Beauty Break: International Cat Day
by Nathaniel R
Since today is a day to honor our beloved feline friends, let's share pics of celebrities with cats. Not celebrities in Cats. That would be tragic. This photo gallery is the opposite...
The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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by Nathaniel R
Since today is a day to honor our beloved feline friends, let's share pics of celebrities with cats. Not celebrities in Cats. That would be tragic. This photo gallery is the opposite...
Chris here, filling in for Nathaniel's weekly recap of RuPaul's Drag Race. This week was everyone's perennial favorite: Snatch Game! Past seasons have made this celebrity impersonation challenge a complete game changer, catapulting contenders like Jinkx Monsoon and Chad Michaels straight to the finals. In fact, only one Snatch Game winner has ever placed less than fifth place: season three's Stacy Layne Matthews (performing as Mo'Nique via her Oscar-winning Precious performance).
You could easily argue that this challenge is more anticipated than the season finale's crowning, and after last season's unmemorable edition, fans were hungry for this year's queens to bring the laughs.
S8.05 "Supermodel Snatch Game"
And it brings me no joy to tell you that the episode was an unfortunate dud.
2016 is upon us. So far it's been a wash since a cold has attacked me without warning but while I sleep and stay hydrated (not simultaneously) and procrastinate here are some favorite tweets of the week. But the year started beautifully with two of our favorite film thinkers and Oscar historians Nick Davis and Mark Harris announcing new projects. Nick will be expanding his "Best Actress" section and Mark Harris will be celebrating 1966 movies all year as he preps for the 50th anniversary of those Best Picture nominees he celebrated in his first book "Pictures at a Revolution" which was on the Best Pictures of 1967.
Our first tweet is a perfect message for the "survey the greats" season we're in via filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Our friend Nick has an interesting solution to this favorites versus perfection equation. He has two top 100s, greatest and favorites. He just wrote a huge batch of new essays which you should really read. Recent pieces include two movies that are accidentallly perfect for New Year's week including Strange Days and When Harry Met Sally (on the "greatest" list) movies like Movies become "favorites" for so many reasons, whether that's great experiences at the theater where we saw them or, the ease at rewatching them, or just the slow dawning realization that this one you just love whatever its shortcomings (this is me with Burlesque which showed on cable in a loop in 2015 and I couldn't look away.)
Favorite movies don't have to be perfect movies. Like in any relationship, Love is what makes them stick around.
— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) December 29, 2015
MORE AFTER THE JUMP including but not limited to Blanchett, Damon, Gleeson, Isaac ...and Eartha Kitt as 2016's Patron Saint?
Welcome to "The Honoraries". We're celebrating the careers of the Honorary Oscar recipients of 2014 and the Jean Hersholt winner (Harry Belafonte). Here's longtime TFE reader and new contributor Teo Bugbee, whose work you might have read at The Daily Beast, on Belafonte's biggest film...
Even in the fantastic canon of classic Hollywood musicals, Carmen Jones is a standout. It’s got all the colors—Deluxe, not Technicolor, which as any John Waters fan will tell you is the real deal—it’s got the timeless score by Georges Bizet, but before we talk about the film itself, let’s take a minute to look at the backstory, if only because what was going on behind the scenes in Carmen Jones is at least as interesting as what made it on film.
Though he never really made particularly political films, director Otto Preminger was a modern man when it came to his politics, and he proposed the idea of adapting the Broadway smash Carmen Jones into a film as a means of showing off the black talent that he felt Hollywood was excluding. But despite Preminger’s substantial box office clout, no major studio wanted to take on a film with an all black cast. So Preminger took Carmen Jones to United Artists and set out making it basically as an independent film.
Harry Belafonte was brought on immediately as Joe, but Preminger took a longer time to find his star, testing a number of black actresses.
Lusty affairs and a singular film after the jump...