Cláudio's 2023 Top Ten

by Cláudio Alves

Commercial releases aside, Patiño's SAMSARA is 2023 best film.Better late than never, am I right? As we all know, here at The Film Experience, a cinematic year only ends after the Oscars, so maybe I'm not so late after all. Whatever the case, it's time to say goodbye to 2023, with the Miyazaki ranking as my prelude to this farewell. At long last, let's consider newer releases and, most importantly, turn away from the now to ruminate on the before – film history, here we come. Indeed, I've missed writing about older pictures like you wouldn't believe. But let's hold our horses. Before such revelry into the distant past, one has to look back at the year that's gone and all its big screen wonders. Personally, I thought they were a vibrant twelve months of cinema…

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My Miyazaki Ranking: Part Four – The Eternal Mystery

by Cláudio Alves

Exploring Hayao Miyazaki's filmography is to dive into a cinema that's often as moving as it is mysterious. Connections to the land abound, calling for ecological harmony in a place ravaged by modernity. Tradition dances with progress, teetering on the edge of oblivion, while dreams soar high above the clouds, for flight is the highest form of freedom. Even his most straightforward exercises tend to have an oneiric touch, some connection to the unknown within us and the world we inhabit. Because he taps into such (un)realities, Miyazaki's narrative work can move between genres and expectations, often complicating conflicts beyond the usual archetypes or doing away with them altogether. And through it all, animation allows the impossible to become possible, the screen a window to imagination unbound…

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My Miyazaki Ranking: Part Three – Self-Portraits

by Cláudio Alves

One way or another, artists can't help but put some part of themselves into their work. It might not be obvious or a direct expression of character. It might not even be conscious on their part. However, it's there for those willing to see, from works by the most self-effacing hacks to world-renowned auteurs. Hayao Miyazaki is no different, though he's sometimes prone to underselling just how personal some of his pictures can be. Of course, there's no denying the introspection happening in his most recent "last films," and not even the director has tried to distance The Wind Rises or The Boy and the Heron from such interpretations. But there's more self-portraiture in his filmography than just those late-career triumphs. I'd say there's a lot of Miyazaki in a little witch who loved to fly…

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Drag Race RuCap: “Bathroom Hunties”

Nick Taylor and Cláudio Alves are watching and recapping RuPaul’s Drag Race season sixteen. This week, it’s time for episode twelve…

This Pit Crew hunk was the episode's real winner.

CLÁUDIO: After last week’s mirthless drag of an episode, there was nowhere to go but up. And surely, “Bathroom Hunties” is better than “Corporate Queens,” though that improvement has little to do with the producers whose challenge ideas are increasingly preposterous. This was a naked recycling of the Night Club to Hotel concept of All Stars 4 and 5, but why they would want to do a reprise of those messes is anybody’s guess. Thankfully, the queens are here to make this hour entertaining even if it kills them, powering through a poor premise and even poorer judging to deliver a fun bit of television. But do you know who’s also doing a good job of salvaging Drag Race Season 16? The Pit Crew, of course. Those hunks were hunking this week, their bulges bulging like never before. Thank heavens for that. 

NICK: We haven’t been sexualizing men enough this season, and I’m glad to see the show really lean on the Pit Crew as props again. Lord knows we needed some unapologetic hunkiness. And from head to toe, tip to base, top to bottom, we got that. One of the few truly uncomplicated pleasures of the episode . . . .

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My Miyazaki Ranking: Part Two – Princesses & Pigs

by Cláudio Alves

If you've ever seen the Never-Ending Man documentary, you'll be familiar with Hayao Miyazaki's complex relationship with new technologies, in animation and otherwise. The film's most famous quote relates to AI, which the Ghibli co-founder strongly feels is "an insult to life itself." However, there's more to it since Miyazaki has attempted and succeeded in combining the possibilities of CGI with traditional techniques. You can see this in the same non-fiction work as the director unsteadily creates Boro, the Caterpillar, one of those shorts exclusively screened at the Ghibli Park and Museum. Still, even as the result may dazzle, the process to get there is a barrage of frustrations for the old master.

Today's Miyazaki tryptic goes against hybridized approaches. Instead, it finds an embrace of hand-drawn animation in its purest form, divested of computerized witchcraft and the like…

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