"The Florida Project" Drops a Gorgeous Trailer

Chris here. We were already on board for whatever director Sean Baker would be giving us post-Tangerine, but after his follow-up The Florida Project received some of the best reviews out of this year's Cannes Film Festival, it quickly became one of our most anticipated of the fall season. The first reactions primed us for something equally heartwarming and breaking, with some stunning 35MM lensing that is just as inventive as Baker's iPhone innovation on Tangerine - and the new first trailer promises just that.

What I already sense from this candy-coated jungle that we weren't expecting is that it might be just as instantly quotable as anything we got from Sin-Dee and Alexandra ("YOU'RE NOT WELCOME!" - I mean, come on, little Brooklynn Prince is already giving such gold here). The trailer certainly sells the lighter side of this look at poverty just outside of the excess of Disney World, so we'll see just how optimistic the film turns out to be. A24 is planning a big Oscar push for the film and if the film remains a tiny tough sell for that crowd, this trailer does lay a lot of ground work for a major play for Willem Dafoe. Could he be this year's "career recognition in a sentimental role" supporting nominee? Or if it is a major player, will they pass out soft serve ice cream for some cute bit during the ceremony?

We're keeping our fingers crossed that The Florida Project is added to the TIFF lineup, but the film will play NYFF before opening on October 6.

Noomi Rapace x7

Chris here. Have you been wondering where Noomi Rapace has been hiding? Well, she's been busy getting cloned for her upcoming Netflix film Seven Sisters. (Just kidding, obviously, but just imagine the gifts we could receive if we started cloning actress!)

Rapace stars as septuplets in a world where siblings are outlawed. Raised by father figure Willem Dafoe, each woman is named for the day of the week that they get to go out into the real world, all assuming the identity of one Karen Settman. As if this doesn't sound looney tunes enough, Glenn Close shows up as the bureaucratic villain for maximum camp nefariousness. When Monday doesn't return home, it's up to the rest of the week sisters to find out what happened to her. And you thought your Mondays were the worst!

Seven Sisters will arrive on stateside Netflix sometime at the end of the year (though it opens elsewhere this summer), and I'm already a little giddy for its sci-fi silliness and what looks like Rapace having a good time. In your sci-fi dystopia, what one day of the week would you choose to leave the house?

Last Chance Streaming: Married to the Mob, Alice, Carmen Jones

There are 120+ titles leaving either Netflix or Amazon Prime this week as December arrives so if you've been meaning to see any of these, now's your chance. As is our practice we'll freeze frame a few selected titles at random and display what we found. Which will you be watching?

The list and screenshots after the jump...

LEAVING NETFLIX

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Willem Dafoe: a man for all seasons

For our impromptu Actors Month, members of Team Experience were free to choose any actor they wanted to discuss. Here's Daniel Crooke on Willem Dafoe.

Willem Dafoe is a Greek god, in the most ceramic of ways. Rather than present himself as a blank canvas, Dafoe’s vessel is a malleable lump of clay that he shapes on the kiln as the character sees fit. His fire-burnt expressions, calcified in psychic scars, detail their histories in an unrelenting mask of past, present, and future. The man is drama. But his tragic side so often overtakes the comic in the cultural consciousness that his nimble lightness often sneaks under the radar. As his performances play out in the frame, he tactfully tears at their rigid façades to reveal the far more complicated, often contradictory stories within; He’s always got a secret.

The severity for which his performances are known is only half the story. Just as his luminescent Sgt. Elias in Oliver Stone’s Platoon offsets the pitch-blackness of Tom Berenger’s sadistic Sgt, Barnes, Dafoe has an uncanny ability to hide his radiant purity behind a stalwartly strict face. For God’s sake, he defined the model of a conflicted Christ in Scorsese’s Last Temptation; doing the impossible, he reconfigured the Messiah’s pop cultural characterization as a man with a pulse, who sinned and lived off the cross. He is a duplicitous study, ready to convince you that he’s a treacherous monster until he reveals on his deathbed – over a ceremonial sip of Bean’s delicious cider – that he was a misunderstood sideliner all along.

More Willem worship after the jump...

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Beauty vs Beast: Shadow of the Auteur

JA from MNPP here christening 2015's final episode of "Beauty vs Beast" with one of my favorite movies of ever, which is celebrating it's 15th anniversary this week - E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire, which fictionalized the filming of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu by adding in some actual behind-the-scenes bloodsucking, was released on December 29th, 2000 -- I have strangely fixed memories of seeing this film for the first time, from the dreamy Art Deco opening credits on down; anyway it left a mark, so don't ask me what the hell happened to Merhige after this. He's only made one more feature-length film since, the 2004 serial killer thriller Suspect Zero with Ben Kingsley.

As for Shadow of the Vampire it didn't do great box-office-wise but it did manage to score two Oscar nominations - one for Make-Up and a much-deserved Best Supporting Actor nomination for Willem Dafoe, playing the actor Max Schreck "playing" the creature Nosferatu as a hilarious spin on Method acting. ("Thissss is hardly your peecture any longgger!" is weekly chatter in my house.) But under-sung if you ask me is John Malkovich's twisted take on the director Murnau, meeting Dafoe every inch in their dance towards Hell without the benefit of literal blood-thirst - his hunger is movie-making, the magic on the screen, and he makes it, by god he makes it.

PS if we want to wrap this movie into the now its influence can easily be seen on Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's hysterical vampire mockumentary What We Do In the Shadows, which unleashes a house-full of Nosferatus (Nosferati?) on some unprepared filmmakers.

PREVIOUSLY I hope everybody celebrated the past week the new cool way to do it - by storming around downtown Los Angeles dragging prostitutes and pimps around like sacks of flour, cackling all the way - speaking of, in last week's Tangerine duel Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) grabbed a clump full of our collective hair and wouldn't let go, taking a full 3/4s of the vote! Said BD:

"Oh my gosh, that whole door-busting, hair-pulling sequence was so bad-ass."