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Entries in Patricia Highsmith (12)

Thursday
Dec232021

Almost There: Cate Blanchett in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

by Cláudio Alves

Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley is now in theaters, bringing Cate Blanchett back to the big screen where she belongs. Playing a manipulative psychologist who proves herself a femme fatale, the Australian actress is sure to bring glamour to the part, dazzling audiences as she's been doing for decades. To commemorate the occasion, this week's Almost There entry revisits one of Cate Blanchett's best performances. In fact. It might be her greatest. In any case, it's my favorite from her sterling filmography, a supporting part she injects with life and patrician heartbreak. The Academy ignored her in 1999, but Blanchett may have come close to a second nomination for her work as Meredith Logue in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley

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Wednesday
Jan202021

Highsmith @ 100: "Carol" is a perfect adaptation

by Cláudio Alves

Patricia Highsmith was born 100 years ago this week. The writer died when she was 74, leaving behind a collection of full of classics. Many of those novels were adapted to the big screen, her mellifluous psychological thrillers most of all. Strangers on a Train and the many stories of Tom Ripley being the most popular. It was through cinema that I discovered the author and ended up falling in love with her prose. I adore how she seduces and stabs, hypnotizing us with beautiful words, undercutting the splendor with her character's monstrousness. 

There was a mysterious softness to Highsmith's poisonous style, an insightful breath of romance that reached its apotheosis with The Price of Salt, later retitled Carol. First published in 1952, the novel was one of the first lesbian romances with a happy ending to see the light of day, making it a revolutionary text in many regards. By 2015, Todd Haynes and Phyllis Nagy finally told that story in celluloid, delivering what's arguably the best cinematic adaptation of a Highsmith novel…

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Tuesday
Jan032017

Talented Mr Linky

Must Reads
The New Yorker an evocative thoughtful profile of Mike Mills and 20th Century Women
The Muse Rich Juzwiak on the year in overrated pop culture, starting with Manchester by the Sea. ("A Masterpiece." "It's not tho")
The Metrograph Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy (Carol) reflects on Patricia Highsmith's dislike of the screen adaptations of her work - Metrograph is showing a handful of them his month. (Finally my chance to see Purple Noon on a big screen.)

Films which take place in 2017, Hayao Miyazaki's non-retirement retirement, Aquaman stunts, Broadway divas, and Postcards from the Edge after the jump...

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Friday
Apr222016

Shine On, Beautiful Murder

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on "A Kind of Murder" and "Always Shine"

I know it's blasphemy in these parts to speak ill of Mad Men (cue 90% of you automatically clicking away in disgust) but I could never really get into it because it felt too slavishly obsessed with 60s posturing - I love Mid-Century Design as much as the next Eero Saarinen disciple but I couldn't ever see the forest for the tulip chairs. That said, the new Patricia Highsmith adaptation A Kind of Murder (from the 1954 book The Blunderer, kind of a suburban copycat criss-cross of Strangers on a Train) makes Mad Men seem positively restrained in its period affectations - how you manage to turn a walking talking charm like Patrick Wilson into a walking talking turtleneck I'll never figure.

The turtlenecks! The martini glasses! The heavy salmon drapes and stone fireplaces! There were moments of such monumental airlessness, as if a plastic sofa cover was wrapped over every scene, where I felt it might be purposeful - where I thought of Todd Haynes' [safe] and the way that movie was built to make the audience hyperventilate while watching it... but A Kind of Murder is no [safe]. What it is is is an occasionally jazzy low-key thriller, with Eddie Marsan skulking about effectively making his case as our modern day Peter Lorre or Raymond Burr. But it ends up more of a put on, a face of perfectly applied make-up cast halfway in noirish shadow, than any sort of artful smear. Grade: C

Part of me wishes I had seen Mackenzie Davis and Caitlin FitzGerald in Sophia Takal's Always Shine before having seen Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston in Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth last year, because while I'm more inclined towards Takal's smoky and sinister edged film... that's a whole lot of Persona riffing in the space of twelve months.

Always Shine tells the tale of two actresses in one of those friendships so fraught with complications it would have doctors reaching for the defibrillation paddles - the pendulums of success and resentment, professional jealousy and personal affection, flinging through space so close that something's bound to rub off and muck up everything. 

And inevitably, muck. In this case the the muck under the misty cliff-faces and mossy canyons of Big Sur, California, an L.A. getaway close enough that when the sun sets the shadows from the Hollywood sign are yet still the first harbingers of nightfall. Here these ladies make their escape, a weekend coffee klatsch under the guise of nursing emotional distance, their carry-on's stacked with comedy and tragedy masks, plus sundresses. Inevitably, tragically, the two women end up flashing their SAG cards in each other's faces instead of laying bare their hearts, a battle of wiles not wills.

You know, actresses. And who doesn't love a movie about actresses? I think I'm preaching to the choir here. The performative commingling of these two still fresh talents is a blast - Davis I've already fallen head over for on Halt and Catch Fire (please tell me you're all watching that show) and FitzGerald is always fine despite a frustratingly written role on Masters of Sex; here these two fold into and under each other in smart - and, in this movie's true blessing, in unexpectedly funny - ways. Grade: B+

Monday
Mar282016

Cast This: Highsmith's Ripley TV Series

Manuel here. Patricia Highsmith is definitely back in vogue. We'll obviously credit Carol (based on her Price of Salt novel) but the ample filmography her books have begat should remind us that she's been the type of author whose works seem ready-made for the screen. While there's still no new word on whether that Gillian Flynn/David Fincher Strangers on a Train remake is still in the works, we now have another Highsmith property to get excited about.

Well, perhaps "new" is too strong a word. [More...]

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