Queering the Oscars: The Delicious Costumes of "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. Tonight we're serving lewks!

By Christopher James

For a movie with iconic nude scenes, the costumes of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) are just as memorable and titillating. It’s fitting that the Oscars honored the incredible work of costume designers Ann Roth and Gary Jones for the film, which should’ve shown up in more categories than the five it was nominated for. Though the actual Oscar went to Lindy Hemming’s period-specific and gloriously gaudy work in Topsy-Turvy, we’re still cheering on the sidelines for Ripley.

Let's count down the 10 queerest looks from the movie...

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A Love Letter to Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous"

In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000.

This photo is an instant serotonin hit.

By: Christopher James

Almost Famous is a love story. That’s not as a reference to teenage journalist wunderkind William (Patrick Fugit) and his love for legendary “band-aide” Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). It’s also not a reference to William’s adoration for the band Stillwater, which sets off the chain of events. Writer-director Cameron Crowe made Almost Famous as a love letter to professional passion. William loves music and just wants outlets to profess his feelings on the subject. Can a journalist be a fan? This is a question asked multiple times throughout the movie. In the end, the answer is yes and no. You have to love something enough to devote your life to it, but not so much that you get swallowed up by it...

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Familiar Faces: The P.T. Anderson Players

We're celebrating PTA this week for his 50th birthday!

by Nathaniel R

Famed auteur Paul Thomas Anderson is not, perhaps, the creature of habit we expected him to be after his first three films made him a legend-to-be and suggested a steady stable of actors shifting guises with each film like a Scorsese or an Altman or an Allen. Since that magnum ensemble opus Magnolia (1999) his films have shifted closer to the traditional one or two man focal point employed by most auteurs even as they've gotten more experimental in other ways. It's as if he was purposefully shaking off the Altman-progeny tag.

That's a wee bit disappointing since auteurs who are particularly genius at assembling a whole mess of actors and watching the idiosyncratic group dymanic spark are few and far between. With PTA's next project set to be a drama about a famous child actor in high school, it's unlikely we'll see many repeats from his troupe, though there's always a possibility one or two of them show up as a teacher or parent or co-star on set.  Let's look at the actors he's used the most in his filmography thus far...

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The New Classics: The Master

By Michael Cusumano

The Master refuses to elevate the audience above Freddie Quell.  In the simplistic version of the film Joaquin Phoenix’s wastrel Freddie Quell would be The Sucker and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd would be The Fraud and there would be little ambiguity about it. No doubt this version was what many expected when they bought a ticket for Paul Thomas Anderson’s kaleidoscopic spiritual and psychological odyssey. A dynamic that would allow for them to lean back and smugly cluck that they wouldn’t be so easily taken in by such madness.

What Anderson's fictionalized take on the founding of Scientology delivered was something altogether more twisted and obscure. At no point can we be entirely sure what any of the main characters truly believe...

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The New Classics: Capote

Michael Cusumano here to celebrate a film that is so much more than just another "based on a true story" prestige pic. I have noticed that Bennett Miller’s Capote is often shoved into the biopic genre in a way that diminishes the film’s achievements. 

Lesser biopics bask in the glow of reflected importance coming off their subjects. Significance through osmosis. They value the flush of recognition over insight, and the accumulation of incident over meaning. Capote on the other hand is crafted with a stark, unwavering discipline. It has more in common with a portrait of artistic self-destruction like Black Swan than with Walk Hard inspirations like Ray...

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