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.)
The internet has spent the past few days savagely ripping apart The Emoji Movie, the animated film about sentient emojis and the adventures they have within your smartphone. This is a film made specifically for children of the internet, who might gaze upon this Sony vertical integration monstrosity of app references and infomercials for about a minute before heading back to their own smartphones. It’s tough to review The Emoji Movie, because it’s tough to take its lack of creativity and basic construction seriously when such cynicism and apathy burns off the screen. It singes your eyebrows. No one cared about making this movie; I can’t imagine anyone coming up with a criticism the filmmakers would even protest. The Emoji Movie is the unadulterated heart of capitalism pumping out disinterested beats, an infomercial for WeChat here, a paid ad for CandyCrush there, Sony everywhere you look...
AV Club RIP voice acting legend June Foray Variety Amazon is moving into being their own distributor now after partnering with other distributors before. They'll try it out with Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel which they seem to have high hopes for. Screen Crush It's official - Emoji Movie is worst reviewed wide release of the year
/Film a photo tour of the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image Deadline Anne Hathaway circling the Barbie movie that Amy Schumer abandoned Coming Soon Warner Bros considering "formidable" Oscar campaign for Wonder Woman
off cinema Variety Jack O'Connell talks about his nude scene in the new revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and why he hasn't watched Paul Newman in the film version Playbill Ellen Greene shares a scrapbook from the original run of Little Shop of Horrors Chicago Tribune recommended theater shows on a budget in Chi-town Boy Culture the world's youngest living Madonna fan - a 13 year old violinist! Exeunt a piece about that 'critics camp' I went to this month by one of the other fellows NYT terribly sad debacle going on with The Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway. When I first heard about Mandy Patinkin's casting I was thrilled because I haven't yet seen the show and totally love that man. But it seems in order to accomodate him (in the role formerly played by Josh Groban) they were ousting their current leading man Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan (from Hamilton)earlier than his scheduled final date. The optics look bad even though Broadway shows do these type of celebrity casting changes constantly. Patinkin has now dropped out and Oak won't extend and now the entire cast, which includes several actors of color (the show was previously praised for its diverse casting), could be out of jobs because they might close early due to the public outrage.
Exit Video The new Charlie XCX video "Boys" is a sexy blast. So many celebrity cameos including the internet's current boyfriend Riz Ahmed, diver Tom Daley, and a slew of musicians. There is a chainsaw in this video but as Charli states
Holy Longevity, Robin. Our first Batman, actor Adam West passed away yesterday from leukemia but what a long life. He nearly made it to 89 and kept his great sense of humor throughout his life. He achieved pop culture immortality with the starring role on the kitsch classic Batman series in the 1960s. Some actors feel uncomfortable about the role that made them famous or the one they become too associated with but the smart ones embrace it. West did just that with gusto, and wasn't above poking fun of himself, either...
A slightly shorter version of this review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...
With a childish man-baby terrorizing us from the White House who needs a movie about one? Shocked as I am to say this… “surprise!,” this past weekend’s #1 film The Boss Baby is actually good. For those fearing a one-joke gimmick film (Baby in a suit. Get it?), fear not. The new Dreamworks comedy actually has at least five broad joke topics. In descending order of amount of miniature jokes mined from the big ones:
Corporate culture
Babies
Childhood imagination
Sibling rivalry
Puppies
While Dreamworks pictures largely still lack the emotional complexity of their Pixar counterparts — this isn’t Inside Out or anything, let's not get carried away — at their best they still offer plenty to giggle with and gawk at for fans of animated comedy...
We've reached the penultimate episode of our Tarzan series. Now sailing into Disney wilds...
by Nathaniel R
For over half a century in film and television storytellers didn't think Tarzan needed an origin plot but when the movies told it (Greystoke, 1984), it was as if everyone had always wanted to. Why not Disney then? Disney hadn't quite run out of classic fairytales to adapt by the mid-nineties but they were shifting their focus to boys. This was arguably due to their gargantuan back-to-back biggest-ever successes of Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), two animated features that deviated from their princess focus. Enter Hercules and then Tarzan. Neither were girly fairytales but both were still firmly embedded in fantasy and heightened enough for musical numbers.
Sort of.
By the time Tarzan rolled into town, Disney executives had clearly begun to wonder if audiences were done with the musical part of their Animated Musicals because Tarzan is only a musical in the sense that non-diegetic adult contemp ear worms keep popping up. They arrive without warning, with all the subtlety of a slasher movie jump scare.
Monday, July 31, 2017 at 10:00PM 
