Happy Birthday, Julie Andrews!

by Cláudio Alves

Julie Andrews accepting her AFI Tribute Award in 2021.

Here, at The Film Experience, we keep to a 10|25|50|75|100 model when it comes to birthdays and anniversaries. Yet, as the world of entertainment lost so many bright lights in the past few days – Maggie Smith, Kris Kristofferson, Gavin Creel, Ken Page, John Amos, and Kalen Gorman – it feels right to take a moment and show some love to those who are still with us. Case in point is the jubilant Julie Andrews, who celebrates her 89th birthday today. This living legend of stage and screen is beyond compare, with a career that spans across eight decades, from entertaining the troops with her parents in the mid-40s to recent voice-over work in such projects as Aquaman and the Bridgerton franchise, for which Andrews has received three Emmy nominations.

All that said, the actress will always have a special place in my heart for reasons that go beyond her body of work. Allow me to share a personal musing…

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Jocelyne LaGarde @100: "Hawaii"

by Cláudio Alves

This year, there was much talk about Lily Gladstone as one of the few Native Americans ever nominated at the Oscars. This focus on indigenous representation makes one's mind wander further into Academy history. After all, who was the first? Jocelyne LaGarde was her name, and today marks a century since her birth. The film that earned such honor was one of those 1960s overblown epics, the historical farrago of Hawaii by George Roy Hill, whose future work would stray away from such stodginess. Yet, to dismiss the piece as colonial apologia like some of its harsher critics do is unjust. The picture's much stranger than that, cruel and miserable, willing to see missionary work as the destroyer of paradise, a tragedy marred by the kind of spiritual bleakness no luscious island vista can conceal…

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Queering the Oscars: Visconti's "The Damned"

by Cláudio Alves

At the 42nd Academy Awards, the Best Original Screenplay category was a rarity of historical importance. You wouldn't know it in 1969, but all nominees would be studied for years to come. Whether seen as seminal works in their author's careers or cultural milestones with much to reveal about the society that produced them, the films form an illustrious bunch, going from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice's pop psychology to the revisionist brutality of The Wild Bunch. The winner was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a western which has inspired queer readings for over half a century though it was far from the queerest picture in the race. 

That would be Luchino Visconti's The Damned, marking the start of his German trilogy, the international metamorphosis of his cinema, and the most open expression of gay sensibilities in his oeuvre to that point…

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Reader's Choice: Hitchcock's Troubling Divisive "Marnie" (1964)

Each weekend Nathaniel we'll be discussing a movie requested by you! SPOILERS ahead so if you haven't screened this on Netflix do that first.

The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.

Who is the most f***ed up character in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964)? The answer is not as simple as it appears. The titular ice queen blonde (Tippi Hedren) is sexually frigid, terrified of lightning, a compulsive liar, a serial thief, and disassociates almost instantly at the sight of the color red. She has so many issues she's a full series of crazy. But while Marnie is a loner she's hardly alone in her own film when it comes to needing serious amounts of therapy...

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Almost There: Nancy Kwan in "The World of Suzie Wong"

by Cláudio Alves

Arthur Dong's documentary Hollywood Chinese, about the complicated history of Chinese and Chinese American lives on the big screen, serves as a starting point for one of the Criterion Channel's new collections. Spanning over a century of American filmmaking and 24 films, this curated program highlights issues of representation, racism, erasure, and more. At the same time, it serves as a chance to illuminate the cinematic contributions of marginalized artists who found unlikely success in Hollywood. They were people like the Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, Taiwanese director Ang Lee, and Hong Kong-born American actress and dancer Nancy Kwan.

In 1960, Kwan made her film debut in Richard Quine's The World of Suzie Wong, became an overnight star, and surely came closer to that elusive Best Actress Oscar nomination than most performers of Asian descent…

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