The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Let's begin with a man and his dog. First, the dog. Woola is an unsightly creature but oddly endearing. He's the size of a pony but he looks more like a lizard or a toad albeit one with six visible legs and hundreds of sharp teeth. He reads all dog though -- a mutant pug. His assignment and then devotion is to guard the human prisoner John Carter (Taylor Kitsch).
John Carter of Virginia has been magically transported to Barsoom (aka Mars) and the green martians who discover him don't know what to make of him though they love his mad jumping skill. Mars' gravity makes John Carter the Earthling a superman, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. When John Carter tries to escape his prison early in the film, he finds it impossible to elude Woola whose multiple legs carry him across the Martian desert in super sonic zig-zag fashion, clouds of dust trailing behind him like a Road Runner cartoon. The adorable mutant pug always appears wherever bouncy John Carter is about to land. Neither man nor beast are moving in a circular fashion but they're not getting anywhere. Eventually they'll be right back where they started.
Points of origin are important. Home, and our journeys to and from it, are at the heart of John Carter's multi-limbed adventure.
"Let's make ourselves a Marilyn"Since so many of you seemed to be watching Smash judging on response to the pilot episode, and since its a fictional show about a possibly real musical about a very real departed movie star, I thought I'd write it up weekly. But Oscar is a needy lover and hogged all my time. Now there are so many episodes to discuss! To get caught up we'll do two doubles, so here's the first of them.
1.2 "The Callback" In the second episode, we were both thrilled and shocked to find that they didn't drag out the "who will they cast as Marilyn Monroe?" drama for weeks on end. Though obviously they could and will revisit it since we're a long way from opening night. Both girls, Ivy (Megan Hilty) and Karen (Katharine McPhee) endured torturous waiting and callbacks while the power players made up their mind. Ivy it was. The best sign that the show is serious about being an actual show about the business of Broadway theater rather than a show about whatever the hell it feels like being about in any given scene (Glee... sigh) was that we actually see Julia and Tom (Debra Messing and Christian Borle) toiling away at work wondering about structure and characters and arguing about song order and even the process itself. You can't just write a musical by stringing songs together. The worst sign for the freshman show is the insistence on Julia's adoption subplot. Isn't birthing a brand new musical enough parenting?
Jack: It's a big risk Eileen: Nothing's Bigger Than Broadway! Jack: I'm aware.
Set List: Blondie's "Call Me" (McPhee), "Let Me Be Your Star" (McPhee/Hilty), "20th Century Fox Mambo (McPhee), Carrie Underwood's "Crazy Dreams" (Hilty) Pop Culture and Movie References: vampire craze, Clash By Night, Monkey Business Best Moment: Ivy practicing her Monroeisms "thank you ever so" Anjelica Awesomeness: Huston's condescension towards her ex's new blonde plaything "We've met" / "I don't think so" / [mocking her with squeaky bimbo voice] "I doooo" Gay Gay Gay "Nothing's bigger than Broadway!" Curtain Call: Megan Hilty does a stunning cabaret rendition of "Crazy Dreams" to close the episode.
1.3 "Enter Joe DiMaggio" In the third episode Karen gets invited to participate in the workshops as part of the chorus and she takes a trip home to Iowa for a babyshower. Things get more complicated when Michael (Will Chase), a rising actor, signs on as Joe DiMaggio and Tom's assistant Ellis starts feeling proprietary about the musical (his casual comment in the pilot sparked the whole thing) and steals Julia's notebook. The best thing about both of these developments is that they make Julia (Debra Messing) way more interesting as a character because she has such irrationally strong reactions to both, one being an ex-lover the other being someone she just bristles at instinctually. In fact, Messing really steps up in this episode making her own case for an Emmy run. (Julia is a surprisingly thorny and multi-faceted character by episode 3. Not at all what we were expecting after the pilot.) Emmys for everyone!
Megan Hilty as Ivy Lynn as Marilyn & Will Chase as Michael Swift asJoe DiMaggio
We're noone you've ever seen Movie stars don't live anywhere here Except on the local drive-in screen ♬ "
Set List: Bruno Mars "Grenade" (Chase), Gretchen Wilson's "Red Neck Woman" (McPhee) "Mr and Mrs Smith" Pop Culture and Movie References: Gone With the Wind, The Seven Year Itch, My Fair Lady, Sinatra, Siegfried & Roy Best Moment: Julia's intense jarring switch from painful confession to Tom to bitchy showdown with Ellis Anjelica Awesomeness: Huston's Eileen Rand is really a marvel of a character creation. She has Huston's usual dragon lady severity but there are so many exquisite playful beats that the character feels unpredictable even when she's working a repetitive "bit" like throwing drinks in her ex-husband's face. Their dinner scene together is filled with weirdly flirtatious hostility, giving off the distinct impression that they once had great sex but always enjoyed pissing the other off. "You have exquisite taste. When you weren't cheating on me it was one of the things I really enjoyed about you." Curtain Call: "Mr and Mrs Smith"... I'm more and more convinced that this needs to be an actual musical on Broadway. Can this series be about a different new musical every season and put it on Broadway directly afterwards? I mean... many new musicals don't have songs as uniformly strong as the ones this show is cranking out.
LATER THIS WEEK... we'll discuss "The Cost of Art" and tonight's episode "Let's Be Bad". If you're not watching, start. Good show. You can get caught up on Hulu or iTunes.
Woody Harrelson hits movie screens with such galvanizing force in Rampart, you might be surprised that Hollywood didn't cower and hand him an Oscar nomination, trembling. It's getting harder and harder to remember that he first came to fame as lovable naive "Woody" on Cheers. His turn in Rampart is closer to that worldly carnality from The People Vs. Larry Flynt but drained of any subversive joy.
Woody is playing an obstinate corrupt cop named Dave Brown. Brown's moniker within the precinct is the not-so-charming "Date Rape" which he supposedly garnered from the killing of a rapist years earlier. It's a piece of street justice that he will neither confirm nor deny but it sounds entirely plausible given his disdain for legality.
When Brown is caught on tape beating a suspect, he's put on probation. The Rampart Precinct has abundant PR problems and Brown, who is loudly homophobic, xenophobic and racist ("I hate all people equally," as he explains it) is one of their largest ones. So begins his downward spiral. It's not just his dirty cop behavior. His personal life is even messier. Brown is an unrepentant womanizer and in addition to one night stands (Broadway wonder Audra McDonald in a memorable cameo) and randy lawyers (Robin Wright, sensational) he's still living with and sleeping with his two ex-wives (Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon), who are sisters. The women he's not sleeping he's either purposely or accidentally antagonizing like his lesbian daughter Helen (Brie Larson from United States of Tara).
"How's school?" he asks her, remembering to play Dad.
"It sucks," she replies more exhausted than angry. "It's full of candy-ass future fags and dykes like me. Those are your words not mine."
Albert Nobbs is story of a woman living as a man in Ireland in the early 20th century. Albert (Oscar nominated Glenn Close) serves as a waiter at a little upscale hotel. His world is so small that he barely leaves the hotel and hardly ever utters full sentences to anyone but himself. Those private conversations generally involve the counting of shillings. Nobbs' inner life isn't quite as small. The waiter dreams of saving up enough to buy a small tobacco shop and run his own little business. When he meets a painter by the name of Mr. Hubert Page (Oscar nominated Janet McTeer) whose situation is not dissimilar but whose emotional life is obviously richer, his eyes are suddenly opened to new possibilities, including romance... or at least cohabitation. But dreams aren't easy when a flea in your undergarments can give you away, when your career could be finished with one misstep around a wealthy patron, when a stroke of bad luck could put your employer out of business, or when the woman you set your sights on for companionship (Mia Wasikowska) might not have the purest of motives in returning your affection.
You know what's just as a hard as opening a tobacco shop when you're a woman living as a man in early 20th century Ireland? Getting your dream movie made when you're an actress of a certain age in the early 21st century... [More]
If you've ever wanted to see Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender or Channing Tatum punched in the face repeatedly, HAYWIRE is your movie. At one time or another, the actors take quite a believable pummelling from rogue CIA agent Mallory (Gina Carano) in Steven Soderbergh's experimental action picture. Soderbergh first spotted his new muse, a real life mixed martial arts champ, while channel-surfing and was so transfixed he ended up building a feature around her. 'Why can't there be a female James Bond?' went his reasoning. He must have meant it in a loose sense for Mallory is no Bond. She's not super verbal, isn't at all comfortable at elegant black tie events, and has no discernible signature catchphrase. She orders no martinis, neither shaken nor stirred.
Carano's lack of acting experience shows when she's not fighting but thankfully that isn't often. Soderbergh, ever a resourceful director, keeps forcing her to dodge bullets, fists, and sharp objects...
Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 9:00AM 
Points of origin are important. Home, and our journeys to and from it, are at the heart of John Carter's multi-limbed adventure.
