Lukewarm off the press: MTV Movie Awards, Dune buzz, Norman Lloyd, etc...

Sorry about our radio silence these past few days. But let's catch up with some of movie news that we missed.

• The MTV Movie & TV Awards were held with WandaVision emerging as the big winner taking home Best Show, Best Performance, Best Fight, and Best Villain. Sacha Baron Cohen, Chadwick Boseman, and Scarlett Johansson among others were also honored.

More after the jump including Dune, Disenchanted, and Lord of the Rings for TV news...

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Gladiator: A dormant genre awakens!

In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000

by Cláudio Alves

One way to confirm a work of art's importance and influence - not necessarily its quality - is to see how much subsequent creations tried to imitate it. How many creators have attempted to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time, whether by blatant copy or freeform inspiration? This is especially true of mainstream cinematic successes. A surplus of movies can triumph at the box office any given year. Not nearly as many can claim to have birthed a string of copycats or revived a genre after decades of obscurity. Say what you want about Gladiator, but that Best Picture champion did accomplish such feats, for better and worse… 

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Sophia Loren crowned again in Italy. And other Italian movie awards news.

by Nathaniel R

Sophia Loren just won her 7th Best Actress statue at home in Italy

Strangely we never saw any of the trades print a full list of Italy's David Di Donatello nominations this year, always just linking to the Italian site which does not have the list displayed in a way where you can copy and paste it easily. Alas. Hidden Away, a biopic of an obscure artist, led the nominations and came out the big winner too. Bad Tales was not far behind in the nomination count but won only one prize. Netflix's Italian original Rose Island had the third most nominations.

The awards were held a few days ago (oops) so it's past time to share the winners. Sophia Loren's Oscar hopes may not have panned out stateside but she won yet again in Italy for The Life Ahead. A few notes after the jump...

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2000: The Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Eartha Kitt in "The Emperor's New Groove"

Team Experience is revisiting the movies of 2000 as we approach Thursday's Smackdown

by Nick Taylor

Is it even worth arguing that The Emperor’s New Groove is the last great animated comedy Disney has made? They’ve certainly made funny movies since then, but have they done anything as purely interested in being funny, let alone made a film that finds so many different ways to be that? Especially given the hellish status of its production history and patently lower budget as a result of all that mess, the success of The Emperor's New Groove is legitimately miraculous (I will not be going over that fraught history in any detail here, but please do check out The Sweatbox, the documentary of the production made by Sting’s wife Trudie Styler). Yes, sometimes it can feel a bit cheap if you look too close or stare too long, but the buoyant colors and unabashedly cartoony style give its absurd silliness exactly the right spring in its step. It’s the film the comedic parts of Hercules wishes it could be, or if the Robin Williams parts of were Aladdin stretched into a whole feature, nailing a culture and era-specific setting and form stylized art that’s somehow in sync with a thoroughly modern comedic sensibility. Coming in at a brisk 78 minutes, you get the feeling of a film that’s packed as many jokes into itself as possible while being exactly as long as it needs to be, walking away with an incredible laugh-per-minute ratio.

What feels even surer is that The Emperor’s New Groove has the last great villains to grace a Disney animated film since it debuted... 

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Thoughts I had... while staring at the "Black Widow" posters

by Nathaniel R

You can hear that, right? It's a little bit like a loud whisper rather than the standard deafening shouts of mid May but summer movie season is calling. What that will mean this year is anyone's guess with the pandemic having wreaked havoc on viewing habits, moviegoing, and theatrical releases. But we've been inundated with new trailers and now we're getting the usual promotions of character posters. Hollywood hopes you'll go back to the movies. (Or do they, since they're so obsessed with building their streaming services). So let's talk the long delayed not-quite-upon-us Black Widow which hits in July by way of its character posters. 

Whenever we're short on time we like to do these 'thoughts i had' and present them unedited as they come though these posters are kind of plain so it's not giving us much to think about...

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