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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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Wednesday
Nov202019

Doc Corner: 'The Kingmaker' and 'On the President's Orders'

By Glenn Dunks

Disingenuousness is a disaster for a documentary. I recently watched two documentaries about St*ve B*annon and while it’s obvious he is a despicable human and despite whatever I may have felt about the movies themselves, one thing you can never call that man is disingenuous. He truly believes every that he says.

The same cannot be said for former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who is the narrative thrust and central subject of The Kingmaker. Something of a natural progression for director Lauren Greenfield’s whose earlier films The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth have each dealt with the lives of people with too much time and money. Marcos is foregrounded for the documentary’s first half and listening to her seemingly endless self-aggrandising about beauty, love, and this idea she holds so dear of being a mother to the Filipino people is – to be perfectly honest – a complete bore.

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Wednesday
Nov202019

Soundtracking: Yentl

by Chris Feil

Some might reduce it to simple star vehicle, but Yentl does something quite uncommon within the musical genre: through song, it places us in the mind and isolation of exclusively one character. All of the songs belong to Barbra Streisand’s protagonist Yentl, locked in the chamber of her mind, until it triumphantly breaks out in her reality. It might seem criminal to have the likes of her costar Mandy Patinkin going songless despite being at his Evita and Sunday in the Park with George-era peak, and maybe more condescending viewers would chalk this up to ego on the part of Streisand. But the effect gives us something that quietly defies musical convention, turning song into metaphor and providing richer payoff to the character arc. It’s only a musical inside the head of our heroine, a way of reflecting the strictures that limit her voice.

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Tuesday
Nov192019

Review: Charlie's Angels (2019)

Box office and reviews have been tough on the new Angels. I guess today the contrarian corner is a theme here at TFE. Tony likes it! - editor.

by Tony Ruggio

We'll start with where I'm coming from: I’m no fan of the original series. The early-Aughts adaptations were mostly forgettable save a dance or two from Cameron Diaz and Sam Rockwell. But these 2019 Angels are surprisingly fresh and fun. It’s an IP brought back from irrelevant hell and updated with verve.

About the three new Angels. Elizabeth Banks is clearly in love with Kristen Stewart, and who can blame her? Stewart is a charisma machine as the weird, spunkiest Angel of the bunch. She's so good you almost wish she took movie star roles more often. You also forget there was once a time when she got gruff for playing mopey all the time. Those days are long gone...

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Tuesday
Nov192019

Noirvember / Contrarian Corner: Motherless Brooklyn

By Lynn Lee

Is Motherless Brooklyn just another high-profile Oscar hopeful turned dud-on-arrival?  The early signs for Ed Norton’s long-gestating passion project have not been encouraging, to put it mildly.  Reviews on both the festival circuit and the film’s general release and here at TFE have been tepid, the box office even more so. Its awards prospects are pretty much nil.  It’s also not the kind of movie that’s likely to find success through word of mouth or build a long-term cult following, and its chances of future critical reevaluation are uncertain at best.

All of which makes me a little sad, because I quite enjoyed the film, and think Norton deserves more credit than he’s getting for what he’s accomplished...

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Tuesday
Nov192019

Over & Overs: "Sister Act"

Please welcome new contributor Kyndall Cunningham...

As a churchgoing kid with a fairly good singing voice, choir took up a big chunk of my adolescence. I attended weekly rehearsals, went to my choir mates’ houses to practice and woke up at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings to perform for the congregation (and God). I had a strong affection for gospel music, but my intense involvement in ministry at such a young age felt deeply uncool at times, if not isolating from the rest of the world. It wasn’t until I picked out Sister Act from my family’s VHS closet one day that I saw that part of my life tied to pop culture in an exciting way. Needless to say, I began screening the film religiously. 

Sorry. 

Like a lot of stories about women turning a new leaf, Sister Act begins with a breakup and ends with a love story...

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