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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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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."

Monday
Apr022018

Box Office: Ready Player Dogs

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (March 23rd-25th)
W I D E
800+ screens
L I M I T E D
excluding prev. wide
1.🔺Ready Player One $41.2 (cum. $53.2) NEW REVIEW
1. 🔺 Isle of Dogs $2.8 on 165 screens (cum. $5.9) CAPSULE | HOMAGE OR APPROPRIATION
2. 🔺Tyler Perry's Acrimony  $17.1 NEW 2. 🔺 The Death of Stalin $1.4 on 484 screens (cum. $3.9) REVIEW
3. Black Panther $ 11.2 (cum. $650.6) PODCAST
3. 🔺 Baaghi 2 $580k on 123 screens NEW
4. I Can Only Imagine $10.7 (cum. $55.5) NEW 
4. 🔺 The Leisure Seeker $248k on 38 screens (cum. $1) 
5. Pacific Rim Uprising $9.2 (cum. $45.6) REVIEW
5. 🔺 Finding Your Feet  $61k on 14 screens NEW

 

Spielberg had his biggest opening in years with Ready Player One, though a lot of people (including our own Chris Feil) don't love the film. Black Panther just won't quit, now nearing the domestic totals of Titanic  (unadjusted) and Jurassic World  and only just starting to lose theaters in its 7th weekend. Meanwhile...

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Monday
Apr022018

Isle of Dogs and Japanese culture: Riff, love letter, or appropriation?

by Lynn Lee

A friend on Facebook recently asked me, after I posted a positive response to Isle of Dogs, what I thought about the controversy over Wes Anderson’s alleged cultural appropriation of Japan.  My initial answer was that it bothered me a little bit, but not enough to mar my enjoyment of the movie.  Later I realized that I’d just implicitly accepted the charge that there was cultural appropriation and, as an Asian American, felt mildly guilty that it didn’t bother me.  But on further reflection, I’m not sure either of those knee-jerk reactions was warranted.  It’s more complicated than that.

The question of cultural appropriation can be broken down a few different ways...

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