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.)
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Monday, April 16, 2018 at 10:29PM Ah... April. It's that time of year when we inevitably make fools of ourselves looooong in advance by predicting the Oscar nominations nearly a full year ahead of time. The 91st Oscars won't be held for another 314 days (February 24th, 2019 if you must know) but it's time we started building the Oscar charts.
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 2:46PM Mini William Holden Centennial celebration. We're beginning, oddly enough, with his final film. Here's Tim Brayton...
The 1981 film S.O.B. wasn't meant to be William Holden's final film: the star died in a household accident a few months after the film premiered, at a mere 63 years old. But it offers a pleasing symmetry to his career to end this way: Holden's big breakthrough, in 1950, was the acid-laced Hollywood satire Sunset Blvd., and there's a comforting rightness that it was with an acid-laced Hollywood satire that his career would end.
Not that S.O.B. has anything on Sunset Blvd., though it's a compelling oddity, and it's one of the few films made by writer-director-producer Blake Edwards after his 1960s heyday that offers all that much to chew on. The film is a deeply caustic fable of how superproducer Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) churned out the biggest money-loser in Hollywood history one day, went insane from the stress of it, and decided to turn his family-friendly musical into a pornographic extravaganza...
Monday, April 16, 2018 at 12:11PM Jason from MNPP here wishing the great Rooney Mara a happy 33rd birthday (it's tomorrow) - do you think she will have birthday pie? I like to think that once she got a taste of pie filming A Ghost Story she hasn't been able to stop. Eat all the pie, Rooney! You've earned it. Anyway I've had Rooney on the brain over the past few weeks (more than usual anyway, which is always some) thanks to the presence of Mark Zuckerberg in our lives - who can look at his face and not want to re-visit all of her take-downs in The Social Network? You're a stronger person than me if you don't find yourself muttering "Good luck with your video-game" to yourself a couple times a day. In that spirit then this week's "Beauty vs Beast"...
PREVIOUSLY I really though y'all would have to give it to Jake Gyllenhaal for his performance in Stronger but every time I doubt your commitment to actresses I get proven hella incorrect - you picked Tatiana Maslany (and I mean no knock on her, she's terrific) with 60% of your vote. Said Bushwick:
"Team Tatiana for her patience - Jake’s reluctance and sassiness and Miranda’s indoor smoking seemed much more unbearable than losing my legs!"
Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 12:51PM What did you see this weekend? We'll skip the charts this week but let it be known that The Rock had another #1 opening weekend ($34 million for Rampage), horror hit A Quiet Place closed in on $100 million, and Isle of Dogs went wide in its 4th weekend and has a cumulative gross of $18 million. That means it's going to be about as succcessful as Fantastic Mr Fox and The Life Aquatic (i.e. his second tier successes) with his tier 1 biggest hits by a large margin being Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Moonrise Kingdom.
I've been a bit sad that the inventive delights and storytelling nuances of Isle of Dogs aren't being discussed as thoroughly as the film's take on Japan...
Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 12:43PM by Nathaniel R
Milos Forman directing Thomas Hulce on the set of Amadeus (1984)
One of the world's most acclaimed directors has passed away at 86 years of age after a long full life and a pretty sturdy filmography. Milos Forman won two Oscars during his career for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984) began life as Jan Tomas Forman in Czechoslovakia. Like another two-time Best Director winner (Ang Lee), he was twice honored in the Foreign Language Film category before his English language Oscar wins...
