Mamma Mia! And Me: How the Musical Changed My Life a Decade Ago

by Jorge Molina

Today Mamma Mia! turns a decade old. The film opened exactly ten years ago, on July 18th, 2008. And this weekend, what is perhaps the most unexpected sequel in the franchise factory that Hollywood has become will open.  

I could write a piece about some sort of legacy, or about what a monstrous hit it was when it opened (becoming the highest grossing live action musical ever, and the highest grossing movie in history in the U.K. at the time). I could attempt an oral history on why I firmly believe this was the most fun any group of actors has ever had on set, or an objective reexamination on why this silly and often senseless movie works so effortlessly.

But I want to get a little more personal. Because ten years ago, that movie changed the way I looked at myself and my life...

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Bergman Centennial: Winter Light (1963) and the echo of First Reformed (2018)

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs for the next week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Sean Donovan...

Perhaps none of Ingmar Bergman’s films do more to conjure clichés of what a ‘Bergman film’ is than 1963’s Winter Light. While Persona is undoubtedly the cinephile consensus choice for his best film, and The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries are his most widely-seen, frequently adorning college syllabi about the history of European cinema, the morose sadness for which his work became known feels most exemplarily expressed in Winter Light. The second part of a trilogy about “the silence of God” (starting out grim already), Winter Light’s infinite quiet, stark black-and-white cinematography, freezing cold exteriors, and tear-soaked monologues scream BERGMAN in capital letters. It’s strange viewing with which to start a hot summer weekday morning, but here we are. Though the severity of film that threatens to overwhelm you, it is my personal favorite of the Bergman canon, superbly acted and filmed with a brisk lightness that befits an auteur frequently in danger of getting weighed down in heavy-handedness. A freezing shot of aquavit on the rocks can knock you over and have you questioning the purpose of your life. 

Winter Light may be reaching new audiences this year as it has received a renewed relevancy from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, an unofficial remake blatantly taking the premise and applying it to the contemporary United States...

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A "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" Trailer Leaked. What Did We Learn?

by Jorge Molina

On Saturday night, a descendant of Aphrodite herself decided to manifest amongst us mortals in the form of a Twitter user who leaked the first trailer for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the upcoming sequel to the hit musical (and yes, my most anticipated movie of 2018). 

The trailer was only up for around twelve hours (a blissful twelve hours!) before it was taken down. Expect a formal release of it soon, but until then, let’s put into use incognito screenshots and see what the trailer revealed about the movie. [Potential spoilers for the plot of Mamma Mia! 2 after the jump!]

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NYFF: "First Reformed" and "Let the Sunshine In"

by Murtada

First Reformed
A middle aged priest in crisis sits down with a young man suffering from his own disillusionment with the status of our current world. Once the pleasantries are done with and the futility of existence and our doomed world become the topic of conversation, the alarm sirens start going off. It took the audience at the New York Film Festival screening a few moments to realize that the sirens are not part of the movie unfolding, but an actual false fire alarm asking us to vacate the cinema.

That’s how deeply engrossing Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is...

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Here We Go Again...

Amanda Seyfried posted the following photo online this weekend with the hashtag #HereWeGoAgain which leads us to believe that Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again is officially filming now...or has officially wrapped filming? One or the other...

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