The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Team Experience has been celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) all week. We'll wrap up Sunday. Here's Ginny O'Keefe...
The best kind of pet in any movie is a loyal one. And it doesn’t hurt if the pet is cute. Also, a sprinkle of badassery is always welcome. All that is nicely packaged in a yellow Labrador retriever named Maggie in 1994’s rafting/crime adventure film The River Wild. For those who haven’t seen this Streep vs. Bacon gem, Meryl plays rafting expert Gail who is forced to take two criminals (John C. Reilly and Kevin Bacon) down a dangerous river all the while trying to protect her son, Rourke (Joseph Mazzello), and husband Tom (David Straithairn). Along for the trip is Maggie. From the get-go, Maggie is sweet, bubbly and you can tell she loves her humans deeply. She’s also good at digging up dead bodies in the woods (spoiler). Overall, she’s a good girl. But when s**t hits the fan, then we see how great of a girl she is...
Ten random things that happened on this day (July 8th) in film history for your edification or amusement
1905 The mutinous soldiers of the Russian battleship Potemkin surrender to Romanian authorities. The event later becomes the subject of one of the most influential films ever made, Sergei Eisentein's Battleship Potemkin (1925).
1907 Zeigfeld stages the very first "Ziegfeld Follies" on a New York theater roof. The elaborate theatrical revue becomes a showbiz institution and the subject or setting of major movies, most famously the Best Picture winner The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and the Best Actress winning Funny Girl (1968)
After the jump Cary Grant, Kevin Bacon, Fantastic Four and more...
John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#21 —Gail Hartman, a rafting expert whose distracted husband and disgruntled son will soon turn out to be the least of her problems…
MATTHEW: The River Wild opens with the rather surprising sight of Meryl Streep rowing a kayak with steely determination and brisk athletic prowess down the lengthy expanse of the Charles River. Watching Curtis Hanson’s waterborne caper for the first time in 2018, I asked myself with stunned curiosity the same question that surely rolled through the minds of ‘90s audiences upon the film’s release: How exactly did she get here? The River Wild is a light rip-roarer that could have easily ended up as little more than a forgettable IMDB entry in the filmography of Sigourney Weaver or Geena Davis or Linda Hamilton were it not for someone’s out-of-the-box idea to transform one of our most famously worldly and erudite thespians into a hard-bodied, take-charge action heroine...
1913/1914 Did you know that Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) and Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn) from Rear Window shared a birthday? Now you do! (Uff, I love Rear Window so much) 1942Rings on Her Finger, a screwball comedy starring Henry Fonda and Gene Tierney opens in theaters 1948Gentleman's Agreement wins Best Picture at the 1947 Oscars but the enduring statues from that year are surely Edmund Gwenn's Supporting Actor win as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street and the Cinematography and Art Direction wins for the astounding Black Narcissus. What a picture! 1952 Vivien Leigh wins her second Best Actress prize at the 1951 Oscars for A Streetcar Named Desire. Absent from the ceremony, Greer Garson accepts for Vivien...
must read "Want to work in Hollywood? Only straight, white men need apply?" this new study from USC is getting a lot of attention and it is pretty damning evidence all told. (How did diversity issues get so much worse instead of better? - It boggles the mind.) That study is just for films but TV is doing a lot better. On that note it looks like we lost Lee Daniels to TV for good (*sniffle... no more Paperboy or Precious). In addition to "Empire" Season 2 he's developing a girl-band series called "Star". NYT also looked at the diversity gap on the bigscreen from that study and Dana Delany tweeted in response underlining why she doesn't do film anymore.
The migration of actors (particularly female) and creatives to television has been well documented. I can only blame moviegoers at this point. They just only seem willing to look at "adult" and female stuff on television and save their ticket dollars for fx films
links Variety Todd Haynes to get a tribute at this year's Gotham Awards Empire remember when Lasse Hallström was a big deal? His breakthrough was MyLife as a Dog (not a literal title) and now he'll be directing a movie called A Dog's Purpose which is actually about a dog, a reincarnated dog who helps various owners in his lives imgur a native of Florida photographs Edward Scissorhands locations 25 years later. The foilage sure grew and the colors sure are drabber now Interview republishes an archival interview with Warren Beatty from 1972 as we await anything on his long-gestating Howard Hughes biopic MSZ "Unloved" series looks at Peyton Reed's Down With Love and The Break-Up Filmmaker Magazine talks to Randal Kleiser about Summer Lovers, an 80s guilty pleasure starring Daryl Hannah and Peter Gallagher. Indie Outlook compares American Sniper and Selma to find the structure of "Oscar Bait". It's interesting but I wholly disagree on the notion that Selma's focus on the mechanicas of civil disobedience makes it dry and unsatisfying. I think that's exactly what makes it so good and so much more worthwhile than a simple "great man" biopic would have been. Love that movie. This Is Not Porn Jessica Lange on the set of King Kong (1976). Hee
spandex city CW Seed This is actually cool. CW, which had a major hit with their fun and well-crafted Flash series is now streaming the original Flash television series from 1990 - I had forgotten that existed even! Comic Alliance "why I'm boycotting Marvel Comics" more on Marvel's very real diversity problem Htxt.Africa talks Star Wars and The Jungle Book from a Disney Africa presentation. Also says Doctor Strange looks "horror-movie-dark"
for London readers FacebookDesperately Seeking Susan is getting a 30th anniversary screening at the Prince Charles Cinema
the Leftovers
Oooh, here's the Season 2 trailer to HBO's "The Leftovers" which had so many good parts for ladies last season. This new season shakes things up a lot so we don't know quite what to expect.
free the bacon Kevin Bacon demands more male nudity in Hollywood
Friday, May 8, 2020 at 5:08PM 
