Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 1:08PM by Eric Blume
This too-short Oscar season has all of us firing on all cylinders here at The Film Experience, so sadly we can't engage in a full Supporting Actress Smackdown this week. (The series will return soon though) In its absence, and to encourage hearing from all of you, Nathaniel has asked me to submit my personal Smackdown ballot and let the chips fall where they may...
Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 10:30AM Please welcome guest contributor Rita Maricone-Dorsch...
Last night, I sat down to revisit Jojo Rabbit, this time with my son, who is equal parts World War II aficionado, Marvel fanboy, and already-pretty-woke tween. Taika Watiti's self-labeled 'anti-hate satire' seemed custom made for his sensibilities. But why do you like this movie so much, he asked me.
I've been wrestling with this question since the film's release, and since my own impression of it differed so drastically from most reviews, including the positive takes. I didn't see a too-tame provocation that poked easy fun at Nazis. I didn't see a project intended to humanize bigoted white men. I'm not sure it's even best described as an anti-hate satire. To me, Jojo Rabbit was a sweet little allegory about a dangerously underrepresented and urgent subject: the emotional education of boys...
Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 8:45AM by Nathaniel R
By now you've heard that one of the last* true superstars of Classic Hollywood has left the Earth. Three-time Oscar nominee Kirk Douglas, best known to modern audiences as "Spartacus" and the father of Oscar winner Michael Douglas has passed away at the age of...103 (!). We've written about his films before for his centennial (you know how we like centennials here at TFE) so if you're interested we have pieces on Spartacus, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lust for Life, and multiple pieces on The Bad and the Beautiful.
*This leaves only Sidney Poitier and several female stars -- De Havilland, Novak, Johns, Saint, Lansbury, Moreno -- standing from Hollywood's Golden Age which is roughly considered to be the very late 1920s through the early 1960s stretching from the chaotic advent of sound through the tumultous time frame when "New Hollywood" took over. "Oldest living screen actors" post here.
Kirk Douglas, Old Hollywood, RIP Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 11:45PM Today the Academy and the show's producers Lynette Howell Taylor and Stephanie Allain announced the latest batch of presenters: Jane Fonda, Josh Gad, Tom Hanks, Oscar Isaac, Sandra Oh, Natalie Portman, Chris Rock and Taika Waititi.
We are especially excited to see Fonda...
Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 10:01PM This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.
This year, The Lion King joins Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) as only the third fully animated feature to be nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. I’ve read that tidbit in several places and assume that it must be true, according to people who know better than I do. I wasn’t sure why the movie that defeated Kubo, the 2016 remake of The Jungle Book, did not belong on this list, until I remembered that Mowgli was played by a living, breathing actor, Neel Sethi. Actually, what I mean is that I remembered Mowgli was in the movie, period. And I actually didn’t remember, I had to look it up. The Jungle Book, like an incredible number of films nominated for Best Visual Effects since the category got expanded to a five-wide field in 2010, made almost zero lasting impression on me. Like Best Original Song, it’s a division where I gladly release myself from seeing all the nominees. So, sorry, Lion King. Sorry, Endgame. Don’t get smug, Rise of Skywalker, you weren’t much better. And, until I proposed this series to Nathaniel, which partly exists to fill my own viewing gaps, sorry to Stuart Little, a movie that really tested my sense of the line between animation and visual effects, especially in the context of 1999. That line only gets blurrier as time goes on, so I thought I’d dig in a little...
