Best Shot Index: The act of looking in 'The Last Picture Show'

by Nathaniel R

Bronze Medal choice for Best Shot

The power of Peter Bogdanovich's unassuming breakout feature, The Last Picture Show (1971) sneaks up on you. It's often called a coming-of-age film which is not inaccurate but... coming to what? and of which age? It's mosaic of characters ranges in age from teenagers to senior citizens and at times it feels like they're not so much coming into something as never leaving it; They're lost souls in a ghost town. If you've never seen the film you might assume that a movie theater is a main character but not really. The theater is just one of the haunts that the central trio of high school seniors (Jeff Bridgess, Cybill Shepherd, and Timothy Bottoms) kill time at. They're less interested in the movie than in making out in the back row, anyway...

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Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: The Last Picture Show (1971)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives tonight. It's focused on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

Bogdanovich drops the audience inside a cold domestic scene early in The Last Picture Show. In the Farrow household, resentments and disappointments permeate the air, each individual stuck in their little bubble of dissatisfied placidity. Together yet alone, the Farrows' silence is a nervous thing, like a fly's wilting buzz as it suffocates in insecticide. Perchance to disrupt the muted disquiet, the matriarch enters her daughter's room and sparks a conversation. She tries to advise the younger woman, so she doesn't make the same mistakes her mother did. Mistakes like staying in their small Texan town, dying from boredom like the fly dies from bug spray.

"Everything's flat and empty here. There's nothing to do." – says Ellen Burstyn's Lois, her words reverberating through the film's most potent images…

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Best Shot Picks and Nathaniel's Choice from 'The Godfather'

by Nathaniel R

Our film title this week on Hit Me With Your Best Shot was in honor of the restoration of The Godfather (1972) for its 50th Anniversary. Here are the Best Shot choices from seven participants and my own towards the end of the post. Click on the images that follow to read the corresponding articles. I'll be "talking" inbetween the images about a film I've never written about before (!) as I select my own... 

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Kathleen Turner and Straight Camp

by Nathaniel R

Romancing the Stone's most famous sight gag. © 20th Century Fox

At the risk of accidental humiliation, like having a stranger end up face down in your lap due to a freak mudslide, I would like to propose a theory that Romancing the Stone (1984) is straight camp. Since no one can agree on a definition of "camp", let alone a heternormative variation on such a traditionally gay style / point of view, it's a risk. But looking back at Robert Zemeckis' classic adventure rom-com, the word 'camp' if not 'campy' kept coming to mind.

Right from its defining cheesy prologue, a heightened visualization of the last pages of a romance novel's already purple prose, it's an artificial wonder...

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Oscar Volley: Best Cinematography could make History

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Cláudio Alves, Nick Davis, Ben Miller, and Eurocheese discussing the Best Cinematography race.

CLÁUDIO ALVES: From an aged future that looks like the ancient past to a black-and-white nightmare of Expressionistic Shakespeare, from digital polish to a rainbow of 35mm lens flares, the Best Cinematography Oscar race presents a cornucopia of varied visual strategies. However, to celebrate this category for variety feels somewhat disingenuous this year. For the first time since the color and black-and-white categories merged in 1967, the Cinematography ballot looks identical to the Production Design one. Even though voted on by separate branches, these lineups' sameness speaks to a broader problem – how the Academy feels increasingly resistant to expand its interest beyond a select group of pictures each season…

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