#Ben Shenkman

[priorwaltermorelife]

Justin Kirk and Ben Shenkman in Angels in America (2003)

[yourmilwaukeebeers]

K.S., baby. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

angels in america, part one: millennium approaches (2003, 2017)

[deatwithdignity]

angels in america

millennium approaches: the messenger

director: mike nichols

cinematographer: stephen goldblatt

[tansy-moppet]

Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly old.

[moviemosaics]

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point

directed by Tyler Taormina, 2024

[letterboxd-loggd]

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point (2024) Tyler Taormina

December 17th 2024

[tinycupcakesstuff]

10 Reasons I am obsessed with Breakfast with Scot

Grab yourself a T shaped pancake and enjoy!

I find the theme's of the novel by Michael Downing and the screen adaptation to be very compelling. Exploration of found families, stable queer couple navigating parenthood, potentially queer/gender nonconforming kids, coming out, self-acceptance.

I am a big fan of contemporary fiction, real-life situations meets romance/rom-com. I am not really into YA or fantasy, fandom can be heavily skewed in that direction. I also like more mature protagonists beyond the early 20s into adulthood.

Love a totally stable and in love m/m couple with careers and a house in the suburbs. No romantic drama. Just a wholesome queer marriage.

LOVE that the NHL and Toronto Maple Leafs gave permission to use the logos and branding in a queer-themed film.

I love both stories, novel and film. I think that the characters stand up really well in both. Particularly, I think Eric is entirely justified in remaining in the closet professionally and as a public figure. It was 2007! Ellen was recently out. Very few celebrities and next to no sports figures were out in that time period.

Tom Cavanagh and Ben Shenkman are just so fine, this should be self-evident.

I just love the wholesome, feel-good comfort of the film. I know it isn't perfect but for its time, I think it did well and was pretty ground breaking. Queer-themed films were usually tragedies back then.

LOVE that they incorporated hockey!!!

Love the supporting characters and feeling of a sitcom. That found family and found community comes through very strongly.

And most of all, I love that there is so much story to tell. How did Eric end up getting together with Sam if he can't even say the word gay out loud yet is ok talking about their bedsheets on the street for anyone to hear? How do they deal with Scot's trauma about losing his mom? How is Sam a sports attorney yet knows nothing about hockey? Did Scot finish the hockey season? I want to know all about Nula and George Jr's wedding! I want Eric/Sam commitment ceremony. Hell, I'd even enjoy Billy and Mia's wedding lol. I want to see Scot graduate from high school and Ryan Burlington get drafted.

[nonesuchrecords]

It was 20 years ago today: Thomas Newman’s soundtrack to Angels in America was released on Nonesuch. Newman's romantic, epic-scale orchestral score to the Mike Nichols–directed HBO film version of Tony Kushner's play "seems divinely inspired," says the San Francisco Chronicle, and proves "rewarding in its own right from beginning to end ... Newman has risen gloriously to the greatness of Angels." You can hear it again here.

Starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Justin Kirk, Jeffrey Wright, Ben Shenkman, and Patrick Wilson, the six-hour epic features a screenplay Kushner adapted from his 1991 Tony Award–winning play.

[clemsfilmdiary]

Chasing Sleep (2000, Michael Walker)

8/20/23

[triforcevillains]

Pi (1998)

Maximillian Cohen ist ein genialer Mathematiker, der in Zahlen jegliche Funktionsweisen des Lebens sieht. Nach einem Computerabsturz stößt er auf eine 216-stellige Zahl, die er zunächst für unbrauchbar hält und den Zettel, der diese beherbergt, in den Mülleimer wirft.

Nach einem Gespräch mit einem ehemaligen Professor realisiert er, dass jene Zahl der Schlüssel zum Verständnis des Universums sein könnte. Nun muss er diese wiederfinden, was sich als recht schwer erweist. (10/10)

[deatwithdignity]

rewatching angels in america literally best thing HBO provided in the 2000s

[tansy-moppet]

"Are you a ghost lou?"

"No, just respectful, lost to myself"

a gift for @yourmilwaukeebeers who made me draw once again :)

[whileiamdying]

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” Transcends the Holiday-Movie Genre

Tyler Thomas Taormina’s comedy drama about a Long Island family boasts some of the year’s sharpest characterizations and a strikingly original narrative form. By Richard Brody November 8, 2024

It wasn’t on my list of likely occurrences that a nostalgic and sentimental holiday movie would provide some of the year’s sharpest characterizations on film and also boast a strikingly original narrative form. But this paradoxical blend turns out to make perfect sense in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” a finely crafted and achingly romantic memory piece, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina. It’s set sometime in the two-thousands in the fictional Long Island town of the title, where members of a large Italian American family, the Balsanos, come together to celebrate the holiday. Written by Taormina and Eric Berger, who both grew up on Long Island and have been friends since middle school, the movie checks the genre’s boxes—long-awaited reunions and poignant separations, hearty festivity and romantic intimacy—but it does so in a way that provokes bracingly complex emotions and frames them in the snow-globe-like quotation marks of reminiscence.

The clan’s matriarch, Antonia (Mary Reistetter), at whose house the Balsanos have gathered, is physically and mentally deteriorating, spending most of her time parked in an easy chair, offering wan greetings. The house teems with at least twenty family members—siblings, cousins, grandkids, other halves, and in-laws, ranging from toddlers to the elderly—plus some friends. Amid the revelry, fundamental relationships are drawn with a clarity that lays bare suppressed anguish, smothered disputes, and painful secrets. Antonia’s four grown children are gradually introduced. There is the poised and pensive Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), who’s there with her husband and two kids, one of whom, a teen named Emily (Matilda Fleming), biliously resents her. Kathleen’s sister, the energetic Elyse (Maria Carucci), is married to the flamboyantly domineering Ron (Steve Alleva), who cooks up the holiday feast while inveighing against the looming prospect of “chaos and insurrection.” Their brother Matt (John J. Trischetti, Jr.) is their mother’s caregiver, living in the house with his wife, Bev (Grege Morris). Matt instigates the film’s main conflict when he proposes selling the house and moving their mother into a nearby nursing home—a plan that surprises his sisters and enrages his brother, Ray (Tony Savino), a widowed blowhard with a hidden artistic streak.

It’s a mark of Taormina’s audacious way with narrative architecture that the scene in which this conflict bursts forth—which includes the piquant detail of Ray yelling at Matt while on an exercise bike—is the movie’s only traditional scene of overt exposition and constructed argument. Mostly, Taormina proceeds in fragments and snippets, with exquisitely rapid touches of dialogue and behavior which bring to life a house that is full of stories and long-standing tensions. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of the individual and the group; it’s a coming-of-age tale about many ages but also a reckoning with the frustrations of adolescence, the many varieties of loneliness in adulthood, and the struggle to define oneself against the identity assigned by a tight-knit family.

Taormina’s idiosyncratic artistry, which was evident in his first feature, “Ham on Rye” (2019), has now, in his third, developed into uninhibited cinematic self-assertion. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” bolsters my belief that a great movie usually reveals itself quickly, in its first scenes and even in its first shots. The film’s distinctive combination of sharp, nuanced writing and enticingly original visual compositions grabs the viewer almost instantly. In moments seemingly caught on the fly, characters flit through the house and out of it, meeting and separating, sharing laughs and exchanging confidences, giving voice to dreams and troubles in casual remarks and offhand gestures. The cinematographer, Carson Lund, festively ornaments the screen with points and streaks of color and light, and his drifting camera conjures murmurs of the past, recalling shots in classic memory films by Max Ophüls and Alain Resnais.

Taormina punctuates the familial drama with several spectacular set pieces, such as a festive meal at which an elderly woman named Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati) delivers a loving litany of the departed; a scene of teary-eyed melancholy in which the family turns off the lights and watches home movies; and a Christmas Eve tradition in which the family joins neighbors to watch the local fire department’s procession of fire engines festooned with Christmas decorations. Yet even such large-scale pageantry gives rise to brisk strokes of high drama, as when Emily unleashes adolescent hostility at the dinner table or when Kathleen becomes the bearer of a burdensome secret.

Meanwhile, at the edges of the action, the movie features micro-incidents of the sort that burrow deep in the mind, a whole box of madeleine moments in the making: a bunch of kids playing video games in the basement realize that the family iguana is missing, and one goes into a dark storage room to look for it; a waggish guest finds Isabelle asleep in a stair lift and presses a button to send her gliding downstairs unawares; Ray, on the patio, talks business into a landline with a very long cord; Ron declares that society is “survival of the fists,” a malapropism that he reinforces by putting up his dukes; Kathleen tries to cheer up an ailing boy with a little dance of uninhibited joy.

The overwhelming profusion of incidents and details, of sidelong glances in crowded frames and notable actions occurring in the background, is reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s films. Taormina’s ornamental sensibility is far less artificial—he adorns a largely realistic cinematic world with seemingly spontaneous touches and serendipitous observations—but, as with Anderson’s work, the movie should be viewed at least twice to be truly seen: the action moves fast, its connections are implicit, and the talk is brilliantly epigrammatic, leaving viewers to look back and catch up while risking missing out on new pleasures as they speed along.

Taormina, like Anderson, also encourages a distinctive mode of performance. Few of the actors in the Balsano clan have long résumés—Dizzia is the most prominent, and her attentive, eloquent performance deftly meshes with Fleming’s, as Emily—but Taormina’s perceptive direction grants everyone moments in the spotlight. The movie seems to create actors along with characters.

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” pivots on a twist of sorts that’s too good to mention but also too good not to. Emily and a cousin, Michelle (Francesca Scorsese), who’s a little bit older and a little bit bolder, sneak out of the house to meet their friends and take a car ride that Kathleen has forbidden. With this leap into the unknown, the movie instantly becomes a story of teen-age discovery, by turns passionate, tender, and goofy. It begins with a comedic wink at a young driver’s inexperience, and includes the motormouth intellectualism of a local boy, Craig (Leo Hervey). In an extended sequence of late-night snacks and seductions at a bagel shop, featuring a memorable cameo by Elsie Fisher, Craig’s smarty-pants riffs take on an earnest weight as Emily deems Christmas gifts “capitalist propaganda” and ponders what to do with hers. As the night progresses from jollity to intimacy, Taormina discovers wondrously discreet and delicate visual correlates for teen lust, including at its most fumbling. (The end credits give a sense of the comedy of the teens’ tussles, listing such characters as Bubble Gum Gal and Kiss-Marked Dope.)

At this point, the story brings Emily and the other teens into contact with two other groups—three postadolescent slackers who hang out at a graveyard, sullenly smoking (the most voluble of whom is played by Sawyer Spielberg), and two police officers with the misfortune of working on Christmas Eve (played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington). They provide a sense of a wider world that may look absurd to the teens—they mock yet fear the slackers and hardly notice the sad-eyed officers—but which for Taormina, older and wiser, is full of pathos. (This is perhaps laid on a bit thick, these older characters’ identities subordinated to the meaning that Taormina assigns them.)

Those streaks of exaggerated melancholy in the grubby ordinariness of suburban life don’t detract from the exalted tone of Taormina’s suburban reveries. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is a drama of gimlet-eyed nostalgia. An image of Emily taking refuge in the woods at night connects her teen life with the grandeur of classic-era melodrama, and few movies ever tap the kind of intense emotion that Taormina stirs with a bag of dumpster-dived bagels. Without losing sight of what’s banal and petty in suburban life, he imbues it with a sense of grace that emerges both from personal relationships and from the aesthetic of daily life—transcendence despite itself. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Yule Rules.”

[themnmovieman]

Movie Review ~ Christmas Eve in Miller’s’ Point

Christmas Eve in Miller’s’ Point Synopsis:  On Christmas Eve, a family gathers for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friends to claim the wintry suburb for her own.Stars: Michael Cera, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman, Sawyer Spielberg, Francesca Scorsese, Gregg…

[genevieveetguy]

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, Tyler Taormina (2024)

[howardhawkshollywoodannex]

Ben Shenkman and John Cusack in Must Love Dogs (2005). Ben was born in New York City and has 65 acting credits from a 1994 episode of Another World to three episodes of a 2022 series.

His other notable credits include Quiz Show, Requiem for a Dream, Angels in America (six episodes), Blue Valentine, Royal Pains (49 episodes), and The Trial of the Chicago 7.