Jennifer Jones Centennial: Cluny Brown (1946)

For the Centennial of one of Oscar's largely forgotten superstars, we asked Team Experience to pick one of her films to watch. 

by Paolo Kagoaoan

We’ve done centennials here before but this one comes with some degrees of difficulty. It doesn’t help that someone changed her name from Phylis Lee Isley into the whitest name in the world, and that the person who gets more Google results for that name is a curler. As a Canadian I can’t say anything bad about curling, but shouldn't a Best Actress Academy Award winner be on at least equal standing to a Gold medallist? Look up all the women who have had five Oscar nominations and a win (Bancroft, Sarandon, Hepburn, Maclaine, etc...) and imagine the world forgetting them. Explaining Jones to friends is equally difficult, even to people in the film industry who know her second husband's name, David O. Selznick.

I’d only previously seen Jones in Beat the Devil, a terrible dengue fever dream of a film. And it’s on TV all time instead of films with better reputations like Portrait of Jennie, which is her highest rated film on both iMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. Or Cluny Brown, her film with the highest rating on Letterboxd, and one that also came out the same year as Duel in the Sun (the film that brough her her 4th conseuctive Best Actress nomination) so that's what I picked to watch... 

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Why Green Book's win made me cringe. (It's not what you think.)

By Lynn Lee

I heaved a heavy sigh the moment Green Book won best picture.  But not for the reasons many of the rest of you probably did.

No, my heart sank because, dear readers, I like Green Book.  Liked it when I saw it, still like it now after all the controversies that failed to derail its path to Oscar.  Liked it enough to cringe at the thought of how exponentially the animus it’s already generated would grow following its victory, and how quickly it would be added to lists of the Academy’s Worst Decisions Ever...

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In praise of Melissa McCarthy, puppet master

by Tim Brayton

The Academy Awards are meant to reward great acting, not provide examples of it, but for a couple minutes during Sunday's ceremony, I'm convinced I saw the best comic performance I'll see for the rest of 2019. When Melissa McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry arrived to present Best Costume Design in polyglot outfits designed to evoke all five of the nominees, the visual gag is already enough. In a different year or with a lazier duo it might have been all we got. But it's when McCarthy and Henry start to introduce the category that it went from silly to downright inspired.

I am obsessed with every bit of what McCarthy is up to in that clip – and it doesn't even include the best joke of the bit, when she has the bunny attack Henry's hand as he tries help her open the envelope. Part of it, of course, is that she's playing things so completely straight...

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25th Anniversary: "Reality Bites"

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Sandwiched between (and oft-overshadowed by) the so-called Baby Boomers and Millennials, Generation X, those born between 1965-1980, seems to get little attention from Hollywood — or from anyone, really. In fact, just last month CBS infamously omitted Gen X in an otherwise comprehensive chart, “Generation Guidelines Defined by Birth Year.” For Gen Xers (of which I am one), this was generally considered as simply par for the course. Of course, of course, of course! 

But 25 years ago this week, we got our cinematic Valentine in the form of Reality Bites, the seminal film of a “forgotten” generation...

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Sundance Closing Night: "Troop Zero"

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

It’s almost always appealing to see two recent Oscar winners work together shortly after they take home their trophies. The notion of the last two Supporting Actress victors, Viola Davis and Allison Janney, teaming up is certainly enticing. Their Oscars were for playing very different types of mothers, and in Sundance’s closing night selection, they face off as competing scout leaders in a hilarious 1970s-set comedy about being who you are...

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