Sundance: Robin Wright Directs “Land”

By Abe Friedtanzer 

Self-imposed exile is a common cinematic device used to frame narratives, with a variety of motivations for that lifestyle change. Venturing out solo into harsh or unknown conditions has been the premise of a range of films, including Wild and Into the Wild. Watching such a journey can be most poignant for what it reveals about its protagonist, and the beauty (or misery) they find along the way. Robin Wright makes her directorial debut with Land, a Focus Features production premiering at Sundance and slated for release on February 12th... 

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Beauty vs Beast: Never Trust A Dame In Sunglasses

Jason Adams from MNPP here on the 111th anniversary of my favorite lower-case dame's birthday - Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn NY on this day in 1908 and a rough-and-tumble 19 years later found herself making movies. Cut to 1944 she was one of the biggest stars there was or ever will be when she got what's probably her most famous role and the one that carved the Femme Fatale Archetype in stone - the unhappy wife with murder on her mind Phyllis Dietrichson, who wrangles the wranglable insurance salesman Walter Neff (a gloriously against-type Fred MacMurray) into doing her dirty work. And Billy Wilder's Noir classic Double Indeminity was born.

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PREVIOUSLY Forrest Gump couldn't run fast enough last week to outrun his Jenny Girl - Robin Wright took 65% of your vote on the now controversial Oscar winner. Said Doctor Strange:

"I have hated Forrest Gump since it premiered, so I'm hardly a johnnie-come-lately hater. I find it manipulative, simplistic, and just plain unbelievable from beginning to end. It's got some very good performances that almost save it... but it's mostly a succession of cheap shots. I'm a boomer myself, but I was never blind to its self-aggrandizing convservatism and retrograde sexual politics."

Beauty vs Beast: The Gump Generation

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" fun-time poll extravaganza - it feels, in the legendary words of Stephanie Tanner, HOW RUDE, to wish Tom Hanks a birthday today with what's come to be seen as his most divisive role, that of the lead character in Robert Zemeckis' 1994 Oscar-magnet Forrest Gump. "We hate that movie now," screams the internet echo chamber.

Except... I kind of don't? I've always been plenty privy to its gross conservative streak - I went to film school in the late 90s, we talked about it a whole bunch, don't worry. I get that it takes a feather-lite tickle to nostalgic Boomer bullshit when a hand grenade might've been more helpful. I was always rooting for Jenny (Robin Wright) and have always found the film's liberal ladling of degradation onto its independently-minded female character, in the words of here and now, hella probelmatic.

And yet despite all that if I stumble upon the film on TV I'll always get sucked in. Zemeckis spins his fable of Straight White Americana with soda-pop commercial zeal, and everybody's so good, iconic really, in their roles. Perhaps we can one day find a middle-ground, watching the movie as an under-amber representation of a vacuum-sealed culture's last gasp; this is the way America saw itself once, lucky and dumb, constantly blundering forward into the next morass without thinking and then making a pretty story out of the good parts.

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PREVIOUSLY Speaking of curdled American Dreams last week's I Tonya contest gave Tonya her gold medal at last - Margot Robbie kneecapped statue-hog Allison Janney with 68% of your vote. Said Suzanne, echoing most of your comments since y'all still mad about last year's Oscars:

"Laurie Metcalf should have won. (And if anyone were going to beat her, it should have been Lesley Manville.) It's Tonya for me."

Streaming Thoughts: Broken Circles, Hunger Games, Gay Indies

Time for another "watch this before it leaves" warning. It's so stupidly complicated to follow these things is it not? So we'll do what we can here and there. The big 'new month calendar dump' is approaching but we'll deal with those next week. For now, let's just talk random streaming stragglers. The following titles are leaving either Amazon Prime or Netflix Instant quite soon so give them a shot if you've been meaning to.

As we do we've freeze-framed them randomly to see what they're serving up and to (hopefully) prompt discussion...

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Happy Birthday, Robin Wright

Tim here. Robin Wright turns 50 today, and it's my good fortune to wish her a very happy birthday on behalf of the Film Experience. She's entering the decade of her life that generally finds actresses facing the worst odds they ever get from the powers that be in Hollywood (there's that infamous stat that only two women have ever won a Best Actress Oscar in their 50s), but for my tastes, she's never been more interesting than in the past few years.

Indeed, it's been only in this decade that Wright has gotten some of her best-ever movie roles, on top a key performance in the Netflix hit House of Cards, and really gotten to show off as an actress. Some of her best film work, sadly, has been in underperforming movies that most people have never seen or heard of; what better excuse than a birthday to go out and track one of these down?

In 2010, Wright appeared as the title character in The Conspirator, director Robert Redford's story of an idealistic young lawyer defending Mary Surratt, whose boarding house sheltered John Wilkes Booth and company as they devised their plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. It's hard to go to bad for the movie as a whole, which wants very badly to be a history lesson rather than a piece of cinematic entertainment. Certainly, Redford's very prim and precise direction of James D. Solomon's research paper-feeling screenplay turn this into a social studies diorama rather than a living, breathing character drama.

But!...

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