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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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Sunday
Feb102019

It's BAFTA Time 

As per usual the BAFTAs aren't broadcasting live but tape delayed but we'll be watching the arrivals and sharing the winners as we hear about them after the jump...

 

Right now we're watching clips from the nominee party yesterday and we learned that Melissa McCarthy is a huge fan of The Favourite, saying:

The Favourite broke my brain in the best possible way.

Ours too, Melissa, ours too...

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Sunday
Feb102019

Great Moments in Screen Kissing: Notorious (1946)

For the next few days Team Experience will be sharing favourite screen kisses. Here's Seán...

Seán here in Berlin, saying hallo! to you with the adequate amount of Prussian warmth. I'll be filling you in with all my hot takes on only a handful of the myriad of films premiering at the Festspiele. But first a quick wink to one of my favourite on-screen kisses (the whole lot of them).

Alfred Hitchcock was a master of genre and form, leaving behind a body of work admired by scholars and movie lovers alike. Aside from being a good, old, problematic trickster on set, he also knew how to do it within the confines of the screen. The Production Code which outlined what was decent and indecent on film had a long list of cuttable offenses. Even toilets were verboten. But what if the inclusion of one was essential to the story, as it was when Marion Crane disposes of a letter in Psycho? Hitchcock knew how to skirt the rules and Notorious (1946) is one of the best examples of this...

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Sunday
Feb102019

14 days til Oscar - Costume Design Lists!

Photography by Brigitte Lacombe

With 14 days until Oscar we're thinking about Queen Sandy Powell, now with a towering 14 nominations for costume design via her double nod this year for Mary Poppins Returns and The Favourite.  We interviewed her in the year of Carol and Cinderella (2015), also a double nominated year. The only time she's ever won while double nominated was the first time...

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Saturday
Feb092019

Beauty Break: ASC Tributes + Best Cinematography Honors

The American Society of Cinematographers will hold their annual awards dinner tonight where they'll be honoring Jeff Bridges with their Board of Governors Award, three-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson (Hugo, Aviator, JFK) with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and two time Emmy winner Jeffrey Jur (Carnivàle, Bessie) for the Career Achievement in Television Award. They'll also hand out some competitive prizes and presumably give Alfonso Cuarón yet another trophy for his mantle (let's hope he has steel reinforced shelving at home given this season's worth of hardware.) UPDATE: oops we were wrong and Cuarón lost for practically the first time this season.

Let's look at that beautiful imagery from the winners and nominees again with a few bonus gifs... 

  • WINNER: Łukasz Żal, PSC for “Cold War” 

What an incredible DP Żal is. After the consecutive Pawel Pawlikowski's successes of Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), will he be in demand in Hollywood or just stick to work across the ocean? While his best work has been in black & white in Poland he does color and cinema from other countries as well...

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Friday
Feb082019

Albert Finney (1936-2019)

by Nathaniel R

We had dreaded this day coming. Albert Finney has passed away at 82 years of age from a chest infection. He'd been battling health troubles for years, which is why the filmography abruptly ends at Skyfall (2012) but what a elegiac blockbuster of a swansong, yes? In recent years we'd repeatedly suggested him for an Honorary Oscar but the Academy rarely listens to our brilliant ideas. Instead he'll retain the sad distinction of being the second most-nominated male movie star never to have received a competitive OR honorary Oscar behind only Richard Burton (Character actor Arthur Kennedy was also nominated 5 times without a win, mostly in supporting, but he wasn't a headliner like Finney). But, as we've often said, awards aren't everything and cinematic legacy is far more crucial. And that, Albert Finney has. He will live on given that impressive filmography filled with rich performances.

Finney wasn't born to a family in showbusiness but was in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the 'angry young man' and kitchen sink era of British filmmaking -- he reportedly disliked "snobbery" enough to turn down the British Knighthood the year of Erin Brockovich (2000). Despite humble origins he was a quick success as an actor landing his first professional gigs on stage and TV by the age of 19. At the age of 24 he was an immediate movie star... 

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