The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. Gemini, Cinephile, Actressexual. All material herein is written and copyrighted by Nathaniel or a member of our team as noted.
YNMS? DOWNTON ABBEY
We're celebrating ALADDIN (1992)
VOTE, READ, DISCUSS
"Abu is a strong example of a non-verbal sidekick, but I think the animators outdid themselves with the magic carpet's communication. It's such terrific character work using just animation and score." - Cash
"I was Jafar for Halloween and my neighbors had a stereo surround CD player and we listened to the Jafar Prince Ali reprise all the time." - Jakey
recent
Wanuri Kahiu (Rafiki)
Jia Zhang-ke (Ash is Purest White)
Christian Petzoldt (Transit)
Richard E Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Toni Collette (Hereditary)
Glenn Close (The Wife)
Thursday, May 16, 2019 at 1:15PM 
The race for Best Original Song nominations at the Oscars is just beginning. Here's Elton John and Taron Egerton singing what we assume is the end credits song for Rocketman. It was written specifically for the biopic. And a week before this film premieres we'll hear two new songs in Disney's live-action remake of Aladdin...
Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 2:45PM We're celebrating musical star Howard Keel's Centennial this week. Here's Tim Brayton...
Presenting a musical in which Howard Keel plays the obnoxious gunslinger love interest to a famous woman from the Wild West. My apologies if you feel a little bit of déjà vu from that logline: Nathaniel did, after all, just write about Keel's breakout performance in 1950's Annie Get Your Gun, about which every word of that sentence equally applies. And that's absolutely no accident. Warner Bros. had fought to get the rights to that stage musical as a vehicle for its up-and-coming singing star Doris Day, but lost out to MGM. When that film proved to be a hit, Warner's responded by developing an original Western musical based - oh so very loosely - on the life of Calamity Jane, famous frontierswoman and scout.
So eager was the studio to recreate that Annie magic that they even went to the trouble of borrowing Keel from MGM for the span of this one production. Not that you could tell any of this just by looking at 1953's Calamity Jane...
Friday, April 5, 2019 at 3:45PM [drumroll] It's Time! Our annual April Foolish Oscar Predictions have begun.
Ad Astra was supposed to be out next month but rumors are that it's not finished yet
First we looked at Animated Features and now we turn our attention to the Sound categories. It's rather perverse to do them second and here's why: Original Songs and Original Scores are among the last things we have confirmed each year. Technically speaking you can wait until your whole film is nearly complete before adding a score or commissioning an original song. It's not always wise to wait of course since songs, especially, can be more effective if they're woven in and some directors prefer to work with some idea of what the score will be like while they're editing. Nevertheless there is much that's completely unknown about this film year in terms of its music...
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 at 10:00AM by Chris Feil
Thank you Lady Gaga, all of the nominated Original Song performances were given a shot to perform on the Oscars! That "Shallow" leverage reportedly kept the ceremony as much of a musical night as possible. Sadly logistics kept us from getting a Kendrick Lamar and SZA performance of Black Panther's "All the Stars", but I found it frustrating that the producers didn't find some way to work the song into the telecast somehow. A montage needle drop, underscoring for the pre-commercial announcements, something?!
Even without Lamar (who also missed the Grammys), the night was a mostly solid salvage of Oscar musical tradition. It certainly fared better than some recent years, and also helped set variety and a pace for the night that otherwise felt a tad too amorphously rushed. A Star is Born's "Shallow" triumphed for the win as expected all season long, but what of the performances themselves? Time for a ranking!...
Saturday, December 8, 2018 at 1:56PM Thank you for your robust comments on our the Golden Globe nominations, Globe snubs, and Vice/First Man nomination theorizing! Please do enjoy your weekend but it'll be busy here non-stop through the Oscar nominations so please check back in daily... or several times a day, bitches! To wrap up our Globe nomination reaction coverage, let's get happy and gay.
We asked friends and teammates at The Film Experience to share their giddiest thoughts and we hope you'll answer these final three questions, too. Here we go...
1. Which acting nomination were you most thrilled about?
DEBORAH LIPP: Alex Borstein 4Ever! I am here for any woman who appears on television in boxer shorts.
MURTADA ELFADL: John David Washington because he is the real star born in 2018 and should be rewarded as such...
Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at 10:14AM by Chris Feil
In lieu of a regular deep dive into the soundtrack of one film, Soundtracking is indulging in some For Your Consideration tracks before the season narrows down to a few contenders. Naturally, all of the talk for original songs this season has been gobbled up by A Star Is Born with some hopes being thrown towards the likes of Mary Poppins Returns, Black Panther, and even Radiohead's Thom Yorke for Suspiria. I'll unpack the field once Oscar reveals its shortlist on December 17 (remember that quiet news item that the Academy will be announcing song and score shortlists all at once along with such categories as visual effects?).
But the outsiders deserve some love too, so allow me to champion a few solid tracks...