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.)
France is the most-nominated country in the History of the Best International Feature Oscar, having conquered 39 nods over the decades. They'll probably up that number soon with Ladj Ly's Les Misérables. The likeliness of a nomination doesn't mean the selection of the country's Oscar submission was without controversy. Many a cinephile thinks Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire was more deserving. Without the benefit of being in the race for that particular trophy, the much-lauded period lesbian romance is likely to receive no Oscar love, even though it's eligible for most other categories
While it's rare for French films to be recognized outside the Best International Feature race, it's not unheard of. Since the beginning of the Academy Awards, 53 films have done so. That's not including documentaries or short films (or the number would be yet more inflated) . The Oscars may be very local in their tastes, but they've always shown a bit of Francophilia…
Pajiba gird your loins - Dan Stevens is in everything Tracking Board Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, and Candice Bergen to co-star in a comedy about a book club reading 50 Shades of Grey? This could be awesome or terrible...or both. Whichever way it turns out, we're there! Coming Soon Focus has acquired the new Jason Reitman / Charlize Theron collaboration Tully but we'll have to remove it from the Oscar charts. It's not coming until Spring 2018 now
AV Club NBC greenlights its first two series of the new year, one of them that used to be called Drama High (and sounds like it has potential) is now called Rise. Why does Hollywood love to go from specific to generic titles? Are their studies that show that generic titles do better or is it fear of specificity? /Film the first cast photo of Marvel's The Inhumans has been released and boy is it underwhelming. I've always loved Medusa but you really shouldn't be able to tell that it's such an obvious and stiff looking wig since the character is so tied up in her hair! I mean, couldn't they have gotten RuPaul's wig designers to do it if they wanted something both outlandish and real looking?
Tony Season Theater Mania hoping to dominate the original play Tonys next year, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has announced an opening for the tail end of eligibility in 2018 Playbill did you know that Audrey Hepburn won her Tony Award the same WEEK as her Oscar? Isn't that crazy? She won the Oscar for Roman Holiday on March 25th, 1954 and then the Tony for Ondine on March 28th! DeadlineAmélie, a New Musical, based on the Oscar nominated French classic, is the first casualty of the Tony nominations, announcing its Broadway closing date for May 21st after a short run and zero nominations. Broadway World Despite a disappointing Tony showing (2 nominations) Anastasia, based on the 90s animated movie musical,announces a world tour. It helps to have that known "brand" going in. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was savaged by critics and received zero Tony nominations, is still doing well and the box office and is already working on the tour) THR Tony nominee anecdotes including Laurie Metcalf on the proposed Roseanna revival and Sally Field discussing the release she felt when she found her calling as a young girl:
It isn't something that I just decided one day or backed into it one day. I found a stage when I was 12 when I was lucky enough to be in a school that still had a theater arts department. And something inside of me changed, woke up, I could hear my own voice for the first time when I was onstage, and then when I would get offstage I had to be all the things that little girls in the '50s had to be, and all of that went back in the box. But when I got onstage I could be all the things I wasn't allowed to be anywhere else, so I could hear my own self.
Love ya Sally!
Exit Video Got 18 minutes? That might seem like a lot but this video essay really is compelling. It names a sci-fi fantasy trope that I haven't personally seen named before but which is as familiar as they come. He calls it "Born Sexy Yesterday" and it's all about the way genre fiction infantilizes women so that men are their natural superior.
At the very least it will make you rethink mermaid and sexy android movies, The Fifth Element and Splash a little bit.
With France's official announcement that the blockbusterThe Intouchableswill be their Official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Film, is the race already over? Its global tally currently rests at an astounding $364 million dollars, most of that from overseas bank. The film hasn't been ignored in American arthouse theaters exactly but it's $9 million gross and mainstream appeal (it's even in the IMDb top 100) qualifies it as a major arthouse hit but no crossover slam dunk; roughly speaking it's a hit the way last year's foreign film winner, the instant classic A Separation, was or the way Beasts of the Southern Wild is.
French cinema has had a complex intermittently passionate long-distance relationship with Hollywood since cinema began and that is reflected in their Oscar success over the years both in this category and others. France leads all countries in most Foreign Film nominations by a wide margin (36 nominees to Italy's 26) but surprisingly they have not won since the Catherine Deneuve drama Indochine rocked US arthouses twenty years ago. Will this Gallic sort-of variation on Driving Miss Daisy (is that too dismissive?) be a lock for Oscar love or will last year's swerve towards critically prestigious international cinema signal a sea change to new glory days for the category? (Yes, I still have impromptu ecstatic flashbacks to A Separation's win)
OFFICIAL SUBMISSION CHARTS 2012 -- everything in one place as we do: posters, trailers, info. Pass it on.
Amelie netflix illustration by Tim Hodge (click for original source)A collection of France's biggest Oscar hits if you'd like to catch up with a movie marathon at home... after the jump
The Hollywood Reporter Dianne Wiest to headline The Corrections. I know this will be old news to some but I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. A lead role for Our Miss Wiest, only one of the greatest living actresses in the world. Tom Shone grades the movies. I love when critics explain their grading systems as it's always such a personal and inexact science. Only six "A+" ever. Film Studies For Free looks back briefly at Brokeback Mountain, which happens to be one of Mr. Shone's six "A+" films.
Salon offers up a library of film criticism essentials They Live by Night great piece on the super complicated editing challenges of The Tree of Life.
We had folders for Earth, Sky, Water, Animals, Miscellaneous, and then within those, bins that were more specific."
Guardian on Amélie's (2001) cultural endurance. The whimsical worldwide hit is now ten years old. Laughing Squid "Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses" Felix in Hollywood "can someone please explain this picture to me?"Tallulah Bankhead lol. Awards Daily They aren't reading the Best Picture nominees in alphabetical order this year. Nor will the board show us how many titles will be announced. Suspense!
Kaufman on the set of Quills (2000) with Kate WinsletFinally, a very happy 75th birthday to the writer/director Philip Kaufman, who people unfortunately rarely talk about these days. Why this is is surely a combo of his infrequency of working (only 12 features in a 47 year career), his lack of masterpieces, and his films being soundly of the adult persuasion in an era when the movies have become increasingly 'you know... for kids.' (I mean, even Scorsese is making family pictures now.) My favorites from Kaufman's oeuvre are three: The Right Stuff (1983) which was nominated for 8 Oscars though Kaufman was oddly not one of them - they had to make room for Ingmar Bergman in Best Director which we shan't ever complain about but it's strange that the competition that wasn't dropped came mostly from what one might call "actor's films" which are usually the first to go when the lone wolf directorial nod comes-a-calling; The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Kaufman's sole nomination - Best Adapted Screenplay); and the NC-17 scandal that was Henry and June (1990). This trinity of "bests" is not-so-coincidentally composed of consecutive projects. When artists are on a roll, they're on a roll. It always seems to come in waves, doesn't it?
He's finally made another movie. His thirteenth film is Hemingway and Gelhorn (2012) which stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 9:00PM 
