How you holding up out there?

We're worried about everyone's mental health. How are you doing during this astonishingly strange moment in our collective history? What new things have you discovered about your home while shut in? Which things do you miss most about the outside world? How are you preventing feeling too isolated? Share tips in the comments.

As for us we're finding virtual happy hours with friends on zoom, skype, or facetime are helping a lot. As is chasing whatever filmic obsessions occur and list-making (April Foolish Oscar Predictions coming very soon... even though we really don't know which films will arrive this year given the shutdown).

Eric Rohmer Centennial: Six Moral Tales

by Eric Blume

Last weekend marked the 100th birthday of one of France’s greatest directors, Eric Rohmer, and we here at TFE figured that a nice way to celebrate him would be a look back at the six-film series that launched his career, the Six Moral Tales, which were released between 1962 and 1972.  

These films basically have the same plot:  a man obsessed or in love with one girl finds himself distracted by another woman, only to return to the first girl.  Rohmer uses this framework to examine the stunted male psyche, the rationalizations of behavior, and the mystery of love...

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Oscar's ridiculous accents

by Cláudio Alves

The Academy loves transformative performances, ones where an actor's chameleonic abilities are on full display. While the recent avalanche of biopics winning acting Oscars may suggest such dynamics are a recent phenomenon, it isn't so. Since the 20s, we've seen it happen regularly. Just look at Warner Baxter who won the second-ever Best Actor Oscar for putting on brown face and playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona. That particular example also brings up another favorite bit of acting work that the Academy seems to adore beyond reason – accents. Bad ones at that.

Some performers, like Meryl Streep, are brilliant at mimicking regional and personal accents, doing them so naturally that one forgets the artifice. Many others, can't be helped and often fail at the task. To be perfectly frank, I'm not a person that's much annoyed by bad accents onscreen. Nicole Kidman's American accent in The Portrait of a Lady is quite unconvincing, for instance, but I still consider it one of the actress' best works. That said, sometimes there are levels of incompetence too flagrant to ignore.

Such is the case of some Oscar champions, including a Best Actor winner whose efforts are cringe-worthy… 

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Posterized: The Wondrous Work of Ruth E Carter

For today's Posterized, a special birthday treat. We've only covered themes, sub-genres, directors and actors in this series so today a first... a costume designer. Today is the 60th birthday of Oscar winner Ruth E Carter (Black Panther) and she's designed so many important pictures over the years (including multiple Spike Lee classics) that she's definitely worth celebrating in this form.

We're still not over her bizarre Oscar snub for Dolemite Is My Name last season but let's look back on the whole feature film career in movie poster form.

How many of her 51 feature films have you seen? 

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Mirror, mirror on the wall…

by Cláudio Alves

In a career full of little gimlets of cinematic madness, The Lady from Shanghai is Orson Welles' most demented work. With an incomprehensible plot and a cast willing to go to the extremes of grotesque, it's a waking nightmare on celluloid. Through surrealism, Hollywood's most famous enfant terrible untethered himself from the demands of audiences and studios alike, spitting on their face as he went about it. The result is a film noir in the process of imploding unto itself, unencumbered by reality it projects shrapnel of shock and provocation every which way.

Beautiful stars turn into fleshy gargoyles and the dialogue gets increasingly florid, like drunken poetry coming directly from the pits of hell. Appropriately enough, an atmosphere of apocalyptic nihilism infects the hearts of everyone involved, onscreen characters and offscreen audiences alike. And then, this melodrama for the end of the world explodes into an ecstasy of beauty. As the lunatic plots converge and the characters reach their nasty apotheosis, Welles' venomous flower of a film loses itself in a hall of mirrors…

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