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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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Tuesday
Apr032018

How to Wait for "How to Talk to Girls..."

by Chris Feil

It's been so long since the first much salivated over set photos of Nicole Kidman as a spiky haired punch in How to Talk to Girls at Parties, that she's had an entire awards run and career resurgence in the meantime! The John Cameron Mitchell adaptation of Neil Gaiman's short story got a quiet esponse when it debuted in last year's Cannes (outside the competition) and there hasn't been much news since. But now there's a trailer...

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Tuesday
Apr032018

Streaming Roulette, April 2018

Can you believe it's April already! If only the weather here in NYC would commit to springtime (Sigh). A new month means new availabilty of streaming titles which means it's time for our streaming roulette. We spin (figuratively... it's really scrolling) and wherever the cursor lands we share that moment of the film. Do any of these screengrabs make you want to see the picture (or see it again)?

Drugstore Cowboy (1989) on Amazon Prime


Holy shit!

Holy shit is right. This is the first moment of a quadruple dissolve with a really strange comic tone. Gus Van Sant just can't help his inner cinema geek sometimes (See also Psycho, 1998). I don't remember this well (only saw it once) but was absolutely convinced at the time that Matt Dillon should have landed his first Oscar-nomination with ease. He had to make do with that year's Best Actor prize at the Independent Spirit Awards and wait another 17 years for the Oscar nomination (via Crash). Kelly Lynch is also excellent as his girlfriend (she had a brief heyday in the late 80s and early 90s but was never properly appreciated despite more than one strong performance).

Six more films after the jump starting with  Little Women (1994) on Netflix...

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Monday
Apr022018

Stage Door: Broadway's Beach Vacations

by Dancin' Dan

It may be April, but New York City is once again covered in a blanket of snow in a winter that won't stop. But thankfully, Broadway is providing not one, but two beach vacations you can take for (slightly) less than a plane ticket to somewhere warm. Escape to Margaritaville and Spongebob Squarepants could not be more different on the surface (although both feature a volcanic explosion as an important plot point), but they do provide some pretty wonderful escapism for anyone longing for warmer climes...

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Monday
Apr022018

Mixed Media: "A Fantastic Woman" Dreams an Awakening 

by Ilich Mejía

Arguably the only drawback of watching a movie on the literal big screen is not being able to immediately rewind to catch a perfect moment again. Well, maybe you could if you were friends with the theater's staff, but some of us may have pissed off too many of those by asking them to turn the air conditioning up a few too many times. In Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, that perfect moment comes an hour into the film when its protagonist Marina (played by Daniela Vega, the trans actress that inspired the film) finds herself in a underground club hiding from the slew of problems the death of her partner has earned her. There, Lelio and his team use dance and music to have Marina confront the movie’s major themes of loss and acceptance in a way that shocks her as much as it moves the audience.

Shiny fringe and mild spoilers after the cut...

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Monday
Apr022018

Beauty vs Beast: Monkeys to Monoliths

Jason Adams from MNPP here on the surface of the Moon (aka lower Manhattan covered with farcical April snowflakes) and primed to toss a bone your way with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" which is wishing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey a happy 50, which it turns today. The film premiered in Washington D.C. on April 2nd 1968 and in New York the following day, and it has probably been running on some stoner's projector every day since. The film was nominated for four Oscars and rightly won for Best Visual Effects - basically every movie that's gone to outer space ever since has been mercilessly ripping it off, just like every movie set in the future post-Blade Runner throws up a neon billboard or twenty. But for all its trippiness it's still at its heart just a "boy and his dog" movie. So what of the boy and his dog then?

PREVIOUSLY We faced down two of the greatest performances ever put on a movie screen last week with with A Streetcar Named Desire but y'all didn't have much trouble making your choice - Viven Leigh's Blanche DuBois roundhoused Marlon Brando's Stanley with 59% of strangers' kindnesses. Said adri:

"I always think of Tennessee Williams as expressing his soul through Blanche. So yes, my dearest Tennessee, I am with you on Blanche, no matter how messy, and a failure and a figure of ridicule she may be."