they look more like drag queens! Is this show trying to create a whole future generation of trannychasers?
Earlier this year on Drag Race Season 3 movie-geeks everywhere were horrified to realize that half of the young drag queen contestants on the show had never heard of the high school classic Heathers (1989). This basic pop culture fail did not automatically eliminate them from the show even though there ought to be laws against that! So the self proclaimed Heathers of the competition banded together like true Mean Girls to belittle their pop-history-deficient competition. But Raven, queen bee of Drag Race Season 2, shows everyone how it's done on the season premiere of Drag U.
Manila tries the formerly successful mean girl moves on Raven. Manila starts throwing her shade at Raven and her makeover subject...
Manila: That's not sexy. Raven: Why are you so concerned with Miss Denise. Should I call you Heather? Manila: You wish you were a Heather! Raven: Actually I don't. I'm a Veronica.
It's such a simple smackdown but it shuts Manila right up. See, everyone knows that Veronica > the Heathers. She's very.
FriiiiiiiiieeeeeeeendAntagony & Ecstasy by way of Green Lantern, Timothy looks back at another ill advised green-hued DC adaptation, Swamp Thing the Wrap John Landis's son hired to write the reboot of Frankenstein. I was wondering when that stitched man monster would try to lumber through the current supernatural crowds again. Hey, Craig was just talking about the original Frankenstein in the Take Three series. i09 considers True Blood characters who still haven't had sex with each other yet. Who should? IndieWire looks at five female directors on the verge Movie|Line says the offer is out for Emma Stone to headline Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Natalie Portman was previously rumored but I think Emma is a much better idea for this kind of tonally specific project. Portman is too uneven with the fanciful stuff. Superb in Black Swan but less so other times that f/x surrealness have been involved. But will Emma really say yes given that she's already done Zombieland?
Howard HughesMeanwhile I was asking on Twitter why anyone would want a Chris Nolan Howard Hughes bio (he previously expressed intent) now that the news is out that that's the Warren Beatty project that is in the works. So many blogs were all "but what about Nolan's movie???" Excuse me but has no one seen Reds (1981)? If all biopics were as resonant, well acted and potent as that one it'd be a different film world altogether and Oscars love of the same would be fully and thoroughly justified and not just THIS again?(Nolan is excellent at certain things but I wonder why people think he'd be the man for a biopic when depth of characterization isn't exactly his forte.) Warren will play Hughes (who Leonardo DiCaprio already played as a younger man of course in The Aviator) in his later years and it'll focus on a romance with a younger woman. Rumored to be involved or interested in being involved are: Andrew Garfield, Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Shia La Beouf, Rooney Mara and Evan Rachel Wood. Oh and Jack Nicholson who gave one of his all time best and least characteristic performances in Reds. No word yet on who will be playing who but the important news is already out in the cosmos: Warren Beatty is getting back to work. Fi-nal-ly.
Last night I had a lovely Scandinavian dinner with friends as we discussed our book club title "The Ice Princess" the latest best seller capitalizing on the super hot Scandinavian crime genre (oh what The Girl With/Who... has wrought!). I didn't like the book at all and the translation seemed clunky (or maybe that was the fault of the original prose?) but I find the whole trend vaguely hilarious since Scandinavian countries, to their vast collective credit, are not exactly known as hotbeds of crime! Returning home, what do I have in my inbox?, but the nominations for Norway's annual "Amanda" Awards. Don't you love unexpected theme days?
Norway had a record breaking year with 34 original films eligible for their own prizes. To give you a very general sense of the amount of films various countries make each year here's a handy graphic AMPAS provided for the films of 2007. Would that all the regularly Oscar submitting countries had been listed!
It's no surprise that Bollywood is the biggest deal with over a thousand films made a year.
BUT BACK TO NORWAY.
They basically have two "Best Picture" categories since Scandinavia has a rich history of children's films. So the six lucky movies are as follows.
Nokas was released in Norway the day after last year's foreign film eligibility cutoff!Best Children's Film
Elias og jakten på havets gull (Lise I. Osvoll) -ANIMATED
Jørgen + Anne = sant [a.k.a. Totally True Love] (Anne Sewitsky)
Keeper’n til Liverpool (Arild Andresen) -a comedy about a 13 year old soccer goalie.
Best Film
Gazas tårer [aka Tears of Gaza] (Vibeke Løkkeberg) -This is a documentary film about the consequences of war.
Kongen av Bastøy/ The King of Devil's Island (Marius Holst) -Here is the highest profile release, a true story period epic about a boy's prison in the early 20th century.
Nokas (Erik Skjoldbjærg) -Another true story, this one a crime drama about Norway's most famous robbery. This is from the director of the famous thriller Insomnia (1997) which Christopher Nolan went and remade.
Trailer to The King of Devil's Island with Stellan Skarsgård
Eligibility dates aren't exactly the same for the Amandas as they are for Oscar submissions but you shouldn't be surprised if one of these six films is Norway's submission. Two other films of note: Maria Sødahl's Limbo, a period filmwith the great Lena Endre about expat Scandinavians in Trinidad, did very well in total nominations (acting, screenplay, direction and more) but missed the Best Picture cut under the familiar awards rule of something-has-to. But it won't be the Oscar submission as it would have been eligible in 2010 and it also has a lot of dialogue in English. Trolljegeren, known abroad as Troll Hunter (it's even in release as we speak right here in the States) won multiple nominations, too.
I'm assuming that Joachim Trier's second feature Oslo 31, August missed the eligiblity cut off for these awards. And given that it was so well received at Cannes, perhaps Oscar submission is in the cards? Norway submitted the young filmmaker's debut Reprise once upon a time. (Oscar foolishly ignored it. God, what a startling debut that was. I nominated it!). Here's the trailer to Oslo 31, August.
...same lead actor as Reprise, playing a troubled soul again. I shouldn't make any uninformed guesses but my hunch is that it'll be this one or The King of Devil's Island for Oscar submission.
"I'm going to lose to the King's Speech again??? It's my turn!"Best Foreign Film One of the funnest things for awards junkies when perusing off-Oscar prizes is how often Oscar giants show up in Foreign Film prizes. Hint: They usually do.
Friday, June 24, 2011 at 9:42PM 
