Watch at Home: Crazy Rich Asians, We the Animals, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

What's newly available for home viewing this week? 

DVD/Blu-Ray
• Blindspotting - Just discussed.
• Crazy Rich Asians -Currently the 12th biggest hit of the year, and hopefully the film that changes everything for Asian-American actors. We should probably watch and discuss again. Do you think it will be up for the Golden Globe Comedy or Musical Best Picture prize or SAG's Best Ensemble prize? I wonder.
• Kin - A sci-fi film about a weapon of unknown origin and two brothers in trouble.
• Skate Kitchen -a drama about skateboarding girls in Manhattan. Nominated for Breakthrough Director at the Gotham Awards.
• We The Animals - The nomination leader at the Spirit Awards this year. We've interviewed the director and we just love the film here at TFE. You really should see it and the book is a swift gorgeous read... the two experiences go well together but are also their own things, perfectly tailored to each medium.

New iTunes 99¢ Deals
• A Quiet Place - The Emily Blunt monster movie smash (and longshot Oscar hopeful) is this week's highlighted deal
• My Cousin Vinny - Revisit Marisa Tomei's hilarious Oscar-winning breakout
• Under the Skin - My personal #1 of 2014, the sensationally unsettling sci-fi masterwork from Jonathan Glazer and Scarlett Johannson in that brief run when Scarjo was experimenting with every movie and knocking it out of the park each time.

ALICE: Two people have asked me about President Pierce...well, complained. 
GILBERT: About what?
ALICE: The barking.
GILBERT: Well, I don't know what to say. President Pierce is a nervous creature and excited by animals larger than himself. 
ALICE: Almost all animals are larger than President Pierce.

Brand New Streaming
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix) - The Coen Bros originally planned this as a TV series. It became a standalone anthology movie. Add "President Pierce" to 2018's long list of memorable dogs onscreen. If you've watched it already which of the six stories is your favorite? 
• Loving Pablo (Prime) -Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem reunited onscreen but the movie didn't make any waves
• McQueen (Prime) -Our review. This highly praised doc about the fasion designer Alexander McQueen is eligible for the Documentary Feature Oscar. 

Golden Globe Nominating Begins!

My oh my but awards season is speeding up. Today ballots go out to the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation. Better known as those crazies that give out the Golden Globes. We adore the Globes here at TFE because if you look back at their history many great films and performances and TV series have won that were never honored at the Oscars or Emmys, particularly those of the comic or musical persuasion.

10 dream nominations we're rooting for, however likely or unlikely after the jump...

1. Crazy Rich Asians and A Simple Favor for Best Picture, Comedy or Musical

2. Toni Collette (Hereditary) and Nicole Kidman (Destroyer) both in Best Actress, Drama because we need some Aussie Actress power celebrated especially since Oscar might stiff them...

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Murtada Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Murtada Elfadl... 

It’s that time again when we tell you lovely readers of The Film experience what we’ve appreciated from all the stuff we watched in the past year. But first things first, I'm thankful for Nathaniel and The Film Experience. For the readers and those who engage in the comments, for this lovely oasis of a community.

And now for the movies, and the people behind them, who made me whoop with joy, cry silently in my seat and sometimes shake my head in amazement and awe.

• YouTube making "The Shallow" always available just a click away so I can watch as many times as I want and not just 200 like Andrew Dice Clay. Because just listening is not enough, I want to see Gaga and Bradley!

• The gut punch to the heart that Carey Mulligan gave me this year. On stage in Girls and Boys. On screen in Wildlife...

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Blindspotting: The Code Switches Back

Lynn Lee on Blindspotting, new on Blu-Ray and DVD today

It must be something in the air.  Or water.  Or just our general 21st century American zeitgeist as we come to grips with how far we are from anything close to a “post-racial” dialogue.  Whatever it is, 2018 is turning out to be the year for movies about racial code switching.  It’s the common thread that links projects as disparate as the gonzo anti-capitalist satire of Sorry to Bother You, the stranger-than-fiction part-comedy, part-true crime thriller BlacKkKlansman, and the Black Lives Matter-inflected YA drama The Hate U Give.  At the heart of each film is a black protagonist who, having mastered the art of speaking “white,” ultimately discovers its limits as a means of challenging society’s white-dominated power structure.

Then there’s Blindspotting, which puts its own unique spin on these themes and turns the concept of code switching on its head.  The film presents a white guy, Miles (Rafael Casal), born and bred in Oakland, who raps, talks, and acts like a walking stereotype of the ’hood even as his best friend, Collin (Tony winner and now Spirit Award nominee Daveed Diggs), has to live with the real implications of being an actual black man with a criminal record.  Despite these tensions, the bond between Collin and Miles feels genuine, reflecting the real-life friendship between Diggs and Casal...

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Jason Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Jason Adams... 

For all of the hairs on my head and the hours of sleep that I've lost in 2018 I do feel, just a little bit,  as if I've traded them in for a couple of worthy life lessons this year. Enough to make up for the state of the world? Not for all the hair and dreams that have ever been or ever will be. But I will say that feeling in a near constant state of emergency has made me a smidge bit of a better writer, and it's nudged me ever so gently towards getting some of my shit together. To paraphrase Ryan Gosling's schtick -- one small step for me, one giant leap (into the abyss) for mankind. Helluva trade. Here's some of the great stuff I'm thankful for the nudges from...

• Moviepass burned high and too too bright this year, echoing our migraines, but I'm thankful to the service at its height for letting me see Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name in the theater a personal record shattering 18 times - in a crazy world those six summer weeks learning about love and peaches with Oliver and Elio and Elio and Oliver were the only thing that made any sense to me. For a film so warm and sunny I'll weirdly forever associate it with walking through cold weather in Central Park to get to or from the Paris Theater, "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs blasting in my ears. (I rounded up most of my writing on the film right at this link.) 

• Funny enough the end of 2018 belongs to Luca too, as the only music haunting my ear buds this Autumn has been Thom Yorke's by turns gorgeous, terrifying score for Suspiria. I'm thankful for that whole unholy beast of a film, bursting with ideas and emotions and Tildas...

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