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Entries in 1971 (7)

Thursday
Jun232022

Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Klute (1971)

The next episode in our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Thursday night. This week we're celebrating Alan J. Pakula's seminal Klute with multiple posts. You still have time to participate! In the meantime, here's Cláudio's entry:

"I'm afraid of the dark, " says Bree Daniels, a New York sex worker trying to keep herself from becoming a serial killer's next victim. This confession happens relatively early in a film bearing the name of the taciturn Pennsylvania detective who comes to the Big Apple to investigate his friend's disappearance. He is the man to which she tells of this private fear, not necessarily a gesture of honesty but a weaponizing of her vulnerability. As ever, Bree wants control of the situation, and to bear herself naked is often the key to such dominance. Nakedness, of course, can come from truth rather than bared flesh. Watching Klute, one gets the sense that Bree is truly afraid of the dark, even though that very darkness is the poisonous womb within which she exists at all time, like an unborn babe striving for the light of birth while keeping itself smothered in the comfort of shadow…

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Thursday
Apr212022

Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: The Last Picture Show (1971)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives tonight. It's focused on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

Bogdanovich drops the audience inside a cold domestic scene early in The Last Picture Show. In the Farrow household, resentments and disappointments permeate the air, each individual stuck in their little bubble of dissatisfied placidity. Together yet alone, the Farrows' silence is a nervous thing, like a fly's wilting buzz as it suffocates in insecticide. Perchance to disrupt the muted disquiet, the matriarch enters her daughter's room and sparks a conversation. She tries to advise the younger woman, so she doesn't make the same mistakes her mother did. Mistakes like staying in their small Texan town, dying from boredom like the fly dies from bug spray.

"Everything's flat and empty here. There's nothing to do." – says Ellen Burstyn's Lois, her words reverberating through the film's most potent images…

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Friday
Dec312021

50th Anniversary: James Bond 007 in "Diamonds are Forever"

by Deborah Lipp

 

If you have clicked on this 50th anniversary commemoration of the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, you are probably eager for a takedown. Diamonds Are Forever (1971) is a movie fans love to hate. But get your tomatoes ready to pelt me at me instead because I will be doing no such thing. I love this movie and I’m fully prepared to defend it...

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Wednesday
Dec292021

Almost There: Glenda Jackson in "Mary, Queen of Scots"

by Cláudio Alves


Eva Husson's Mothering Sunday arrives in American theaters in February. If you are in the UK, you can already stream or rent the movie online. This period drama marks the return of Glenda Jackson to the big-screen after years in Parliament and brief stints on stage. So it seems logical to celebrate this tremendous thespian now, who remains one of the strangest Oscar favorites in Academy history. I've written about her 1970 victory for Women in Love before, but Jackson's career is vaster than the fruitful collaboration with Ken Russell. For instance, on TV, she played the definitive dramatization of Elizabeth I in the BBC's 1971 miniseries Elizabeth R and won two Emmys for her efforts. Concurrently, the actress also played the 16th-century monarch on film.

Charles Jarrott's Mary, Queen of Scots saw her consider the role in a less historical context, performing the Virgin Queen in romanticized opposition to Vanessa Redgrave in the part of her doomed Scottish cousin…

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Saturday
Dec252021

Christmas today and Christmas back then...(at the movies)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE.

This picture has nothing to do with the post but it's Nicole Kidman three Christmases ago. Cheers!

Years ago it was decided that we couldn't be celebrating movie anniversaries with utter randomness at the Film Experience so we committed to 10th, 25th, 50th, and 75th, and 100th parties. We stray often, especially if we're busy on "projects" like a Smackdown or what not, so this decision was useless and we'll probably drop it next year. Broader movie culture wouldn't play along anyway, celebrating all sorts of odd anniveraries (17th! 36th!) in order to just keep celebrating the same things over and over again. This is all a long way of getting around to the conceit of this post (GET ON WITH IT) which is

On this Christmas day in showbiz history, what was going on...

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