Showbiz History: Star Trek transforms, Little Women opens, Nicholas Hoult strips

You spoke and asked us to keep doing this series but we have to simplify so it won't be as deep divey. We still hope it's fun for you -Editor

4 random things that happened today, December 7th, in showbiz history

1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture opens in movie theaters, the first major move in transforming the shortlived 60s tv show into an undying franchise. 

1990 Mega-blockbuster Home Alone was enjoying its fourth (of an astonishing twelve!!!!!!) weekend atop the box office charts while two future classics and two of the best films of the year opened in limited release...

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Abe Gives Thanks 2020

A few volunteer members of Team Experience will be giving thanks this holiday week. Here's Abe Friedtanzer

This year has had its share of disappointments, but there’s plenty to celebrate personally and cinematically. I’m fortunate to have great weather in Los Angeles where I can spend time outdoors on a regular basis. It’s also been exciting to write much more frequently for The Film Experience and to interact with contributors and readers who were mostly willing to forgive my lukewarm attitude towards Schitt’s Creek. Here are ten movie/TV-related reasons I’d like to give thanks:

• Parasite winning Best Picture. I predicted 1917 but couldn’t have been more thrilled to see a stat-busting international triumph. It’s also the first time since The Departed that my #1 film of the year was also chosen by Oscar.

• The Sundance Film Festival happened completely as normal. For my seventh time in Park City, Utah, I got to see 41 films and enjoy sitting in the front row in crowded theaters for five movies in a row per day for a week straight. Little did I know that January would be my last visit to a movie theater...

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Review: "The Great" on Hulu

by Cláudio Alves

Most dramatizations of history have a difficult, often unbalanced, relationship with facts. Reality is notoriously devoid of narrative structure, which makes taking departures and creative license into an essential crime. The troubles arise when the parameters of adaptation aren't clear, when fiction dresses itself as truth, and confusion blooms from pretension. Hulu's biographical series about the early years of Catherine the Great in Russia is unencumbered by such issues, sidestepping them with irreverence. At the start of each episode, a title card points out that this miniseries is only occasionally based on things that really happened.

The rest of it is hilarious fantasy, a play on history that turns the rise of Russia's empress and reformer into the stuff of romantic comedy. It's a black-hearted farce that's unafraid and unashamed of being silly…

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Night of the Living Link

• Theater Mania the Tony Awards to be replaced by... a Grease sing-a-long? Broadway fans are not happy about it. There are so many ways CBS could have filled the air time that were still about current or classic theater
• The Guardian In career trajectories we totally dont understand Luca Guadagnino who started off so masterfully with fresh filmmaking in I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name is signed on for his THIRD remake, this time its Scarface (1983) which was itself a remake of course
• New York Times a must-read oral history of the making of Mad Max: Fury Road

What We Do in the Shadows, new Criterion BluRays, a remake of "10", a new project for Michael B Jordan, more celebrity deaths (sniffle) and other topics after the jump...

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Review: The Current War (Director's Cut)

by Tony Ruggio

After more than a year of pre-release hell at the scissorhands of Harvey Weinstein and his terrible deeds, The Current War has finally seen the light of day. Tackling the industrial war over electricity between famed inventor Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and business magnate George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), it’s a good story well told. Well, after a rough first half, anyway. The epic narrative is rushed and contracted in the early going, before evening out and focusing more on character in the final stretch.

The breakneck pacing actually does the film a disservice, as we barely get to spend time with Edison, Westinghouse, or their creations before director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon barrels forward to the next moment in history. Classical themes of greed, power, and loss are threaded like any other biopic of powerful men, but the greatest subtext lays therein, where the two men differed so greatly...

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