When Oscar met Razzie

by Cláudio Alves

Founded by Mo Murphy and John J. B. Wilson, the Golden Raspberry Awards, more commonly known as Razzies, are the evil twin to the Academy Awards. Instead of celebrating the best achievements in world cinema, they award the worst, ridiculing them in the process and daring anyone to go accept their gold sprayed statuette in good humor. They've been handed out since 1981 when Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music battled out for the title of Worst Picture. Since then, the Razzies have made many controversial choices, showing an especially troubling fondness for lampooning female-centric stories or examples of campy entertainment.

Today we'll be talking about two instances when the Oscars and the Razzies tastes diverged so much they ended up nominating the same performances…

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National Pet Week: “Si” and “Am” from Lady and the Tramp

Team Experience will be celebrating pets at the movies this week. Here's Lynn Lee...

My cats!

Last fall, my husband and I adopted a pair of Siamese kittens from a local rescue organization.  It was my husband’s idea – I was hesitant at first, despite the extreme cuteness of their pictures and videos.  Not because I don’t like cats; to the contrary, my husband had already converted me into a cat lover with our previous, gone but still-missed pair.  No, the real if silly reason, as I explained sheepishly, was that every time I thought of Siamese cats – especially in twos – all I could think of was the devilish duo from Lady and the Tramp (1955). While I hadn’t seen the movie in years, I vividly remembered two blue-eyed hellions who teamed up to torment poor innocent Lady and frame her as the “bad dog” she assuredly was not.  I also remembered a sibilant signature song that I was pretty sure had not aged well after a half century, even if the movie itself remained one of my Disney favorites...

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Cast This: Disney's Live-Action Hercules

by Nathaniel R

Disney still has lots of animated features to get through before they've made animated or live-action remakes or spinoffs of each of 'em. Word is they're now developing Hercules (1997) but then they're developing lots of these things to follow Mulan (2020) and Cruella (2021) into movie theaters.

Hopefully Hercules Redux gets some new songs because there aren't a lot as we recall and there's only so much of a score you can build from "Go the Distance". This will live or die based on how funny it is so we hope they lean heavily into its more camp aspects: bodybuilder lead, five muses, flamboyant villain. 

How would you cast this thing? More after the jump...

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Have you ever heard Cynthia Erivo sing 'The Last Five Years'?

by Nathaniel R

Twas very depressed last night scrolling through social media (rarely a good idea) when I chanced upon this reshare of a video from 2015 that I'd never seen. At some point just before The Color Purple' started its previews on Broadway a pre-fame (at last in regards to the US) Cynthia Erivo showed up at Marie's Crisis (for non New Yorkers, that's a very famous basement piano bar near Stonewall). She sang "I Can Do Better" in full (eagle eyes will spot her co-star Danielle Brooks right behind her). As a fan of Erivo and a crazy-obsessive Last Five Years stan (I went to the original Off Broadway run and listened to the cast recording on loop for a full year) this was pure heaven for five minutes...

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How Had I Never Seen..."Xanadu"?

by Cláudio Alves

In these stressful days, it can be nice to sit back and lose ourselves in the escapist marvels of cinema. Of course, what constitutes escapism varies from person to person. Some love the bloodlust of gory pictures while others revel in good midcentury melodrama. Whatever your poison of choice is, now seems like a good time to indulge. For me, one surefire way of dispelling the doom and gloom of day-to-day life is to bathe in the glamour of movie musicals. Other prime sources of stress-relief are those movies which are so terrible, so unbelievably miscalculated, that their turpitude becomes entertaining. The logical conclusion is that there's no greater joy than watching a movie musical that's so bad it's good.

Well, that's precisely what I did one monotonous afternoon, trading in the frustrations of reality for the disco disaster fabulousness of Xanadu…

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