Current Top Paid Actresses

Forbes ranks the working actresses in order of assumed income for the past year (May to May) and Queen Theron, who has been absent way too long, jumps back in the game with her recent burst of acting and activities. Forbes counted guesstimated residuals, endorsement deals and profit participations and such. The list goes like so. (Dollar figures are in millions)

01 Kristen Stewart $34.5 Twilight finales + Snow White
It'll be interesting to see if she can hold "a top earner" status post Twilight what with Jennifer Lawrence next in line for the absurd franchise riches.
02 Cameron Diaz $34  huge profit sharing on cheaply made Bad Teacher
03 Sandra Bullock $25 ...not sure how she scored this high with only Extremely Loud as a new element but... okay.
04 Angelina Jolie $20
05 Charlize Theron $18 -thanks in large part to Dior, surely
06 Julia Roberts $16
07 Sarah Jessica Parker $15 the latest movie flopped but the perfumes are totally selling
08 Meryl Streep $12
09 Kristen Wiig $12
10 Jennifer Aniston $11 

I'm not greedy at all. Would totally settle for, oh, half of one week's worth of Aniston's income as my annual salary. Too pricey, huh? Okay, okay. I'll take three days worth as annual salary as long as joint custody of Justin Theroux is on the table. Who can arrange this? Please and thanks.

You know what would make a fun list? Yours. Rank your top ten if you ran the world. Which actresses would you gift with the most endorsements and the biggest incomes this past 12 months. Whose name and face and merchandise do you want to see plastered everywhere?

Tuesday Top Ten - Motion (Picture) Sickness

.

JA from MNPP here. First off, my apologies to those of you with weaker constitutions. This might not be your sort of Top Ten list today. With that out of the way, want to know why I still won't eat cherries to this very day? Since it's "The Witches of Eastwick week"I think y'all can probably put two and two together. Take a giant silver bowl of them, stir in a trio of witchy women under the influence of one Big Bad, and shake thoroughly - out spills what might be the always game Veronica Cartwright's most memorable cinematic moment. (And this is a woman who has been terrorized by Hitchock's birds and phallically attacked by HR Giger's Alien, so she knows from memorable scenes.)

.

You'd be excused for expecting it to be the walls and furniture to be what tumbles out of her mouth since she spends the first half of the scene devouring the scenery in a tour de force of bravura overacting, but the devil's in the details - that red-stained torrent of cherry pits is something you just don't forget, even 25 years later. (Watch the whole scene here.)

.

So in it's honor, a list!

Here are 9 more cinematic spews... from Bridesmaids through The Exorcist

Click to read more ...

Time Out's "100 Best Horror Films"

I am fascinated by the horror genre. From afar. As in: I am not at all fascinated by the horror genre but am endlessly curious about why it provokes so much feverish fandom in others. So I find myself reading about the horror genre a lot in an intermittent effort to understand it. From afar. Time Out London just came out with a poll of horror biggies and horror enthusiasts to form an eclectic list of the 100 best horror films. Some of them that I love I hadn't really thought of as "horror" (though on second thought they clearly are) like Dead Ringers, The Night of the Hunter and Ken Russell's The Devils. 

I knew my three all time favorites would rank high though my fourth favorite horror film (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) did not make the list.

Nathaniel's Horror Trinity: CARRIE, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and PSYCHO

The films on the list that prompted the most nightmares were The Silence of the Lambs (which I weirdly dreamt up constantly before seeing it) and The Omen which I saw on television by myself (after my parents had gone to bed) as a kid. It was probably severely edited but I was so terrified that Damien shared my birthday (June 6th) that I raced to the bathroom mirrors afterwards to check my head for a 666 mark -- no joke! I was so scared I had nightmares for a full week afterwards and vowed to never watch another scary movie.  

As an adult the films I was most terrified of while I was watching them were: Halloween which I didn't see until the early 90s on VHS when a friend would not let me be until I watched it; The Descent which I saw in a completely empty theater... like one big dark cave, The Blair Witch Project's last ten minutes in which I basically thought I would die (though that experience seems unrepeatable); Audition because... holy hell; and The Shining which I saw for the first time in basically .... wait for it... a cabin in the woods.

In the interest of full disclosure and to illustrate my scaredy-cat nature I have seen but 32% of the 100 wide list which I've included in a visual after the jump if you must mock me. How many have you seen? And which 10 do you think should be mandatory viewing? 

Click to read more ...

I Link You Just the Way You Are

Just a heads up. I was pleased that people passed this around twitter after I posted it but DO NOT READ The New Yorker review of A Separation before seeing the film. I recently named the movie Best of the Year but one of the greatest things about it, that I was careful not to spoil in my review or any of my subsequent writeups or awards postings is how it keeps defying expectations and throwing more and more complications your way. That New Yorker review, which is meant to be an enticement to see it and is otherwise beautifully written, will significantly damage your viewing pleasure as it gives away several twists and nearly the entire plot. You're welcome. And for shame Anthony Lane! Why do that to readers and potential ticket buyers? 

Boy Culture Congratulations to actress Kristy McNichol, who is now out of the closet. That'll mean something to anyone over the age of like, um, 35 (?). Otherwise y'all might be like "who?". But she was a big deal in the late 70s/early 80s. Think "Family" or "Empty Nest" on television and summer camp classic Little Darlings (1980) wherein she was deflowered by Matt Dillon! 
Thompson on Hollywood Christopher Tellefsen on the rhythms of editing. He did such great work on Moneyball I think.
Hello Giggles has 100 Things You Should Know About Downton Abbey 
Deadline which films are popular in their home countries?
In Contention has the Central Ohio Critics film winners. But I can't deal with typing up ANOTHER list. No offense, Ohio!
Hey Deanie is not convinced by Bérénice Bejo in The Artist

NYT "Seeking the next red carpet knockout" interesting piece about young actresses trying to find the dress and what happens when they do. (Though it makes you appreciate actresses who never bother, too)
Rope of Silicon The biggest flops of 2011, budget to gross.
Flavorwire Audrey Hepburn's screen test for Roman Holiday. One of those first time's the charm Oscar smashes. Ah, I love that movie.
Electronic Cerebrectomy I love when people post super random extensive personal lists of their favorite things of a year. It's like a scrapbook of everything -- not just movies. I'd do that if I didn't have 100 other lists to make.
Serious Film 2011 Superlatives: Best use of profanity.
Google celebrates the centennial of Charles Samuel Addams best known as the creator of The Addams Family. 
City Arts Armond White releases his annually inane "better than" list. I shouldn't like. It's such obvious trolling link bait. But I can't help myself. I do find his distaste for Lars von Trier highly amusing since you'd think the provocations just for the sake of provocations (Jack & Jill > The Descendants et. all) would mark them as soulmates.

Ugh, I used to love blog-a-thons so much. And then there were too many of them and I gave up. But then every once in a while you find one that looks so fun and you didn't know about it and you just want to die a little inside. Have you seen the BlogalongaBond?

It's hosted by The Incredible Suit which I've been reading for a month (and love). But I didn't know about it. It's been going on for a year already! One Bond film a month counting down to the 50th anniversary of Bond with the release of SkyFall (2012)! They're up to Octopussy (1983) now which is the very first Bond film I ever saw so if I weren't a crazy OCD completist type person it would be a great time to join in but I already missed 12 movies and all the Connery ones. Boo! 

That said, how invested are you in James Bond movies, Bond Girls and the like? We might do something.

Best of Year Pt 2: Sweet 16 from Primordial Ooze to YA Novels

Part One: I Am Thirty Two Flavors 
Other pictures from 2011 that The Film Experience's year wouldn't have been complete without.

Part Two: Honorable Mentions
The year's best movies stretched all the way from the creation to the apocalypse and everywhen in between; time hardly seemed linear in 2011 but immeasurably flexible instead. The year's best films also twisted and shape-shifted in scale and meaning, wrapping big themes around human-sized packages.

THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick)
Fox Searchlight. May 27th. 
I really didn't know that our Burning Questions columnist Michael C felt so similarly about Terrence Malick's latest so two somewhat agnostic appreciations back-to-back were not intended here at The Film Experience. I greatly admire The Tree of Life's grandiose reach (the creation segment being my favorite chunk) and breathtaking physical beauty but often I felt like I was visiting an impenetrably random museum installation. Still... it's hard to shake the imagery and in a few key sequences -- children playing in poison clouds, brothers crying in tall grass, and especially in the different ways that Mrs O Brien (an ethereal Jessica Chastain) and Mr O'Brien (Brad Pitt's second great performance of the year... can we please give him an Oscar now, people?) touched and taught and looked at their children, the movie was fiercely moving.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (Woody Allen)
Sony Pictures Classics. June 10th.
Let's not call it a comeback. Woody Allen has never gone away and his filmography runs the gamut between masterful and mediocre -- sometimes within the very same movie! What sets Midnight in Paris apart from the pack is a conceit so clever and insightful that it works both within the famed auteur's current limitations and as charming cover for them. It's okay that the present feels so tired and one note when hack screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) feels exactly this way about the life he's leading. It's definitely okay that the nostalgic past feels shallow and cartoony since nostalgia is fantasy, a very specific escapist (rear) projection. Quibbling is easy -- it's no Purple Rose of Cairo (an Allen masterwork treading somewhat similar ground) -- but why quibble when Corey Stoll is so funny as Hemingway, Adrien Brody is so amusing as Dali "Rhi-no-ce-ros" and Marion Cotillard's muse complicates the movie so beautifully by rejecting its message entirely and exiting the picture with so little fuss.

THE HOUSEMAID (Im Sang-soo)
IFC. January 21st. 
This erotic melodrama, a remake of a Korean classic (which I have yet to see), is either the year's most elegantly trashy soap opera or its most biting political metaphor for the carnivorous and consequence-free behavior of the super wealthy and the impotent dramatics of the working poor. Maybe both. Either way it's uncomfortably steamy, beautifully filmed, and superly acted (South Korea is where it's at for actresses these days. Period.) It's also unusually entertaining once the bad behavior and catfights begin. I watched it twice in one week when I first saw it and if my schedule weren't so tight, I'd do so again right now.

PARIAH (Dee Rees)
Focus Features. December 28th. 
Two important new voices emerged in queer cinema this year, writer/directors Dee Rees and Andrew Haigh (his Weekend up later in the countdown). Both filmmakers previously directed one documentary-style feature so they weren't in the discussions of "best debuts" but what debuts these narrative features were! Coming out stories are a staple of gay cinema but few of them have carved out as much emotional nuance from raw feeling. Pariah has so much feeling for its characters that it occassional gets distracted with tangential subplots but better too much genuine feeling than not enough of it or the poorly manufactured variety. This story of a shy closeted lesbian high school student (Adepere Oduye, just wonderful) in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood just aches with emotion and, best of all, future possibility. You find yourself wondering about Alike's journey after the movie ends. The best characters, gay or otherwise, live beyond the end credits [Best LGBT characters of 2011]

SHAME (Steve McQueen)
Fox Searchlight. December 2nd. 
Brandon only has room for one thing in his life. His apartment and office are as barren as his emotional life. Michael Fassbender enters the picture on a naked loop as he travels from bed to phone to bathroom, one day being any day and every day empty but for bodily functions and the pursuit of the next fix. It's the first of many smart decisions that Steve McQueen, one of the most exciting new cinematic voices to emerge in the past decade (see also: Hunger), makes in this visually spare but daringly operatic take on addiction. Shame isn't perfect -- for every "New York New York" segment -- a telepathic conversation? a sung monologue? --  there's another moment that's too on the nose. The best thing about Shame is McQueen's voyeuristic addiction to the contact high of great actors. His camera stalks them ceaselessly but wisely never gets in their way, freezing in place to watch them work their inimitable magic.

YOUNG ADULT (Jason Reitman)
Paramount. December 9th
The first painful chortle of recognition I experienced watching Young Adult was the ease at which YA writer Mavis Gary (a brilliant Charlize Theron) became distracted from her work. A sentence or two, tops, was all she could manage before she was on to more pressing things like e-mail, Diet Coke, pet care (of sorts), and other absent-minded rituals. Sigh. I know the feeling on all counts. It was the first chortle of many. Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, who previously made Juno together, make another compelling case for continued partnership here in this diamond sharp perfectly condensed comedy about prolongued adolescence, untreated mental illness, and terrible cultural values (note how Mavis isn't the only one who worships her skin-deep beauty or encourages her self delusions). 

P.S. It took me half an hour to write that paragraph and it's not even a good one! Thankfully I did not hatch any plan as spectacularly ill conceived as "return to hometown. steal ex-boyfriend away from wife and infant daughter" during the fitful pauses. 

and now... the top ten.