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, April 11, 2018 at 9:00PM by Eric Blume
Half a century ago two ultimate sci-fi classics were released. We've just revisted 2001 but what of the other hit? 20th Century Fox released the original Planet of the Apes directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston at essentially the same time. Revisiting the original film after decades of sequels and reboots provides some fascinating reveals...
Wednesday, April 4, 2018 at 12:30PM Stanley Kubrick's space saga is 50 this week! Here's Chris on its iconic music...
bwaamm bwaaammm bwaamMMM...
BAH BAHHHH!!...
It’s as memorable a music cue as any in film history. Out of darkness, Stanley Kubrick opens his abract space opus 2001: A Space Odyssey to the stirrings of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (the “Sunrise” movement specifically) with the sonic weight of impending creation. Or is it destruction?
Strauss’s composition carries throughout the final, creating an a link that ties its ambitious, fractured narrative together. By repeating the track, Kubrick shows how innovation, exploration, and even violence come from the same lifeforce, like a spiritual Big Bang. The music is a key to understand how the film explores human instincts against the nature of the universe: can they be both at odds while also being the same? The sheer force of the sound, the kind of music you feel deeper than your bones, is its own impenetrable force. For a movie that creates iconography out of a literal monolith, its biggest monolith might be its omnipresent orchestral sound.
Wednesday, March 7, 2018 at 12:29PM by Nathaniel R
Remember Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day? It opened 10 years ago on this very day starring newly crowned (again) Best Actress Frances McDormand and Amy Adams. All I remember about it actually is Shirley Henderson's high pitched voice and Amy Adams flouncing around before breaking my heart by singing a duet with the scrumptious Lee Pace...
Friday, February 23, 2018 at 10:30PM By Salim Garami
What's good?
Timothy Spall's character Maurice Purley in Mike Leigh's 1996 Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies is a photographer and every scene we see him at work involves his usually-successful, sometimes-not-as-much attempts to amiably convince his clients to take a big smile before he takes the photo. Sometimes it's a direct appeal and sometimes it's just by making an off-hand joke that catches them. Usually it's preceeded by a very slight window of sadness implying a long and exhaustive story on the subject's part. It feels like a very reflexive move on Mike Leigh's part: Secrets & Lies, like most of Leigh's works, is a humanist tale of some very messy and sometimes sad parts of a large story but Leigh imbues it with a sense of delicate compassion, sometimes injecting a sense of humor about the situations, but always wanting the best for its characters.
Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 4:00PM by Eric Blume
Mike Leigh nabbed his second Best Director nomination and his third Original Screenplay nomination with his 2004 film Vera Drake (he has yet to win any Oscars despite seven nominations across those two categories). Imelda Staunton scored an Actress nod as well for this tale of the vibrant eponymous character who “helps girls out” as part of her many job and family responsibilities. Her actions carry a brutal cost, and the film still carries incredible power.
Fourteen years later, Vera Drake has aged beautifully, perhaps in part because Leigh has structured and staged it in a classical framework...
