"Orange is the New Black"- Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Welcome back to Litchfield Correctional Facility.  The second season of Netflix's Orange is the New Black was unveiled last Friday and my cup runneth over.  I tried my hardest to savor this zesty treat and watch gradually to fully appreciate this special show.  That didn't go over very well-- this is, after all, such a singular and highly addictive series.  I binged and binged rather hard, nearly devouring Season Two.  While I process and settle, The Film Experience is running "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" for Season Two.

Orange is the New Black may not be the most expressive show visually, but it may just be the most humanistic, and when you feature the best and most diverse ensemble cast in all of television, you don't need any artificial showiness to throw about.  The show hardly needs any fussiness what with the vivid, beautifully multi-dimensional women at its center.  It lies in the sharp writing, wonderfully realized black comedic/lightly tragic tone and the pitch perfect performances of it's expertly realized cast.  Their faces, in all their diverse wonder, are expressive enough.

Which is why my favorite shot of Season Two is such an incredibly simple one.  It comes from Episode 8 ("Appropriately Sized Pots") and features my Season Two MVP-- Miss Rosa (majestically and gracefully played by Barbara Rosenblat.)  It's a bullish claim, since the spark of Orange of the New Black has from the very beginning been its generosity with its rich ensemble, so much so that best-in-show honors change sometimes within scenes.  For now, I stick with it.  Miss Rosa was merely on the periphery of the first season, but in heartbreaking and joyous fashion, embodies the spirit and fire that makes Orange is the New Black so special in the first place.  An older woman dying of cancer and stuck in prison for what she knows will only be a short time left.  Rosa is a crank, a truth-teller, and yet so full of life and love and joie de vivre that it spills out in unexpected and beautifully modulated moments.  Episode 8 tells her story-- flashing back to when she was a fiery and beautiful spitball turned on by the lure of robbing banks and sharing kisses with her partners.  The shot above sees Rosa in the happy throes of nostalgia.  It's short, but sweet.

More on Orange is the New Black soon.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot- "3 Women"

The Film Experience honors Robert Altman's under-seen 1977 cult totem 3 Women for Hit Me With Your Best Shot this week.  With that comes a confession-- I've never seen the film before.  Which is particularly shameful because I adore Altman and 3 Women stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek.  I know better than to trust much (especially something as elliptical as this) on first viewing, but found it be a creepy, feminine fun house representing perhaps the most eclectic specialties of a group of singular artists.  So, if the film on first visit (there's absolutely enough to lure a second one) reads perhaps like a riff on Ingmar Bergman's landmark actress classic Persona as it studies its two leading ladies as their identities start to bleed into one another, I know better than to trust my initial response.

The film opens in a sort of dream space and never quite leaves even as on the outset many sequences (especially in the first hour or so) seem fairly straight forward.  Curiously, 3 Women came about allegedly from Altman's own dreams-- in action that surely should be one of the great backstage stories of the much lionized American cinema of the 1970s, Altman was able to sell this strange story without a completed screenplay to a major Hollywood studio (in this case, Fox) based solely on reputation.  The opening titles themselves seem to immediately sell 3 Women as a go-all-in sort of feature-- surrender to it!

Millie (Duvall, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes that year) works at a senior health spa.  She's a talkative, confident, endearingly independent woman.  Yet there's something off right away about her, for when she speaks (that would be often), her colleagues, neighbors and "friends" don't even bother to pretend to acknowledge her, they even sometimes openly mock her.  She's absolutely delusional, but an indelibly offbeat characterization.  Millie's world is changed by Pinky (Spacek), a fresh in town Texan who begins to work with Millie and quickly build up not just a friendship, but a possessiveness of Millie.  Pinky, by contrast to Millie's outwardly plucky demeanor is timid, fragile, a bit frightening and possibly borderline autistic-- all arriving a year following Carrie White. Slowly, Pinky ingratiates herself into becoming Millie's roommate and things just get weirder from there.

There's a third woman (as the title suggests)-- that would be Willie (Janis Rule), and the odd lot they create as the film reaches its twisty, confounding conclusion.  Or maybe not.  The draw and the magic of 3 Women seems to shroud the leading actresses in a sort of loosely designed set of limbo as they reflect and refract from one another.  Visually, it's sumptuous and arguably one of the most audacious in the entire Altman canon as the characters all seemingly float along and pick and take from one another.

My favorite scene in the film (I'm not even sure yet why this my favorite scene in the film or if that will extend on further viewings or not) revolves around nothing particularly dramatic, yet the eerie undercurrent of future horror rears its head nonetheless.  Pinky has just moved in and Millie is preparing dinner.  The scene starts, seemingly innocuously as Millie is describing the ideal way to make tuna melts and Pinky is altering a sleeping gown given to her by Millie.  The camera snaps a shot of a reflected Pinky and Millie.  Suddenly Spacek, so short and so fragile, has grown in stature and just barely towers over Duvall, a stark change in everything, mostly reality- just like the movie.  A perfectly subtle cue for the power ploys that face the relationship later on.  That the image is just slightly out of focus adds to the shady allure and dreaminess.

BEST SHOT

Making Fetch Happen: 'Mean Girls' 10 Years Later

Startling to think that ten years ago Lindsay Lohan was the still a promising redhead on the verge of breaking out, Tina Fey was still mostly unknown outside of Saturday Night Live, Rachel McAdams hadn't yet made three (3!) time travel romantic fairy tales and Mean Girls was just starting to enter the pop cultural lexicon.  Ten years later, times have changed, and the three main ingredients that made this particularly sassy and smart teen comedy pop the magical way that it did have each branched out into completely different directions but the movie is still just as smart and fun and sassy as ever.  As Heathers was in the 1980s and Clueless in the 1990s, Mean Girls is the ultimate defining teen comedy of the 2000s.  Mean Girls borrows heavily from Heathers, but still manages to be its distinctive own beast and its exploration of high school hierarchy is still bracing, super quotable and majestically funny.  It's hard to believe its been ten years since we were first introduced to Cady Heron, Regina George, Ms. Norbury, Janis Ian, Damian, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith, Aaron Samuels, Shane Oman and the odd lots of Cool Asians, Nerdy Asians and Mathletes.

Map of North Shore High: Where do you fit in?

Happy Birthday to "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

March 19, 2004-- One of the greatest movies ever made opens in theaters.  Directed by Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marks a sublime snapshot of everyone involved was at the top of their game.

It's greatness isn't up for debate as far as I'm concerned.  It's personal, beautiful, anguishing, haunting, funny, sad, hopeful, romantic, weird and well, eternal.  To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (how did that happen so fast?), the least one can do is give it a revisit.  For a film I'm rather hopelessly possessive and obsessed with, forgive me for making it all about me, but the best thing I can say about this modern masterpiece (a word I don't use lightly, in fact, one I try to seldom use at all) is that it feels so much like a film that was made just for me, the personal component is important.  Particularly when the film itself is sculpted, twisted and pretzel-curved out of such relatable pain.  Yet through the miracle of an ingenious screenplay, playful direction, top-tier actors and crafty artisans, the film is never depressing-- it sings, it soars, it inspires.

I remember seeing the film in theaters on opening day, it was a matinee.  It was showing at the kind of grungy-looking strip mall theater near where I used to live.  Not my ideal spot, but relatively inexpensive.  I had wished it opened, instead, at the nicer, far more comfortable multiplex across the street, but for cinema, sacrifices are made.  To this day, I'm surprised the film opened wide-- for such a nutty, hard to suss-up mind bend, that takes some real balls on the part of Focus Features, who distributed-- I doubt that would happen had the movie opened this year.  Anyhow, the first viewing (there have at least fifteen more since than, and that's probably being conservative), I don't remember being instantly in love with the film.  There was certainly a crush, but I was fuzzy, nearly instantly unsure of what I had just seen.  Yet with time, my method of discerning if a film is truly great, Eternal Sunshine (unlike a few of its protagonists) stayed, kept refreshing and churning inside my brain.  I hope it stays there forever.

BEST SHOT

The Film Experience is celebrating by collecting the best shots of this beautiful movie.  Which is actually really hard.  For a film so feeds the mind and heart so fully, it's sometimes hard to remember what an absolute beaut of film it truly is, ever more so because the very best (and most instantly iconic) beats of the film are in such constant motion.  My pick is a simple one of Clementine Kruczynski's huffing out the door.  Winslet, giving one of the best performances ever, pounces and acts the hell out of her; my pick needed to Clementine-centric.  I have more to say on Eternal Sunshine-- the 10th Anniversary will live on for the next couple of days.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

Foregoing the fact that the 20th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's mega-opus Jurassic Park makes me feel quite old, it's a great movie to catch up with.  In 1993, it was a wonder of summer blockbustery spectacle, yet there's an uncanny and unique wonder to the film, one that seems to improve with time.  Like many films that come around at that certain and magical time when a budding movie geek is building his palette and taste, Jurassic Park in many regards feels like an old friend-- a big, lumbering beast of a friend...one that might potentially eat me one day.  It's in that respect that the 3-D conversion re-release doesn't exactly read (at least to me) as a corporately cynical way of milking a long in the tooth franchise, but instead like a celebration of a film that time has only improved upon its legacy.

Revisiting this special friend, it's remarkable how the astounding and groundbreaking effects still hold up and the razzle dazzle of twenty years ago can still be held in the same regard (or perhaps even higher so) than the mega-digitized-extraganza-spectacles of today.  Even some of the dated imagery has a delightful effect opposed to the you-know-it's-all-fake Deceptacons and Avatars of today.  More importantly, there's just enough sense of character that there's enough of a rooting cause for them.  Just as importantly, many are incidental (or in the case of Wayne Knight, evil enough) that it's okay to root for dino-carnage as well.

Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, there's little point in arguing that Jurassic Park is high art, it's a high calorie roller coaster ride (made literal when it became an existing theme park attraction at Universal Studios; synergy in motion), but under the expert skill and showmanship of Spielberg, it's a great roller coaster ride that chugs along at an exceptional pace.  And for a plot that conceived on the silly premise of the return of dinosaurs, only for them to attack humans, there's such a grandiosity to the spectacle, it nearly is art.  Spielberg is essentially riffing on Jaws, his first great film and the grandfather movie for the whole summer blockbuster craze to begin with.  And similarly makes the frightening fun and the fun frightening.  I've previously addressed the effect Jaws can have on a five-year-old.  A couple of years later, I was ready and willing participant to Jurassic Park.

Looking back it's startling and thrilling in the sense that nearly every splice of the film is iconic.  From the helicopter circling down on the waterfall and pristine island to Richard Attenborough's "Welcome to Jurassic Park," to the car ride of eventual doom and the escape acts.  The T-Rex was the always the centerpiece, but the tease of his entrance was just as, if not more memorable.  Just as the chords of John Williams' Jaws score announced terror before we faced it, the same effect occurred here in the benign image of rings in a water cup.  And then it happens...

It wasn't just the mastery of technology, it was the mastery of suspense.  Spielberg, still working the mindset of an industrial Hitchcock, builds till the moment of panic.  That edge of your seat gamesmanship that happens to be more fun than the payoff itself.  In that sense pass the popcorn and bemoan the state of the current crop of Hollywood offerings.

My favorite shot of Jurassic Park to play along with the great piece, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," offered at The Film Experience, comes very early on in the film.  It involves little technical whatsits but clearly, authoritatively and quietly sums up what the feeling that the filmmaking experience should be.

And Jurassic Park still does that even twenty years in...blindsides you in the magic and wonder of the cinema.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "The Wizard of Oz"

The Film Experience has a wonderful series that asks movie lovers to pick their favorite shot from a pre-selected film.  This weeks offering, to coincide with the release of Oz: The Great & Powerful is The Wizard of Oz.  I want to play along.

Because I was so moved by Jodie Foster when she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award last January, I feel the urge to confessional too.  It's something I don't talk about very much and have never really been able to air publicly and somewhat feel the cinematic elite may shun me eternally for, but here goes:  I've never really particularly cared for The Wizard of Oz.  The classic 1939 fantasia never quite worked its magic on me as a child-- to be fair I was far fussier back then and the realm of the fantastic at once read to simplistic and far went over my head.  Also, I confess that Margaret Hamilton always scared the crap out of me-- in both Miss Gulch and Wicked West from.  I'm glad to get that off my chest.  I've regressed or grown (thankfully) throughout the years, and like, if not love, The Wizard of Oz more and more as the years grow on.  Of course, Judy Garland in her sepia-toned wonder singing her signature ballad, "Over the Rainbow" is a marvel, and the production itself (for all its difficulty, and near killing of Buddy Ebsen) is monumental.  In revisiting the Victor Fleming classic, I appreciate it more and more for its visual delight (and thus picking a "best shot" was fairly daunting), it's off kilter compositions that read perfectly appropriate and strangely don't feel outdated in the slightest despite the bug of technology prowess that's come since, and while I can't claim yet to an Oz-convert (the sting of stubbornness has always been a sore point on my end), my appreciation ever grows.

My favorite shot is the dreamy dreamscape on which Dorothy drifts back from her adventure.  A bit strange, mystic and perhaps even a bit wild for a film from 1939.