Say A Prayer For "Serenity"

by Jason Adams

Although I don't think it's ever spoken in the film it's hard not to have the "Serenity Prayer" -- God grant me the serenity, wisdom, change, courage, check and etc -- echoing in your cavernous, more cavernous by the second, head while watching Serenity, writer-director Steven Knight's nervous-breakdown-put-to-film. Starring Matthew McConaughey as the hard-drinking and hard-sexing good ol' boy in paradise called Baker Dill (and really we all knew it was only a matter of time before Matthew McConaughey played a character called "Baker Dill" right?) watching Serenity is, well, an experience that calls for prayer. Any prayer. An exorcism, even.

I realize at this point, with these balls-deep references to demon possessions and nervous breakdowns, you're probably thinking that Serenity sounds like a miserable experience. It's not...

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Four Random Thoughts on "Vice"

by Eric Blume

Adam McKay’s film Vice has been out in theaters for two weeks or so now, and as we head into Golden Globe weekend where it leads the nominations, we ought to discuss it a bit more. Here are some thoughts about the film, which do carry SPOILERS, not about story points (as unfortunately these things really happened), but about just how truly odd this film is in so many ways...

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Coal in our stocking. 'Worst' of the Year

Each day a different year in review list. Here's Nathaniel R...

2018 was unpleasant in so many real life ways that grousing about unpleasant things within our favorite escape hatch from reality seems ungrateful. By and large, we love the movies here at TFE and I think I speak for most of the team in saying that we can all pretty much find something to love even in the worst ones. Nevertheless, allow me a quick exorcism of the things I disliked the most this year to get them out of my system. A very important caveat though: As my own boss I can skip whichever films I have no interest in or which receive intense critical drubbings. Therefore my "worsts" are rarely the worsts and sometimes not even terrible just unsatisfying, if you catch the drift. But these films and performances just didn't work for me or actively discouraged benefit of the doubt.

Much kvetching after the jump...

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Showbiz History: Marsha marries Neil, Barbra is "Guilty," and Blue is the Warmest Color

7 random things that happened on this day (October 25th) in showbiz history

Neil Simon & Marsha Mason

1881 Pablo Picasso is born in Malaga Spain. He's been played onscreen by everyone from Antonio Banderas to Anthony Hopkins. Okay so just guys named Tony... never mind. 

1973 Legendary Playwright Neil Simon marries the then little-known actress Marsha Mason, who is acting in his Broadway production "The Good Doctor" just months after his first wife's death. Mason's screen career takes off the very next year with an Oscar nomination for Cinderella Liberty. Then she & Simon make films together that Oscar really loves for the next decade like Goodbye Girl, Only When I Laugh, and Chapter Two... 

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Months of Meryl: Evening (2007)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.  

#36 —Lila Ross, an old friend of a dying woman.

JOHN: While Meryl Streep is fiercely protective of her and her family’s privacy, she made no secret about what she got her daughter Mamie Gummer for her 24th birthday: Lajos Koltai’s Evening. Adapted from Susan Minot’s 1998 novel by the author herself, along with writer Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Evening follows Vanessa Redgrave’s Ann, an elderly woman drifting in and out of consciousnesses on her deathbed as she recalls a distant memory from her long-ago youth. That memory stars Claire Danes as a twentysomething Ann on the day of her best friend Lila’s (Mamie Gummer) wedding to a man she does not love. Ann, Lila, and the latter’s brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy) are instead infatuated with Harris (Patrick Wilson), a strapping doctor that each will either screw or regret not screwing...

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