A new series on auditions begins with "Audition"

by Ginny O'Keefe

As an actress I have had my fair share of God-awful auditions. And good ones. And so-so auditions that I barely remember minutes after they happened. This is the life of an actress starting out in Los Angeles. Granted, I am in no way a veteran of the acting industry but I have been to a lot of casting calls and made a lot of self-tapes. So far I have never been yelled at by a casting director because I dropped a line or been told to take my clothes off to prove my dedication to a part. It's made me realize how embellished or exaggerated auditions can be in film and TV; normalcy just doesn’t sell. (There are actors out there who have had horrible and even traumatizing experiences, but this is merely from my perspective on how I have been treated to date.)

Now, I've joined my love of watching movies with my love of acting for this series. We'll discuss auditions from movies and TV and talk about how ludicrous or realistic they turn out to be. This week, to kick the series off, a dive into the deep end with Takashi Miike’s disturbing Japanese thriller Audition...

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Tribeca 2019: "Knives and Skin"

Team Experience reporting from Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams

If someone you had a crush on in high school suddenly handed you a crude anatomical drawing of your genitals how might you have reacted? I, uhh, sure can think of a few reactions I might have had. But several of them would have involved a smile, a chuckle - anything but utmost sincerity, which in this instance would have a tinge of the absurd. And that tinge turns trickle turns ten-fold flood in Knives and Skin, writer-director Jennifer Reeder's surreal small-town murder-mystery that feels beamed in from another planet; one where the reactions are all upside down.

It all starts with a missing blonde girl, tipping its Twin Peaks cap right off the bat...

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Tribeca 2019: "Come to Daddy"

Team Experience reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams

Come to Daddy opens like a big-screen reboot of Schitt's Creek, with Elijah Wood working his best elaborate David Rose ensemble of flappy black fabrics without discernible seams. He's yanking a wheelie suitcase through a no place field. Slowly, the cinema happens -- the field gives way to the trees, a forest, a gorgeous coastline, all while Elijah's Moe-hairdo and black nail polish paint him as a rank outsider in this place of nature and wonder.

Soon enough we see that he's doing what all us fancy city boys must do at one point or another -- he's going home. Except not entirely...

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Review: The Curse of La Llorona

by Tony Ruggio

Latino audiences are the leading demo for moviegoing so Hollywood ignores them at their own peril. Cynical though it is, somebody at Warner Bros said "no mas" and rang James Wan to add one more wrinkle to his ever-expanding Conjuring universe.

Serving as producer, Wan's fingerprints are everywhere. From swooping dollies and immaculate crane work, to an early scene of kids frolicking to 70's tunes, La Llorona often flatters the original with homage. The simple foreboding of a dark corner in the room or a hazy reflection in the mirror, it’s all there and it works for the most part...

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Pussywillows! Serial Mom at 25

by Salim Garami

What's good?

The existence of Serial Mom 25 years ago establishes that America’s current obsession with true crime stories – with the likes of Serial and American Crime Story and the never-ending avalanche of Netflix documentaries – is not something remotely new to our day and age. Hell, it wasn’t even new to 1994; many of the social observations Serial Mom makes arguably were already well before up to the previous year’s The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. There is little prophetic in the satire but there is A LOT of scary forecasting regarding the OJ Simpson murder case that was just around the corner at the time of its release...

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