Introducing the Smackdown Panel for '00

Have you lined up your screenings to play along at home with the Supporting Actress Smackdown? The Smackdown and its companion podcast arrive in two weeks time. This next episode discusses the films and performances of 2000 so we'll be watching Almost Famous, Pollock, Chocolat, and Billy Elliot. Your votes count so hurry up and get them in. Let's meet your fellow panelists, shall we?

PLEASE WELCOME NEW GUESTS...

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Back to the Movie Theaters: Lynn Sees "Gunda"

By Lynn Lee

a sad strip mall interior for happy experiences

Until yesterday, the last movie I saw in a theater was Emma – on March 7, 2020, just before the reality of COVID-19 descended on me and most people I knew.  If you’d told me that the next time I’d be in a movie theater would be nearly 14 months later, in a tiny, crappy arthouse joint in a suburban Virginia strip mall, and that the movie would be an idiosyncratic black-and-white documentary about a brood sow, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.  And yet that is exactly where I found myself Sunday afternoon.  

It wasn’t the return to moviegoing I’d envisioned since my husband and I got our second Pfizer dose in early April...

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Marvel Cinematic Universe - New tease and theatrical dates

by Nathaniel R

Marvel Studios released a big "back to the movies" video to celebrate the communal experience of movie-going. You get tiny slivers of their past "phases" and sneak peaks of all four films coming in 2021 except the Christmas-time Spider-Man (so we'll assume there isn't yet footage available). The most "exciting" of which for all it's 'what will this be like?' mystery is The Eternals directed by freshly double-Oscared Chloe Zhao from. We get some wide shots but no glimpses of the action except Angelina Jolie raising a sword. It will be good to have her back on the big screen where she belongs! The "tease" and release dates after the jump...

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John Waters @ 75: A Dirty Shame (2004)

Team Experience has been celebrating John Waters for his 75th birthday.

By Ben Miller

I like to think John Waters had enough of what people have been expecting from him.  Following a slightly more conventionally commercial run of films with Hairspray onward, Waters returned to his sex-addled farcical roots with 2004’s A Dirty Shame.  I love the idea of a fan of Cry-Baby showing up to this film expecting something along the same lines, only to be presented with something much closer to Desperate Living.

A Dirty Shame follows the residents of Hartford Road as either "neuters", a group of puritanical sex haters, or "perverts", a group of sex addicts with unique fetishes brought on by accidental concussions...

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Other women who should have won Best Director

by Cláudio Alves

At this year's Oscar ceremony, Chloé Zhao became only the second woman in Academy history to conquer the Best Director prize. The second one in 93 years. She follows in the steps of Kathryn Bigelow, whose Hurt Locker, like Nomadland, also won the Best Picture trophy. As a longtime proponent of the importance of women directors in film history, I rejoice at this result. However, the victory is bittersweet, a reminder of the chronic lack of recognition for these filmmakers. Many other women have deserved to win the Best Director Oscar across the years…

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