Three Little Links

• The Guardian - an excellent profile of Pedro Almodóvar by Xan Brooks
• /Film Daveed Diggs to play Sebastian in the live-action Little Mermaid. But Sebastian is a crab so this is probably not fully live-action but half and half style.
• Vulture - 15 essential Judy Garland performances. Solid list with some strong points made, though I think dead wrong about why Zellweger is awards worthy in Judy (as noted on the podcast I liked her performance quite a bit but what’s missing is exactly what’s cited here as the chief strength, the capturing of Judy’s once in a century kind of talent.

Blindspotting: The Code Switches Back

Lynn Lee on Blindspotting, new on Blu-Ray and DVD today

It must be something in the air.  Or water.  Or just our general 21st century American zeitgeist as we come to grips with how far we are from anything close to a “post-racial” dialogue.  Whatever it is, 2018 is turning out to be the year for movies about racial code switching.  It’s the common thread that links projects as disparate as the gonzo anti-capitalist satire of Sorry to Bother You, the stranger-than-fiction part-comedy, part-true crime thriller BlacKkKlansman, and the Black Lives Matter-inflected YA drama The Hate U Give.  At the heart of each film is a black protagonist who, having mastered the art of speaking “white,” ultimately discovers its limits as a means of challenging society’s white-dominated power structure.

Then there’s Blindspotting, which puts its own unique spin on these themes and turns the concept of code switching on its head.  The film presents a white guy, Miles (Rafael Casal), born and bred in Oakland, who raps, talks, and acts like a walking stereotype of the ’hood even as his best friend, Collin (Tony winner and now Spirit Award nominee Daveed Diggs), has to live with the real implications of being an actual black man with a criminal record.  Despite these tensions, the bond between Collin and Miles feels genuine, reflecting the real-life friendship between Diggs and Casal...

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Lynn Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Lynn Lee..

In many ways, 2018 – like the two preceding years, only even more so – has felt like a nauseating carnival ride that I, for one, would like to stop and get off.  But the one welcome constant was always having something genuinely engaging to watch and, in the best cases, elevate my feelings on the state of the world and humanity. 

In that spirit, here are some of the many things I’m thankful for:

• The electrifying last 15 minutes of Nanette, wherein Hannah Gadsby turned stand-up comedy into something else altogether – and left our collective jaw on the floor.

• Daveed Diggs – so good in Hamilton, even better in the riveting and underrated Blindspotting.

• The shimmer in Natalie Portman’s and Oscar Isaac’s eyes at the end of Annihilation, one of the most bonkers and most unexpectedly rewarding films of 2018...

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Tony Winners for 2016

A lot of us needed that awards show last night - a celebration of passion, talent, and love for community - given the horrific events of the weekend.

In the opening number the musical acting nominees joined James Corden on stage (from left to right: Benanti, Corden, Krakowski, Miranda, Goldsberry, Levi, and Danielle Brooks

The Tonys were particularly defiantly joyous Sunday evening with an exuberant production, which featured a fun curveball of having each performing cast do a miniature version of a classic showtune outside the theater before or after they performed their shows number onstage inside. Other highlights included: Audra McDonald doing a high kick while pregnant; James Corden's bit with the Tony accountants; Frank Langella being more concerned with the tragedy in Orlando than his Tony; and a hilarious view of the nominees through the prism of their guest star work in the Law & Order franchise. Poor Danny Burstein! Or, rather, 'well employed Danny Burstein' who guest starred on Law & Order so many times it was like watching a man age in time lapse photography...

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