Winona Ryder @ 50: "Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice"

Team Experience is celebrating Winona Ryder this week as she turns 50.

by Ginny O'Keefe

He’s the ghost with the most, babe. It’s Beetlejuice. The wacky, morbid and over the top 1988 Tim Burton joint  revolves around Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) a couple living in an idyllic Connecticut countryside. They are tragically killed after their car swerves off a bridge and into a river. The thing is the film keeps following them and their perspective. Tracing their steps all the way back home which is when they realize…they’re dead! Once home they discover a book titled "Handbook for the Recently Deceased". Soon enough their house is sold to the Deetz family. Charles, his wife Delia and their daughter Lydia all moving out into the country from New York City. They begin to tear apart the house and make it their own. Barbara and Adam want them gone so it’s time to start haunting. Eventually they turn to someone (or something in the form of Michael Keaton) they never should have for help: Betelgeuse (pronunciation: beetle juice). 

The greatness of this film is its supreme wackiness. Nothing is too out there for this movie. It’s got sandworms, moving sculptures, Harry Belafonte musical numbers, dead caseworkers, Catherine O’Hara wearing gloves as a headband, goofy production design, and a perfect balancing of message and escapism. My favorite character in the film is Lydia played by the great Winona Ryder...

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Tweetweek

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The aesthetic, the world-building, the pulsing drama of Dune...truly incomparable pic.twitter.com/5PVm2UxH09

— Beatrice Loayza (@bealoayza) October 22, 2021

More Dune plus Rita Wilson, Tom Holland, actressexual jokes etcetera after the jump...

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On "Marriage Italian Style" and "The Shop on Main Street"

by Nathaniel R

Have you either of these classics of mid 60s international cinema? In one of the strangest timetables in Oscar history, both of these two film's leading ladies were honored with Best Actress Oscar nominations but neither in the year their film was honored:  Sophia Loren (Marriage Italian Style) was nominated for Best Actress in 1964; Ida Kaminska (The Shop on Main Street) was nominated for Best Actress in 1966; inbetween those Oscar years the films themselves were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 1965 (now called Best International Feature Film).  

I was thrilled to rejoin Juan Carlos Ojano on "One Inch Barrier" to discuss 1965's Best international race, a strong vintage, which also included the family drama Blood on the Land (Greece), the very horny Dear John (Sweden), and the supernatural Kwaidan (Japan). We discuss Best Actress, Oscar's resistance to Asian cinema, sex in cinema, and Sophia Loren's magnetism...

Days Until...

Today is October 22nd which means it's... 

0 days until Dune, The French Dispatch, Ron's Gone Wrong, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, and The Harder They Fall open in movies theaters (and in some cases at home). That's right -- they're out now!

60 days until the Oscar finalists list are announced in categories like Best International Film, Best Score, Best Documentary, and so on...

96 days until the Governors Awards when the Academy honors legends like Liv Ullman and Samuel L Jackson with their Honorary Oscars

109 days until the nominations are announced for the 94th Academy Awards

156 days until Hollywood's High Holy Night aka the Oscars.

How will you use the time alloted you? 

UPDATED OSCAR PREDICTIONS ARE HERE

"Passing" and "The Lost Daughter" lead Gotham Awards nominations

by Nathaniel R

It was a good year for forthcoming Netflix content helmed by actresses turned directors with the juries of the Gotham Awards. Rebecca Hall's artful black and white drama Passing and Maggie Gyllenhaal's artful thorny adaptation of the novel The Lost Daughter led the nominations. They'll hit Netflix on November 10th and December 31st respectively. With both the Gotham Awards and the often slighlty more mainstream Spirit Awards it can be hard to know exactly what is eligible. Usually budgets make all the difference in film (for example Power of the Dog was ineligible) which creates a fuzzymath accounting line between mainstream and 'indie. But how do they decide with television? Did they not like Mare of Easttown (which scored zero nominations) or was it just not eligible though its chief Emmy rival The Queens Gambit obviously was since Anya Taylor Joy was nominated. 

Nominations and commentary are after the jump...

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