Smackdown '02: Meryl, Julianne, CZJ, Queen Latifah "and" Kathy Bates

The Supporting Actress Smackdown series picks an Oscar vintage and explores.

THE NOMINEES Today's topic: 2002 which featured the movies Adaptation, The Hours, About Schmidt, and Best Picture champ Chicago.  This very starry field of much-beloved actresses (all but one are now Oscar winners) deliver a juicy collection of characters: a horny mother-of-the-groom, a suicidal 50s housewife, an opportunistic prison warden, a fictionalized non-fiction writer, and a jazzbaby murderess.

THE PANEL  Here to talk about these 2002 divas and their movies are comedian/writer Joel Kim Booster, comedian/writer Matt Rogers, Variety's Artisan's editor Jazz Tangcay, Vox's critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff, and lip sync assassin Ben Yahr. And, as ever, your host at The Film Experience, Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

2002
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen'

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week a new documentary about transgender representation on screen, streaming on Netflix.

By Glenn Dunks

The Celluloid Closet casts a long shadow over queer cinema in the 25 years since its release when it became an arthouse box office and Emmy-nominated sensation. That film by Rob Epstein (a two-time Oscar winner) and Jeffrey Friedman opened the world of film to new textural readings that many LGBTIQ viewers had known and talked about for years but remained largely quiet in the mainstream while traversing through to the then budding space that queer filmmakers and stories had carved by 1995. And for those young enough to come to the film as a budding LGBTIQ cinephile, it made for a hell of an introduction to movies.

There are always going to be gaps in a film like The Celluloid Closet and the new Netflix documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen from director Sam Feder attempts to fill them. All that and add a quarter of a century of cultural and societal changes on top... 

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The Furniture: Architecture of Anxiety in The Golem

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

 by Daniel Walber

The story goes that Paul Wegener first heard of the Golem while shooting The Student of Prague (1913). Though he was clearly caught by the story, Wegener may also have been entranced by a glimpse of the old Josefov, Prague’s Jewish ghetto. Dating back to the Middle Ages, the neighborhood was almost entirely demolished between 1893 and 1913 to make room for Paris-style boulevards. Inspired, Wegener made two (now-lost) Golem movies during World War One - though not in Prague.

By the time he started on The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), the world had changed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone. Prague was the capital of brand-new Czechoslovakia, a Czechoslovak-speaking nation - which would be complicated for its mostly German-speaking Jews. Frankly, Wegener could have set his Golem movie in 1920 if he wanted...

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Horror Actressing: Janet Leigh in "Psycho"

by Jason Adams

Sixty years ago today Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho premiered at the DeMille Theater, located at 701 7th Avenue in New York City. That theater, just north of Times Square, no longer exists; funny enough, given the substance they used as a substitute for blood in the film's infamous shower scene, there's a Hershey's Chocolate store located there today. I wonder what they'd think if I went in there and started spraying chocolate syrup all over myself screaming, "Oh god! Mother! Blood! Blood!" I digress. (Do I ever.) Point being it's the right moment to finally devote some "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" to the shower's favorite Scream Queen, Janet Leigh.

But I want to take Marion Crane out of the shower. She deserves it, sixty years on...

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Queen Latifah's "Bessie"

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, when watching a particularly starry TV production, whether it's a movie or a miniseries, one wonders how it might have impacted the Oscar race if had been released on the big screen. Would Mike Nichols' epic Angels in America have made Jeffrey Wright an Oscar nominee back in 2003? Could Drew Barrymore have snagged Sandra Bullock's Oscar if Grey Gardens had gone to movie theaters? With the 2002 Supporting Actress Smackdown nearly upon us, I began to wonder how Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah might have figured in the 2015 Oscar race with her Bessie. After all, that HBO film is one of AMPAS's favorite types of buzzy titles, a famous musician's biopic with a cast full of prestigious names…

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