Doc Corner: The Thrilling 'United Skates'

By Glenn Dunks

Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown’s utterly divine United Skates begins with a tangle of bodies that zig, zag and spin across a roller rink floor in choreographed fashion. Close-ups of sweat-damp skin and excited faces. Neon signs, fluorescent clothes and a thumping beat. In just these brief opening moments before the title crashes on screen, I was hypnotised by the way the camera was capturing these people and embedding itself on the floor, swooping and swinging with as much vigour as the people its watching. The way it captures their passion, their movement and, without even saying a word, their unbridled joy and the memories of days gone by.

It’s my favourite opening of the year; nothing has quite approached the very simple act of hooking me so immediately and in such a way that I bolted upright, eager to see where I was going to be taken. Luckily, United Skates isn’t just about the roller skates and the booty shorts and the basslines. It’s about so much more, smartly using a nostalgic touchstone of African American culture as a means to dissect contemporary issues around race.

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Learning iMovie and Making Lists with Chris

Chris here with some more listy goodness that Nathaniel wanted me to pass along: my own! This year rather than going the normal listicle route for my Best Of, I tought myself iMovie to make a video montage as both a love letter to the cinematic year and present my Top 20. Consider this a Soundtracking side quest, because I lean hard into my song choices. One thing I learned from teaching myself something new (aside from the technological mishaps - but hey, staring at films you love sure does ease all frustrations), is how to find similar narrative threads in the movies that move us, which I was able to do through song choices shared over multiple films.

Consider this a small peek into my ballot (which is in full here) for next month's Team Experience Awards, or hopefully just a quick way to bask in the past movie year as it comes to a close. We all love a montage, but I hope you love this one too! (NSFW for language)

2018 Film Year in Review from Chris Feil on Vimeo.

Soundtracking: 2018 Grammy Nominees at the Movies!

by Chris Feil

The Oscars aren’t the only big movie music prize on the horizon. Last week we got this year’s Grammy nominees and the Grammy voting committee has clearly been spending a lot of time at the movies this year! Aside from the film categories (more on that in a minute...) soundtracks showed up in major categories in a big way thanks to behemoths Black Panther and A Star is Born.

“All the Stars” from Panther and “Shallow” from Star both made it into the Record and Song of the Year categories, in addition to both getting nominated in the genre performance categories. But the biggest movie moment among the nominees has to be Kendrick Lamar’s nomination in Album of the Year for Black Panther’s soundtrack...

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"Everyone was nominated.... except you!" (Our annual SAG outrage)

by Nathaniel R

Pierre Png, who has a lot of scenes in CRAZY RICH ASIANS, was snubbed while his "replacement" for Gemma Chan's affection, who has about 2 seconds of screen time, was nominated!

We'll keep doing these posts each year until the Screen Actors Guild does something about their most unfortunate awards rule. For those who are new to the awards game, please note: If you are a working actor lucky enough to wind up in a film nominated for "Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture," that doesn't mean you are included in the nomination; you have to have your own title card for that! What this means each year is that actors who aren't really famous yet, or don't have an aggressive agent, wind up left out of the official nomination even if they contributed immeasurably to the success of the film or were highly memorable in some way.

Read on for the specific exclusions this year and the history of most embarrassing omissions from the past due this ruling...

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The SAG Nominations are Here

Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians) and Laverne Cox (Orange is the New Black) announced the nominations and joked about their height difference, while pronouncing all the names beautifully, being totally gorgeous, and staying enthusiastic about the whole damn thing. We thank them profusely because the ACTUAL nominations were among the worst we've ever seen in our long history of awards-watching and we might have experienced dry-heaving ourselves had we been forced to read them off.

Did the SAG nominating committees only screen 8 movies and 7 tv shows this year? 

Screen Actors Guild rules make voting your conscience about who is supporting and lead impossible (the members are required to vote however the actor is campaigned by the studio) unless you are conscientous enough to just not nominate the person if they are cheating... as we are when we vote on such things... but most nominators aren't. So this year we have even worse Category Fraud than usual -- there is barely a Supporting Actress category this year, at all, which is such a shame given all the worthy actual supporting female actors out there.

The nominations and some comments after the jump... 

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