National Pet Week: "Sam" from I Am Legend

Team Experience is celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) this week. Here's Tony Ruggio...

With my third family dog growing up "Sydney"

I’ve always been a dog person. Some of my first memories are of rolling in the carpet at three years-old next to our first pekingese bruiser Gin Gin. His death at the hands of a roaming pack of stray dogs in our neighborhood was my first real brush with tragedy and emotional trauma. Two more family dogs would come and go over the next twenty-five years, each one’s passing more devastating than the last. 

It’s no surprise then that I would take to the tale of a man and his dog in 2007’s I Am Legend, or its inevitable conclusion. The movie itself is a flawed slice-of-apocalyptic-life blockbuster, a one-man show for Will Smith wherein he and German Shepherd Samantha roam a desolate New York City...  

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Review: "Normal People" on Hulu

By Spencer Coile 

To adapt a work of fiction is to play with fire. I can only imagine that nimbly capturing the spirit of the original text while imbuing it with new levels of creativity is no easy feat. Discourse surrounding literary adaptations usually focuses on how the movie or series fails the original text - either it doesn’t cover everything sufficiently (like The Time Traveler’s Wife, a personal tragedy), it overstays its welcome (The Handmaid’s Tale), or an abundance of creative liberties are taken (recently Little Fires Everywhere). Comparisons are easy to make, and book lovers are quick to critique. 

On its surface, Normal People, now streaming on Hulu, masquerades as a straightforward adaptation. Born from Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, it follows Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), two Irish secondary students who forge a connection despite their uneven social standings. The novel,  and now the BBC/Hulu limited series, chronicles their years-long relationship in all its complexities...

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Almost There: Harrison Ford in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

by Cláudio Alves

As we well know, AMPAS has major genre bias, preferring the prestigious quality of respectable dramas above everything else. Even when they decide to embrace a genre picture, there's a branch of the Academy that's always ready to turn their collective noses at them with unashamed snobbery. We're talking about the actors, whose distaste for anything remotely close to action movies, adventure, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and so forth, has robbed many great performers of the recognition they so richly deserve. Truth be told, this is a problem that goes beyond the Oscar voters and even affects popular views on the art of acting.

If you want a good example of this, look to the awards race of 1981, when Raiders of the Lost Ark was a major success with critics and audiences alike...

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Emmy Watch: Supporting Actress in a Comedy

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

We’re looking at another Emmy Awards category today – Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. This category has been overstuffed recently, offering a whopping eight nominees for two years in a row but half of last year’s slate isn’t eligible this time around, with six-time nominee Anna Chlumsky (Veep) and new additions Sian Clifford and Olivia Colman (Fleabag) out as a result of their shows ending and Sarah Goldberg (Barry) off the ballot until whenever her show returns...

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National Pet Week: “Si” and “Am” from Lady and the Tramp

Team Experience will be celebrating pets at the movies this week. Here's Lynn Lee...

My cats!

Last fall, my husband and I adopted a pair of Siamese kittens from a local rescue organization.  It was my husband’s idea – I was hesitant at first, despite the extreme cuteness of their pictures and videos.  Not because I don’t like cats; to the contrary, my husband had already converted me into a cat lover with our previous, gone but still-missed pair.  No, the real if silly reason, as I explained sheepishly, was that every time I thought of Siamese cats – especially in twos – all I could think of was the devilish duo from Lady and the Tramp (1955). While I hadn’t seen the movie in years, I vividly remembered two blue-eyed hellions who teamed up to torment poor innocent Lady and frame her as the “bad dog” she assuredly was not.  I also remembered a sibilant signature song that I was pretty sure had not aged well after a half century, even if the movie itself remained one of my Disney favorites...

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