Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 1:56PM Happy birthday to the Sensates. Netflix renewed Sense8 for a second season today (the actors seem very happy). To celebrate let's all masturbate simultaneously all over the world at 8:08 PM tonight.
[If you missed our coverage, Nathaniel talked about the NSFW radical sexuality and Tim reviewed the whole season.]
Monday, August 3, 2015 at 12:20PM NEW SERIES! Since our eyes always flash and a smile spreads when a movie is referenced on a tv show we're watching, we've decided to make it a habit to share these cross-platform romances with you. Whenever we see one worth discussing, we'll share it. Here's Manuel on "Gilmore Girls."
There’s an entire series to be written about every single pop culture reference made in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s beloved mother/daughter TV show. It wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t an entire Tumblr account devoted to it (there is!) and while I’ve been enjoying its availability on Netflix (I’m currently on a much needed rewatch), the recent news about its acquisition by UPtv had me thinking it’d make a great entry into TFE’s newest series.
As luck would have it, I didn’t even have to look hard to find a specific moment to talk about. Here are our pop culture junkies at the start of "A Deep Fried Thanksgiving" (S3:E9):
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 11:00PM NEW SERIES! Since our eyes always flash and a smile spreads when a movie is referenced on a tv show we're watching, we've decided to make it a habit to share these cross-platform romances with you. Whenever we see one worth discussing, we'll share it. To kick things off, here's Andrew binge-watching The Americans...
The Americans follows the machinations of two KGB spies living in the US posing as Americans in the early 1980s during The Cold War. Like Mad Men (the genesis of The Film Experience’s TV at the Movies love affair), the show does some impressive things when playing with the period, while never going overboard. Key cultural references from television to film to music (a significant scene was set to Yaz’s “Only You”. Remember Yaz?)
This movie moment from “Stingers” (S3E10, a series best from the show) is too good to pass up...
Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 1:25PM Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions...
Last week we talked about Cheryl Dunye’s Stranger Inside, a female prison drama that makes that Netflix series feel like a light-hearted romp. I highly recommend it; though, as with many of the films we’ve been looking at these past few weeks, it is not readily available for streaming (it is available on YouTube). This week, we pause on one of HBO’s greatest shows, Six Feet Under, which features one of the most fully realized gay male characters ever seen on television, David Fisher, played by Michael C. Hall.
Premiering as it did after The Sopranos and proving HBO’s swaggering arrival into prestige TV was no fluke, Alan Ball’s melancholy meditation on death, mental illness, and sexuality, nevertheless always felt, as David Fisher himself, like the dutiful, kinda gay, and oft-ignored middle child in HBO’s eyes; Six Feet Under thus lived (and died) in the shadow of its more popular and charismatic older brother.
That’s not a knock on David Chase’s drama but a reminder that Tony Soprano’s show was a gargantuan hit that’s since become the poster child for "HBO drama," if not for the entire “Golden Age of Television” writ-large. It both paved the way and reaped the benefits of the daring work showrunners like Tom Fontana (Oz), David Simon (The Wire), Daniel Knauf (Carnivale), Steven Soderbergh (K Street), and, of course, Ball himself, were producing during the early 2000s.
Ball’s series feels like an outlier among those early HBO dramas; Six Feet Under, more expertly than Ball’s Oscar-winning film, American Beauty and with more nuance than his later vampiric sudfest, True Blood, thrives on that much maligned genre which earns immediate scorn, melodrama. Indeed, with its focus on grief and mourning, the show constantly wears its teary-eyed heart on its sleeve, shamelessly tugging at its audience’s heartstrings. [More...]
Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 5:00PM Please welcome new contributor Kyle Turner to the team, who has previously Smackdown'ed right here. In the wake of the Emmy nominations, he's here to talk about one very particular film & tv trope - Editor
In Tina Fey’s book of autobiographical essays Bossypants, she describes with delight and nostalgia her time growing up working at the Delaware County Summer Showtime program for the arts. And while her experiences about her background in theater are the surface, it’s her relationship to the queer community that serves as, perhaps, the thesis and thematic core of the essay. She writes carefully, balancing emotional reaction of the present juxtaposed against examining the events in hindsight. She talks about the lesbian best friends she had for several years, the way her hometown was like “Gay Wales” (“What Wales is to crooners, my hometown may be to homosexuals – meaning, there seems to be a disproportionate number of them and they are the best in the world!”), and, most important, the role of LGBT people in her personal narrative(s). She writes
I thought I knew everything after that first summer. ‘Being gay is not a choice. Gay people were made that way by God,’ I’d lectured Mr. Garth proudly. But it took me another whole year to figure out the second part: ’Gay people were made that way by God, but not solely for my entertainment.’ ”
In one quote, Fey pinpoints a problem that mainstream media often has when depicting queer (usually male) characters: they’re often asexual, thinly written, or designed with tropes built in as opposed to given the benefit of complexity that their straight counterparts more reflexively are given. They are, in a word, tokenized. [More...]
