"You think just because I'm a movie star I don't have feelings."

...well, you're wrong!"

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Goodbye to "Girls"

by Chris Feil

This Sunday HBO ended the six season run of Girls, Lena Dunham’s caustic and compassionate take on millennial Brooklynites. The series ended much as it began: with a wide range of qualitative opinions, as frustrating as it was rife with conversation points, uneven but special.

The final season was its the choppiest since its earliest days, often one of its more unsatisfying. After seeming primed to get her shit together at the end of season five, that charged feeling of a new life chapter was delivered in the unexpected form of Hannah’s pregnancy. Marnie was running out of gas as her divorce finalized and her music career was on its most pathetic last legs. Elijah inched closer to Broadway. Jessa took a backseat as a villain without much of a story, and Shoshana was barely there at all, even less than usual. Despite its comic stride holding up from the previous season, this season’s form felt sloppy and scattered despite Hannah’s long-game story arc.

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TCM Classic Film Festival 2017 Starts Today!

Greetings, classic Hollywood fans! Anne Marie, here, returning to the blog! The sun is shining, the stars on Hollywood Blvd are gleaming, and there's been an uptick of tourists taking pictures of Bette Davis's handprints outside the TCL Chinese Theatre, all of which mean just one thing: it's time for the TCM Classic Film Festival! 

This year, the most explosive news of the festival is the screening of several movies on nitrate film. TCM has always prided itself on screening 35mm at its festival side by side with new digital restorations. However, projecting nitrate prints requires a retrofit of the projection booths that handle the infamously flammable film stock. Fortunately, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood recently underwent just such a renovation thanks the Hollywood Foreign Press, The Film Foundation, and Turner Classic Movies. As a result, movies ranging from Laura to Black Narcissus and the original The Man Who Knew Too Much will once again get the chance to light the screen ablaze - metaphorically, of course...

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'a good Samaritan'

The Furniture: Thoroughly Modern Millie

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Thoroughly Modern Millie opened 50 years ago this week, in the spring between San Francisco’s Human Be-In and the Summer of Love. None of 1967’s Best Picture nominees, immortalized as the birth of the New Hollywood in Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, had yet opened, but there was already something in the air.

Director George Roy Hill capitalized on this countercultural moment with an extravagant show of concentrated nostalgia. Thoroughly Modern Millie leaps back to the Roaring 20s, America’s last moment of liberated sexuality and conspicuous consumption before the Great Depression. Its flamboyant, frenetic ode to the flappers and their world was a big hit, making more than $34 million and landing 10th at the yearly box office. The film was nominated for seven Oscars including Art Direction-Set Decoration.

Yet its portrayal is not without contradictions...

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