Winona Ryder @ 50: "Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice"

Team Experience is celebrating Winona Ryder this week as she turns 50.

by Ginny O'Keefe

He’s the ghost with the most, babe. It’s Beetlejuice. The wacky, morbid and over the top 1988 Tim Burton joint  revolves around Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) a couple living in an idyllic Connecticut countryside. They are tragically killed after their car swerves off a bridge and into a river. The thing is the film keeps following them and their perspective. Tracing their steps all the way back home which is when they realize…they’re dead! Once home they discover a book titled "Handbook for the Recently Deceased". Soon enough their house is sold to the Deetz family. Charles, his wife Delia and their daughter Lydia all moving out into the country from New York City. They begin to tear apart the house and make it their own. Barbara and Adam want them gone so it’s time to start haunting. Eventually they turn to someone (or something in the form of Michael Keaton) they never should have for help: Betelgeuse (pronunciation: beetle juice). 

The greatness of this film is its supreme wackiness. Nothing is too out there for this movie. It’s got sandworms, moving sculptures, Harry Belafonte musical numbers, dead caseworkers, Catherine O’Hara wearing gloves as a headband, goofy production design, and a perfect balancing of message and escapism. My favorite character in the film is Lydia played by the great Winona Ryder...

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50th Anniversary: "Play Misty for Me"

by Nick Taylor

Happy 50th anniversary to Play Misty for Me! The 1971 directorial debut of notoriously productive actor/director/writer/composer Clint Eastwood received a new wave of attention earlier this year in the wake of lead actress Jessica Walter’s still-unthinkable death at age 80. Nathaniel mentioned the film in his in memoriam piece, but with its anniversary upon us it seemed right to give the film a deeper dive. The story is a tale as old as time - boy meets girl, boy and girl have a liaison, boy realizes girl is dangerously invested in their relationship and that one of them will probably die. Fatal Attraction would take that fable in an iron grip once it hit the screens, imbuing it with its own peculiarities, but Play Misty for Me is very much its own beast. That’s partially the beauty of launching before the film that will eventually define your subgenre...

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Deborah Kerr @ 100: The legend, the legacy, "The Innocents"

by Cláudio Alves

For decades she held the record of being the most Oscar-nominated actress never to have won the statuette, with six unsuccessful nominations. In a piteous gesture, the Academy granted her an honorary award in 1994. How fitting that Deborah Kerr received such tribute from the hands of Glenn Close, the current holder of the older actress' erstwhile record. Considering this trivia, it'd be easy to remember Kerr's legacy through the prism of Oscar history. That would be a mistake. I state it as someone who first encountered the British thespian through her nominated roles, constructing a mental image limited by AMPAS' taste. As it turns out, despite her numerous nods, the most outstanding Kerr performances weren't so highly celebrated by the Academy. Simply told, that Oscar-y sextet doesn't do her justice. 

To celebrate Deborah Kerr's centennial, let's remember her range beyond golden laurels, her incandescent talent, the power she brought to her films. Let's honor her by reflecting on the actress' greatest work - the nightmare that is The Innocents…

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Weekend @ 10: A Modern Gay Classic

by Cláudio Alves

Ten years ago, Andrew Haigh's Weekend opened in American theaters after a long travail through international film festivals. The director's second feature put his name on the map and opened up an artistic path that would bring us such precious cinematic gems as 45 Years and Lean on Pete, as well as the televisual delights of Looking. Contextualizing the work in such ways makes it seem even smaller than it already is, a miniature of gay urbanite life and the emotional ties that blossom from a night of casual sex. Despite the limited scope of all his projects, everything Haigh has done since Weekend feels much larger, more conspicuously ambitious. And yet, a decade later, that small British indie still stands as the director's most remarkable achievement…

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Luca Guadagnino @ 50: A Trilogy of Desire

Happy belated 50th to Luca Guadagnino.

by Cláudio Alves

Like many a director in film history, Luca Guadagnino's cinema is characterized by common themes, through lines transversal to all his works, though more evident in some than others. During the release and promotional tour of Call Me By Your Name, the Italian auteur came to realize that his last three films could be construed as an unofficial trilogy of desire, though he later repudiated the notion. Nevertheless, akin to Bergman's Silence of God tercet, Guadagnino's I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name complete a three-part thesis in cinematic form. Instead of the Swedish master's spiritual dread, we have a multifaceted portrait of human desire as a force so great it's both overwhelming and life-changing, magical and terrifying, a blessing, a curse, perchance a deliverance…

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