Toshiro Mifune @ 100: Yojimbo

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next couple of nights. Here's Eric Blume...

When the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was released in 1961, he and Toshiro Mifune already had collaborated on over a dozen films, and this collaboration is widely considered one of their greatest.  It essentially birthed the character of The Man With No Name, was remade three years later by Hollywood as A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and has had an enduring influence on films for almost sixty years...

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Desperately Seeking Link

THR Insightful piece about experimentation of studios and Hollywood's post-coronavirus future
Vulture "are the celebrities okay?" a funny piece about the bizarre social media of stars during quarantine
Awards Daily Contagion (2011) reframed
Boy Culture a huge celebration of Madonna's "Vogue" as it turns 30

More after the jump including showbiz obituaries, Marvel's What If?, and the cinema of 1962...

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Podcast: Quarantined with "Emma" and "Cactus Flower"

with Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl

Everyone's a shut-in so we'll be watching the same movies at home.

Index (33 minutes)
00:01 Updates on health and the NYC self-quarantine 
04:20 Cactus Flower (1969) is a delight, though crazy sexist. We both fell hard for Ingrid Bergman and enjoyed Goldie Hawn's Oscar winning debut, too. It's streaming on Criterion Channel. We also talk briefly about our reader's choice series thus far and what's next.
17:38 The latest adaptation of Emma starring Anya Taylor-Joy. Murtada really loves Bill Nighy and Nathaniel loves the look but we both think it's not as strong as the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow version. 
26:30 Bonus randomness - two perfect leading lady star vehicles: Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Cher in Moonstruck.
31:00 Wrap-up

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Cactus Flower, Emma, Quarantine

Today in Showbiz History: Julie Andrews in "My Fair Lady"

by Nathaniel R

We've discussed the Oscar wars of My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins (1964) before but have you ever wondered how history would have been different if Julie Andrews had scored the movie role in My Fair Lady after playing it on Broadway? Would there have been a different Mary Poppins? Would they have waited and wouldboth films hav won Best Picture in separate years? Would Julie Andrews never have won an Oscar at all (since so many saw her very atypical Oscar win and Audrey's own lack of a nomination as a way to shame My Fair Lady, the movie, for not hiring her?! The ripple possibilities are endless...

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Fellini @ 100: His Self-Referential Masterwork "8½"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Eurocheese...

A filmmaker stands out as a master because of the distinctiveness of their voice, and how they speak specifically to the human condition. Well, that, and a filmography where we can point to classics, even stone-cold masterpieces. If I was to ask you which director seemed to examine life through a fun house mirror, you might be able to guess we were talking about Fellini. I hadn’t rewatched 8½ (1963) in several years and one of the things I had forgotten, maybe because of the joyous memories of so many individual scenes, is the way the razor sharp editing creates such a sense of panic right from the start; we're watching our protagonist suffocating with hundreds of eyes on him. The iconic image of the director flying high in the sky like a kite, only to be pulled down to the ocean, adds terror to the upcoming, more realistic scenes. This movie itself must provide answers for him to escape his terrible fate.

The way the film consistently rushes one character after another at the camera gives us a taste of the control Mastroianni’s Guido is experiencing. He's both suffering from a god complex where he can toy with the depictions he is sending us, and building towards a fate he's desperate to avoid...

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