Thursday, January 3, 2019 at 9:10PM by Eric Blume
Adam McKay’s film Vice has been out in theaters for two weeks or so now, and as we head into Golden Globe weekend where it leads the nominations, we ought to discuss it a bit more. Here are some thoughts about the film, which do carry SPOILERS, not about story points (as unfortunately these things really happened), but about just how truly odd this film is in so many ways...
Thursday, December 27, 2018 at 8:41PM John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#52 — Katharine “Kay” Graham, pioneering Washington Post publisher who authorized the printing of the Pentagon Papers.
JOHN: Since it was first announced in March of 2017, deep into the first hundred days of the Trump presidency, The Post moved at a breakneck speed from rewriting to shooting to post-production before it quickly arrived in theaters in December of that year. Spielberg had paused production on his historical drama The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and after reading a spec script by Liz Hannah, set the gears into motion on The Post, assembling his usual team (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, among others), along with two screen legends who had never before shared a single frame. This urgent sense of timeliness is palpable in The Post, which is both a riveting period piece about a landmark historical moment and a rousing paean to the free press in our distressing present...
Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 10:30AM John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#50 —Emmeline Pankhurst, key leader of the women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom.
JOHN: Vandalizing storefronts, detonating mailboxes, carrying out prison hunger strikes — these are but a few of the risky tactics employed by women in the British suffrage movement in and around London circa 1912. Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette chronicles the movement’s pivot to such dangerous gambles in an effort to draw attention and spark action for the cause. “Deeds, not words” became the new mantra after years of respectable yet unsuccessful solicitation of a woman’s right to vote. These radical activists, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and visionaries like Emily Wilding Davison, Edith New, and scores of others, believed that civil disobedience and militant action were the only ways to disrupt the status quo and achieve women’s suffrage. This crucial moment of history has rarely been represented on screen, save for glimpses of the movement in Mary Poppins or in a handful of documentaries, despite the exciting and provocative elements inherent in this important story.
Unfortunately, “Important Story” could appropriately serve as the tagline and governing principle of Gavron’s misguided though well-intentioned film...
Friday, December 7, 2018 at 6:30PM Before we get to the final "happy thoughts" Team Experience Globe Reaction finale, I thought I'd ask our contributors and friends of the site questions about the Golden Globe fates of Vice (nomination leader), First Man (2 nominations, Score and Supporting Actress), and Widows (entirely shut out). It's easy to theorize about what's happening with all three of those movies, and theorizing is fun. So let's begin:
1. Why do you think Vice led the nominations?
DEBORAH LIPP: Hating Dick Cheney is a cathartic substitute for hating Donald Trump. I support this.
GUY LODGE (VARIETY): Because it's the newest thing out and, crucially, because it hasn't been reviewed yet -- its on-paper prestige is still undented...
Thursday, November 29, 2018 at 5:00PM by Eric Blume
This month marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Gus Van Sant’s semi-biopic Milk, chronicling the last eight years of the life of gay politician Harvey Milk. If you’ve never seen Milk, get ye post haste to it, if for no other reason than to be fully immersed in this crucial window of history. If you saw Milk when it was released a decade ago and haven’t seen it since (which was true for me), watch it again: it’s aging beautifully.
Olympic diver Tom Daley’s husband, Dustin Lance Black, won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for this movie, and the trophy was richly deserved. Black not only manages to avoid almost every biopic cliché, he captures the beginning of the gay rights movement with precision, pain, and most importantly, humor. Black’s script starts when Harvey Milk turns forty, had been mostly closeted, and was not politically aware. He chronicles his consciousness-raising without a hint of clumsiness or fake nobility. And while Black keeps his focus squarely on Milk, his real achievement is in casting a wider net: he gives Milk’s real-life contemporaries a vivid presence, and shows us a full community within the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco. This script manages to be both macro and micro, and throughout you can see Black’s gigantic heart and passion for this story...
