Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 8:00AM Five mood-boosting showbiz anniversaries for today, and if it's a special day for you have a great one. Take these suggestions and let us know if they helped.
MAY 16th History
2003 The fabulous and seriously undervalued Down with Love opened in theaters...
Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 10:34AM Have you ever seen a film which mixes documentary with fiction? Hybrid films, films with documentary and fiction parts or at least performed / acted elements have been around for some time. I'm not enough of a documentary expert to know if this is an increasing trend but in the past few years I've seen a few. From my (extremely limited) experience the combo can spark frissons of excitement and thoughtful layers as in Sarah Polley's autobiographical mystery Stories We Tell. The hybrid approach can also be both fascinating and exhausting simultaneously as with Clio Barnard's The Arbor (2010) in which actors lipsynched to recorded interviews from the actual documentary subjects.
At this year's New Directors / New Films festival, which wraps today in NYC, the hybrid technique (genre?) gets another discussable entry via Happiness Academy...
Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 10:49PM 
Every day, different angles on a 2016 wrap up. Tonight Nathaniel with the year's best musical short films...
It's true. They're more commonly referred to as "Music Videos" but since they have their roots in the Movie Musical, we think of them as short film descendants of that greatest of film genres. Music videos, which exploded so spectacularly in the 1980s with the dawn of MTV but experienced something like a midlife death rather than crisis, when MTV dropped the music part of music television, have roared back to life in the past decade with YouTube Vimeo and other saviors. The medium is alive and well and arguably healthier than ever (until the next platform crisis at least).
Though Beyonce's Lemonade dominated the conversation, 2016 actually produced a remarkable number of musical shorts that one might include under the umbrella of "Women Gone Wild," a subgenre equal parts political, erotic, and psychological...
Monday, December 26, 2016 at 12:43PM 
As a general rule of thumb, we love list-making and recapping of the year's significant moments and events but the exception is the work of the grim reaper. Death has claimed so many icons recently, particularly from the music world, that 2016 is starting to feel like a parody of its apocalyptic self as we reach its conclusion.
On Christmas day, of all days considering that one of his most enduring hits is "Last Christmas," George Michael was taken from us. Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (better known as George Michael) was born in East Finchley London in 1963. By the age of 19 he'd charted his first hit with his friend Andrew Ridgeley (the other half of Wham!) called "Young Guns (Go for It!)". Two years later he was world famous by way of the global smash "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." Which is when little Nathaniel first fell in love. But that initial fame wasn't the half of it. In fact the early hits I loved so much only hinted at the artist he'd become. He proved himself one of the great pop singers and composers over and over again. "Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I," released in 1990 is surely his masterpiece (and one of the greatest pop albums ever recorded) but he continued to be brilliant even when record contract troubles and personal problems overshadowed his talent with the public. His career had been quiet for some time but it's worth noting that he made one last significant contribution to pop culture that people don't regularly attribute to him -- he was the first star to sing with James Corden whilst driving around in a car back in 2011 which eventually became the ubiquitous "Carpool Karaoke" series of the here and now.
Given his death this weekend, the lyrics and defiance of one of his very last records "White Light" (recorded in 2012 and inspired by his near death in 2011) are suddenly so much sadder.
There is no white light
and I'm not through
I'm alive I'm alive
and I've got so much more that I want to do.Was it music or science that saved me?
After the jump 16 favorite songs from his career...
Tuesday, November 22, 2016 at 9:00PM Let’s face it: this is a difficult year for many of us to be thankful – at least if we’re focusing on the news (and how could we not?). 2016 has taken so much and so many from the world, it’s hard not to greet Thanksgiving with the kind of benediction Wendy (Christina Ricci) delivered in The Ice Storm...
