Christmas at TFE: The Lion In Winter

Members of Team Experience have been asked to share their favorite holiday film. Here's Dancin' Dan with his...

AH, Christmas! That special time of year when family gathers around the tree to shower each other with love, presents, and good tidings... and backstabbing, long-held resentments, and petty grievances! Which is exactly why The Lion in Winter is my kind of Christmas movie.

Of course families love each other. That goes without saying. But no family is perfect. For many people (I'm tempted to say everyone, but you never know!), going home for the holidays is a prospect that inspires fear and dread. You may only see these people once or twice a year, and there's only so long that certain things can go unsaid...

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Doc Corner: 'Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood'

Amy Winehouse died seven years ago today and several years removed from its Oscar win and box office success, Asif Kapadia’s Amy lingers in the public consciousness. A popular work of non-fiction due to its remarkable access to the story of a spiralling genius. For me, however, Amy remains a personal bug bear; an unethical and cruel work of documentary filmmaking that uses the words of its dead subject against her.

It was purely coincidental then that I thought about Amy while watching Matt Tyrnauer’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. The two films definitely do not share the same world, but this revealing piece of Inside Hollywood muckraking does raise questions about ethics all its own. I admit I got a bit of a salacious thrill out of it, but that doesn’t stop me questioning whether I ought to have.

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The Furniture: Matte Paintings at the End of an Era

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve done an informal retrospective series on the Best Production Design nominees of 1967. It isn’t an especially “New Hollywood” lineup, despite being the year of “Pictures at a Revolution.” Four of the nominees are lush period pieces, three of them lengthy musicals. They often feel like extravagantly-designed chaos, whirlwinds of sets and props that spin out of control. This is true of both the hilarious brawls of The Taming of the Shrew and the dated, stereotype-laden adventures of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Camelot, the winner, manages to split the difference between Old Hollywood excess and New Hollywood sexuality.

The final two films, both Best Picture nominees, are a bit less of a thrill. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle are, respectively, the most realistic and most fantastical of the five nominees. However, despite their differences, they both underline the inadequate end-point of old-school studio design.

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Letterman to Bring "In-Depth Conversations" to Netflix

By Seán McGovern

David Letterman has spent enough time growing his beard and is set to return to screens. Letterman is to host a six-show season on Netflix, which will be “in-depth conversations with extraordinary people, and in-the-field segments expressing his curiosity and humor.”

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You Need Serious Hair!

Kyle back in the house to address a very serious topic: Hair. Caution: Joy hairdo spoilers ahead.

The extent to which certain moments of David O. Russell’s Joy are deliberately soap opera-y is an open question. The movie’s latter scenes, in particular, draw on clichéd images of toughness: pleather jacket, sunglasses, and, of course, newly shorned hair. It seems that nothing says a woman is serious quite like taking matters, i.e., her hair, into her own hands.

I’ll happily debate the merits of having a narrative arc reveal a woman to be a badass—since most already are in my book—but I’d rather hear what some of your favorite DIY hair-cutting scenes are. Here are three of the most dramatic that leap to my mind after the jump...

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