Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 7:00PM Mean Girls Week Begins! For the next seven days (betwixt the normal blogging) we'll be dropping in occasionally on the students of North Shore High to celebrate 10 years of Mean Girls which opened April 30th, 2004.
For now please to enjoy this very pink gallery with a lavender note from Damian...
Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 1:00AM TFE's coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sep 27-Oct 14) continues with JA discussing About Time.
Charm is a hell of a drug. Be it in real life or up on a movie screen, it can intoxicate a person right out of their senses, making the charmer in question immune from all kinds of quibbles - major or minor, animal vegetable or mineral. If that certain somebody or somebodies are lighting off sparks, we the charmed, defenseless and weak, are willing to overlook a lot whilst under their spell. Put those fireworks front and center in a romantic comedy and you're pretty well good to go...
And so it goes with Richard Curtis' new flick About Time. There's actually a sequence in this movie where the beloveds at center stage (played by Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams) are falling for each other and we're given a montage of time passing involving wacky outfit changes and god save us all subway buskers, and yet instead of reaching into my brain through my ear canal and lobotomizing myself right then and there I only rolled my eyes a little - not even a lot! That's a feat, one I must lay down in awe at the feet of our charm-riddled lovebirds. ("It's the H1N1 of romantic comedies!" = my poster blurb.) I almost always find McAdams worth watching when she tries (at last year's fest I positively luxuriated in the sight of her campily swanning around in lingerie in Brian DePalma's Passion) and here she's at her most homespun loveable, fringe and all - she knows her way around and back again with a sly knowing smirk.
But I'd be lying if I said it my scales (and the movie's, it must be said) weren't tilted ever so slightly in the favor of Gleeson - indeed I came out of this movie thinking I'd just been introduced to the world's skinniest gingeriest movie star since Julia Roberts squealed "Well color me happy there's a sofa in here for two," in thigh high pleather boots and a Carol Channing wig. Domhnall's been building up a memorable resume with everything I've seen him in, from Never Let Me Go to Anna Karenina, but here, to borrow a turn of phrase from Mama Grape, he shimmers and he glows. Total charm offensive.
He's so captivating that not only can I overlook mad-cap subway musician antics, I can very nearly tip-toe right past all kinds of questionable moral quandaries that his time-travel antics cough up, like gosh there's nothing at all creepy about relationships built on excessive one-sided manipulations (they're not really lie lies), and gosh, women don't so much need personal agency, do they, as long as somebody parrots their girly likes back at them. (A fixation on Kate Moss is a really strange fixation for a person to have though. Really very.)
Indeed the movie manages to swerve around these sorts of questions by pushing the third act's beating heart, where our expectations are set for the standard relationship implosion-to-reconciliation arc, into the body of a father-son picture instead (Bill Nighy's basically just playing Bill Nighy, or the Bill Nighy we all imagine Bill Nighy is, but I still like Bill Nighy, so I was okay with it); there's life in the fact that the movie manages to side-step our well-trod expectations, to be sure, but the movie actually kind of forgets about McAdams once she's good and won and churning out the babies. I hoped there'd be some curiosity bestowed upon her character regarding her amour's constant shuffling off into cupboards, at least? But that wasn't to be - she's set on the shelf while the film unearths its true colors, as a tear-jerking fantasy about family and memory and the passage of time, and also ping pong. Most meaningful ping pong!
Honestly though, truth be told, I was so high off what Domnhall was giving me it was only once the film was over and my love hangover set in that I began picking our personal love affair apart. And even then notsomuch. Subway buskers come and go, but Domhnall's grin is forever.
You should all make time (groan) for About Time when it plays at the festival tonight, 10/2, or 10/6. Then come tell me whether I was blinded by ginger or not.
Friday, April 12, 2013 at 9:16PM Today's Must Read
New Yorker Screenwriter Alan Zweibel on his two run-ins with Roger Ebert (who gave him his worst review)
More Links
In Contention Melissa Leo's gone Hollywood. Are the new films beneath the LEOgend's skill set?
Open Culture Alfred Hitchcock masterclass on film editing
Cartoon Brew Disney destroys its hand drawn animation division. Honestly I'm shocked that this only happened now. It's been so long since they were in the hand drawn business. (Sigh)
The Playlist Abbie Cornish, Colin Farrell, and Anthony Hopkins in a movie about FBI agents with psychic abilities. Sounds terrible.
And Four For You, Glen Coco!
Hollywood.com has an empirical breakdown of the seven women of Mean Girls and who is doing best for themselves 9 years later. I almost didn't link though because of the weird lapses in facts just to praise Rachel McAdams. Yes, Hollywood.com, she has also had flops. And more than one of them.
i09 on why the western/sci-fi mashup is such a hard sell for audiences
MovieLine wonders why there's no remake of Near Dark (1987) in the works. Ugh. So glad there isn't! There's no topping Bill Paxton's "finger lickin' good" vamp.
Entertainment Weekly Matt Damon's new physique for Elysium
Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 8:24PM Recently we discussed Forbes list of the highest paid actresses of the last year but money alone paints a crap portrait about what matters in the movies. Vulture recently released a list of the Top 100 Valuable Stars and weighed numerous factors like Oscar pull, box office, and media interest of various kinds. It's the kind of list that Premiere and Entertainment Weekly used to do in ye olden times, a list with more to say than just "hey, we need more page views, click on me 100 times for random photos with two sentence capsules!").
Since there's way too much to say about a list of 100 for a blog post, let's recap their Actressy stance within the top 100, only 30% of that list (sigh), starting with the undisputed queens...
Queen of Action.
Queen of Everything.
Queen of "America's Sweethearts".
27 more actresses (and commentary) after the jump
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:20PM Hallo folks! Ester here. You might remember me from such previous forays into Film Experience as my "Reader Spotlight" and my Two Stars, One Slot tribute piece, "Waif vs. Waif: Mia Wasikowska vs. Saoirse Ronan." Today I come to you with a feminist chip on my shoulder and a spark of rage in my eye, and my target is Woody Allen -- specifically his tepid time-travel fantasy, Midnight in Paris.
It's not surprising that Hollywood, the quintessential vehicle of nostalgia, is obsessed with landmarks. Jack Nicholson has only to get up in the morning and put his shoes on the right feet four shooting days out of five to get nominated for an Oscar, because Hollywood is just so gosh darn grateful an old-school movie star like him is still gracing films with his presence. Similarly, Woody Allen has only to make a movie that is not truly godawful terrible to make every film critic in the US sigh happily about how the maestro has done it again.
Even then, by the way, he still makes several insufferable stabs at cinema for every Vicky Cristina Barcelona (or Scoop, which I actually kind of enjoyed).
I understand the impulse to make ourselves hoarse praising the man. After all, we're talking about Woody Allen, auteur extraordinaire, Oscar-winner, redefiner of comedy, granddaddy to a thousand less-talented copy-cat narcissists. He's so prolific he probably doesn't even remember making one of my favorites of his films, the wistful and imaginative Purple Rose of Cairo. (Such small, delightful movies are often called "gems," which confuses me as gems come in all sizes; in fact, a woman I know recently received one that may weigh more than she does. But that's neither here nor there.)
Friends, a mediocrity is a mediocrity, whether it comes from Shakespeare or Dan Brown. Why do we insist on grading Woody Allen on a curve?
