Doris Day @ 100: 'With Six You Get Eggroll'

Team Experience has been celebrating Doris Day for her Centennial. 

by Nathaniel R

Most careers peter out. Not so with Doris Day's. The most bankable actress of the first half of the 1960s chose to wrap it up at the first real sign that her popularity was waning. Her last top ten of the year hit was the bizarre comedy The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) but her last film, a blended family comedy called With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), was also a hit albeit not as big as her usual successes. The 1960s were tumultuous on all fronts including ideas about sexuality. The media became snide about Day, infamously dubbing her "The World's Oldest Virgin".

In retrospect, with only anecdotal history to go on, it's fascinating that Doris Day was supposedly rejected on these grounds when Julie Andrews, the box office queen of the second half of the 1960s, was not exactly a repudiation of the Day persona; sunny, funny, wholesome, short-haired musical blonde whose chemistry with male co-stars was undeniable but hardly horny...

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25th Anniversary: "The Portrait of a Lady"

by Nick Taylor

Happy Holidays! We are celebrating a very dear, tumultuous season - awards season - and the current wave of critics prizes has left us with some very exciting developments. It’s perhaps not the biggest shock that Jane Campion’s austere, sensual Western The Power of the Dog has become such a critical darling. It’s the first time in nearly two decades that one of Campion’s phone is in serious consideration but the film’s remarkable showing with awards bodies and the sheer number of Best Director wins she’s accrued are both tremendously deserved and, given the overall trajectory of her career, something of a surprise. 

Releasing her first film since 2009’s Bright Star (and after showrunning the acclaimed series Top of the Lake for two seasons), Campion’s favor with the Academy and critics at large has shifted wildly over the years. As rapturously as The Piano was received, her 1996 bold, purposefully hard-edged adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady scuttered a lot of that goodwill, and as abrasive as that film is, I can’t for the life of me understand why this torpedoed her prestige reputation so badly...

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Streaming Roulette, Oct: The Manor, Black Widow, 'Just a Girl' and more...

New month and a... oops, we're approaching the halfway mark. How did that happen? It's past time for another round of Streaming Roulette where we point out a handful or two of random titles that are streaming and just for fun, freeze frame them at totally random places in the scroll bar...

I brought a little something to get the party started...

THE MANOR on Prime
Barbara Hershey stars in this new horror film about a woman convinced that residents of a nursing home are being killed. Bruce Davison co-stars so you get two 1990s Oscar nominees in this new film from a director named Axelle Carolyn...

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Linkraiser

• Vanity Fair must read profile of Norwegian star Anders Danielsen Lie (Oslo August 31st, Bergman Island, Worst Person in the World) who has a day job that you won't believe
• The Guardian wonderful interview with Barbara Hershey who talks Beaches, Hannah and Her Sisters, Black Swan, and her new film The Manor
• /Film because everything is franchiseable, even within franchises, Kathryn Hahn may be getting her own Agatha Harkness show after the success of WandaVision.

More after the jump including Hellraiser remake, Sutton Foster's hobby, Adele's transatlantic comeback, Madonna's concert, and Kirsten Dunst at home... 

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Horror Actressing: Barbara Hershey in "Insidious"

by Jason Adams

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On Wednesday the great Barbara Hershey will be celebrating her 72nd birthday, and per usual once an actress hits a certain age what's the genre that picks up the slack? The "disreputable" Horror genre,  that's who, always there to welcome these great talents into its warm, slimy embrace. I simply don't know how one could call one's self an "actressexual" and not be appreciative of all the meaty roles this genre's afforded actresses that nobody else is throwing their way. Yeah yeah maybe they're not always Chekov, but the work is there and the focus is often on women's stories and relationships, and great actresses can make anything sing.

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Ten years ago Hershey hit hard with two prime examples of this -- I'm not going to fall down the rabbit hole of whether Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a horror film (it is) though, because I want to focus on the other one, one which gifted Hershey with one of the decade's greatest scares...

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