Dorothy Dandridge @ 100: "Carmen Jones"

Team Experience is revisiting a few Dorothy Dandridge movies for her centennial

by Baby Clyde

Groucho Marks famously described Grace Kelly’s Best Actress win at the 1954 Oscars as ‘The greatest robbery since Brinks’. I think we can all agree that a terrible crime was committed, but Judy Garland wasn’t the only victim on the night of March 30th, 1955. Dorothy Dandridge was a sensation in Carmen Jones becoming the first Black woman to receive a Best Actress nomination. In any other year, her loss would be seen as a huge scandal but because of Judy’s legendary star turn in A Star Is Born the fact that Ms Dandridge was also deserving has been almost entirely overshadowed...

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Missing Cameron Diaz on her 50th Birthday

by Nathaniel R

image from Cameron's instagram. We added the birthday wish ;)

Do you remember the first time you saw Cameron Diaz onscreen? Her debut The Mask (1994) was a smash hit but believe it or not I missed that one in theaters despite being a weekly moviegoer by then. I first saw her in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) a quickly-beloved movie though I can't say she was my focal point. It was only years later when I realized how deftly she was navigating a tricky part...

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25th Anniversary: "Face/Off"

by Nick Taylor

Yeah, that’s right motherfuckers, we are talking about ci-ne-MA! We’re celebrating the 25th anniversary of Chinese action auteur John Woo’s third English-language film, the 11th highest grossing film of 1997, a lone Oscar nominee in the now-subsumed Sound Editing category (may her memory be eternal) that was inevitably bulldozed by Titanic. It's one of the most voluptuously insane movies Nicolas fucking Cage has ever appeared in; Face/Off, where they take the face OFF.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been proselytizing about this film for years, ever since I first saw it with my sister Melina and some friends of our  about 8 years ago. The 25th anniversary was an ideal opportunity to pop in the Blu-Ray Tommy got me for Christmas and finally share (he might say inflict) its majesty with him. Our roommates even joined us, and I had so much fucking fun watching them experience it for the first time...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "I Could Go On Singing"

Team Experience revisited nine Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nick Taylor on her final film.

Judy’s last film was always going to be an event. Released six years before her death to positive reviews but poor box office, I Could Go On Singing plays like a morbid echo of her final months. But for all the film’s metatextual readings into Garland’s life and career, this isn’t a self-conscious reckoning or farewell from a beloved star to her audience. Her regular talk of staging yet another comeback, even after her brief and very publically heralded casting in Valley of the Dolls before being canned by the studio, gives I Could Go On Singing an aura of lost time and unrealized potential heavier than the film’s bittersweet ending implies. I Could Go On Singing leaves Garland as alone as she’s ever been but still singing with all her heart, and it’s a shame she never got to strut it for the camera again...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Judgment at Nuremberg"

Team Experience is revisiting nine Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Christopher James on the star's second Oscar nomination.

Judy Garland received a Supporting Actress nomination in 1961 for her three scene performance in "Judgment at Nuremberg."

With a career that spanned over three decades, there were many points in which Judy Garland had to reinvent her image, intentionally or unintentionally. The other articles in this centennial celebration have examined Judy as the child star, the musical superstar and the complicated movie star. In conjunction with Claudio’s piece on A Star is Born, this later period of Garland’s career sought to deflect from her personal life through focusing on her powerful dramatic chops. Stanley Kramer’s Judgment in Nuremberg cast Garland in a new light… a supporting actress. However, her role as Irene Hoffman, a woman imprisoned as a teen for violating “racial pollution” law, is not short on fireworks. Garland delivers an impressive and affecting performance in just three short scenes. It's hard to argue against that year's winner (Rita Moreno for West Side Story), but Garland more than earns her Oscar nomination, the second and final of her career...

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