Have you seen "Legendary" on HBOMax? Let's celebrate its best contestants

And now for something completely random. Word of mouth is everything in streaming culture since we're all on different timetables. Please welcome guest contributor Allen Nguyen (of the beautiful Oscar site Statuesque) to discuss a show we meant to watch this summer but didn't get around to. Now just might be the time!

by Allen Nguyen

In case you haven’t already heard, HBO Max’s glorious ballroom competition show Legendary is now casting for its second season. I was turned on to Legendary a few months after its debut, my interest piqued partly by way of its ecstatic word of mouth and partly because I was in desperate need of queer quarantine content after enduring the five month bender that was RuPaul’s Drag Race, Secret Celebrity Drag Race, and All Stars 5. What I wasn’t expecting with Legendary was the return of that same enthralling high I felt when I first watched Drag Race a decade ago. Think of Legendary as the show Drag Race fans didn’t know we’ve been waiting for — the natural next step in the venn-diagram that intersects these two queer worlds... 

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Streaming Roulette, Nov: Paranorman, Thunderball, Time and "Psychiatry On-Screen"

After the jump you'll find a listing of everything that's new to streaming this month (November 2020). But first we pick two handfuls of titles and randomly freeze them with the scroll bar. Whatever comes up is what we share. Do these images make you want to see (or rewatch) the movie? 

[on the radio]  It's christmas time in the city. Ring a ling. Hear them ring ♫ ♬

Carol (2015) on Netflix
Always forget this is a Christmas movie! But, really, 'tis always the season for the best movie of the decade. 

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Portuguese Cinema on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

It's not often that one gets the opportunity to promote Portuguese cinema in these parts of the internet. Despite good reviews and some acclaim across the festival circuit, it's rare to find films from Portugal being discussed internationally. Even though I love my country's pictures, I find it difficult to justify writing a piece about them for The Film Experience, especially considering plenty of readers don't have access to said films. When the opportunity strikes, one can't waste it. 

Recently, the Criterion Channel has curated two collections focused on the works of Pedro Costa and João Pedro Rodrigues, some of Portugal's most important contemporary filmmakers [some NSFW images after the jump]...

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20:20 (Pt 2) Power chords, romantic comedies, and unseen gems?

Due to our ongoing fetish for freezeframing movies at random and for the practical reasons of looking for which 2020 releases are streaming --we are rapidly approaching "year in review" list-season so we gotta catch up --we're freezing 2020 pictures at the 20:20 mark. If you missed part one, that's here. The movies were chosen entirely at random ....so long as they were easily accessible for viewing.

How many of these 15 movies have you seen? Any you've been meaning to catch up with?

Are the people ready to make opening arguments?

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20:20 (Pt 1) Prodigious Bribes, Wonky Spells, Silent Judgment

Thirteen years ago (gulp) we launched a series called 20:07 which was immediately popular and imitated around the web (back when everyone had blogs, natch). In the series we froze a movie at just that spot, a punny play on time stamps vs the year we were living through. Occassionally we revisited the series with a different timestamp in other years due to our ongoing fetish for freezeframing movies at random. But we haven't done it in forevs. So since half the internet believes that, like, 'no movies came out in 2020' let's revisit 2020 releases that happen to already be streaming and freeze them at 20:20* just because. If you enjoy or if it piques your interest, we'll keep going for a whole 2020 release library ;).  The movies were chosen at random. How many of these 11 pictures have you seen? (We're going to have to start bingeing 2020 releases ourselves in order to catch up in time for the Film Bitch Awards. This will be the first year where those awards don't exactly line up with the Oscars, eligibility wise, since we want to stick to calendar year since that's what we've always done. 

* timestamp is not exact. DVD counters were exact but streaming tends to be difficult to read exact time stamps due to backwards counting on some sites, the lack of frame by frame ability, time stamps disappearing with pausing, pre-movie ads, and the like depending on the service, so these are "approximations". 

Always wondered what Grandma kept in those locked closets. Turns out it was full of medicinal herbs and elixirs and old books about ancient healing.

THE WITCHES (Robert Zemeckis, US) 
Warner Bros. Original release date: Oct 22nd. Streaming on HBO Max

I was such a fan of the 1990 version and Anjelica Huston's amazing performance as the Grand High Witch that I haven't yet had the heart to watch this remake despite sturdy Octavia Spencer not to mention Anne Hathaway camping it up. Have any of you watched this yet? 

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