Marcia Says "Hi"

by Nathaniel R

Putting the Gay Harden in Gay Pride! Just a brief note from a slammed day to share the wonderful news that yours truly met Tony and Oscar winning Marcia Gay Harden at New York City's pride parade yesterday. How perfect is it that the original Harper Pitt in Angels in America was out to see the festivities with her kids... and sporting rainbow colors, too!?! 

We didn't speak for long but she seemed delighted when I mentioned her brief comic genius in Grandma (2016) -- it's probably not the title most people bring up first! She was so warm and friendly. One things for sure: This was much a happier outdoor parade moment than her despairing final scene in Mystic River (2003)! 

In New York, A Repertory Film Renaissance

by Murtada Elfadl

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

A film I desperately wanted to see that had eluded me for a long time was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972). I promised myself that I wouldn’t succumb to watching it at home;  I’d wait and hope that it would eventually appear soon in a repertory theater. And sure enough it did, three months later. I got the full theatrical experience of the classic film, screened in celluloid glory. I’m glad I waited. My first screening of A Place in the Sun (1951) happened only last year, and was so exhilarating it was my favorite film I’ve seen in a cinema in 2017. Ditto Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999). I enjoyed all these films and more without distraction, in the dark, projected big and among fellow cinephiles...

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Stage Door: The Complex Web of Theater Awards

by Nathaniel R

Andrew Garfield in "Angels in America"

Oscar fanatics have it easy. Each year roughly 300 movies are eligible for the Oscar race and those same titles (with very few exceptions) are also eligible for all the other movie awards on this continent. They're even (with a few more exceptions) the same slate of movies that are eligible ACROSS the ocean at the other major English language film awards (the BAFTAs). Not so with theater!

Theater awards, a nichier beast altogether, are ultra territorial and when there is crossover it can feel accidental or play out like an echo rather than a harmonic convergence. The Olivier Awards, for example, just honored Lin Manuel Miranda's blockbuster "Hamilton"  which the Tony Awards honored two years prior but the only real crossover for this year's Tony Awards is likely to be Angels in America which just transferred here with most of its London cast intact...

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See "Mean Girls" on the big screen!

by Nathaniel R

"Get in loser we're going shopping to the movies." Just popping in to tell NYC readers about a chance to see Mean Girls on the big screen. I didn't want you to miss the opportunity because...

Show-Score.com is hosting a screening of the 2004 classic this Sunday (March 25th) at the lovely SVA theater in Chelsea. You can watch the movie with your own clique and here's the extra worth-the-almost-free-price-of-admission part:

UPDATED NEWS -Before the screening, I will be moderating a Q & A with a guest from the Mean Girls musical about adapting the film for the Broadway stage!

Here's the link to buy $5 tickets. Make sure to click on the blue "book now" box on that page so that you get this special private offer that I'm passing on intead of the normal price. If you come make sure to say "hi" to me as I am definitely more of a Cady than a Regina and won't talk about your effing ugly skirt behind your back. 

P.S. If you're somewhat new to The Film Experience and missed our massive 10th anniversary celebration of the film a few years back, make sure to check out that six post party. It was so fetch. 

Doc Corner: Tales of the City at DOC NYC

by Glenn Dunks

The massive DOC NYC festival begins this week in – would you believe it – New York City. The festival runs from November 9 - 16 and showcasing over 250 films and events. We’re going to look at some of the films screening there that will hopefully make their way to theatres and VOD over the next year. This edition of our weekly Doc Corner is devoted to three films about cities and the way people interact within and around them.

12th and Clairmont
It is inevitable that Brian Kaufman’s 12^th and Clairmount will be compared with Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit considering both focus on the 1967 riots of the city. But whereas Bigelow’s production zeroed in on just one incident of the five-day series of violent and destructive action on the streets of the city, Kaufman’s film examines a much larger canvas, covering the time before, during and after the city's people responded to the significently white police force's swarm of brutality.

It’s a tactic that proves essential to beginning to understand the events that one person in this often compelling documentary describes as “the days of madness in July”...

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