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.)
An intimate convo this week as Nathaniel R and Nick Davis discuss recent flicks. This was recorded right before Nathaniel's birthday but we are late uploading it. Here it is now for your enjoyment. Lots of Tully and Disobedience talk (among other films) all without spoilers if you haven't yet caught those early release gems!
Index (40 minutes) 00:01 Silliness about Nathaniel's Birthday 03:30 Favorites of 2018 thus far including Diablo Cody & Charlize Theron's brilliance in Tully 10:25 A long anedcote-filled conversation about Sebastian Lelio's Disobedience starring Rachel Weisz. It's quite discussable from a number of angles 25:00 On Chesil Beach, Deadpool 2 and Ready Player One 30:15 Let the Sunshine In, and Grace Jones, Bloodlight and Bami 34:45 More randomness including Book Club and the exquisite beauty of Michelle Pfeiffer in Wolf
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
• Guardian has a really fascinating interview with Sean Penn about his novel (yes he wrote one), his ex-wives, his humanitarian work, the Me Too movement and more • AV Club Netflix suggests it's going to back away a bit from its war against the movies... or at least from competing on the awards battlefield. Does this mean they're abandoning their Oscar campaigns? This statement is quite vague. • Boy Culture connects two of my favorite things of all time: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" phase and... Natalie Wood? • Time Can Oceans 8 bring back the glamourous caper?
• EW Uma Thurman willing to work with Quentin Tarantino again • W interviews Grace Jone about her fierceness "I pack a good wallop" • Variety YES! A24 is planting the seeds for an Oscar campaign for Toni Collette in the horror film Hereditary • Coming Soon For some reason Monty Python's Spamalot is going to become a movie • Variety Olivia de Havilland talks about being Cannes very first female jury president decades ago • Electric Literature "storytelling" in WestWorld and how literary it actually is • Awards Daily Academy votes to expel Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby • AV Club Steve Martin and Martin Short are actual best friends • i09 beautiful posters for King Kong's Broadway musical debut • Playboy "Hollywood's pansexual moment" - interesting points in this article but I'm really quite annoyed that we've jumped from gay rights to "let not define ourselves and let's explore fluidity" and are acting like homophobia is solved / gays are accepted. There are literally still laws being pushed in the US to discriminate against queer people - even this very week!
Click to enlargeAvengers Mania <-- This Captain Marvel poster going around looked so official I thought it was. Apparently it's actually fan art by a Brazilian illustrator Fabio Rodrigues
• VultureInfinity War facial hair rankings • Monkey See Glen Weldon coins a genius term for the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. Well worth a close read. • Crooked Marquee Eric D Snider wins the award for "best headline to an Avengers Infinity War review" • /Film Black Widow's solo film actively looking for a director (even though no screenplay is written yet. Hmmm) • AV Film how are we supposed to care about Ant-Man and the Wasp post the brutal ending of Infinity War • Coming Soon Infinity War has been out just one week and it's already nearly at a billion dollars globally. Jesus. • Express a very elaborate theory on how Captain Marvel and Ant Man could save the day in Infinity Wars Part 2
Documentaries about musicians can feel like a dime a dozen. It’s no wonder, too, since they’re such easy sells for festivals and home entertainment in a market that is over-saturated with exhibitors and distributors in need to properties that don’t require elaborate marketing campaigns -- just a hope and a prayer that they will ‘catch on’.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is not exactly one of those films. It is unconventional as rock docs go in a whole host of ways, but it’s also a film that even its subject’s fans may struggle with. It eschews a typical birth-to-death narrative and instead focuses on Grace’s experiences in Jamaica and Paris recording her 2008 album Hurricane, recorded in garish lo-fi digital video, juxtaposed against richly filmed concert footage that echoes her 1982 One Man Show. It’s a documentary that leaves questions – like what exactly are “Bloodlight" and "Bami” (I had to look them up)? Why did it take so long to complete?
It drifts by for 115 minutes on its own sort of trippy wavelength which is, if you think about it, entirely appropriate for a documentary about Miss Grace Jones, one of the most enigmatic and exciting pop stars of the 20th century...
Kieran, here wishing the happiest of birthdays to one of our most talented, specific, peculiar and mysterious pop culture icons--the great Grace Jones.
There are countless pop music mainstays today who owe a great debt to the trails blazed by Grace Jones and many have gone to great pains to cite her as a predecessor. Her signature, striking style, her unique music, her fascinating, inimitable look are incredibly influential. Make no mistake--a lot of your favs (and I take nothing away from them by saying this for it's the best artist that borrow from other artists) can be traced back to Grace Jones.
Jones has made forrays into film here and there, though she's arguably most known for her appearances in Boomerang where her character brashly declared...
• The next James Bond will be... Damian Lewis? Our first ginger 007 you guys! Rumor only but I could see that happening. [Mirror] • It's weird that there's not a definitive feature about the airplane-building Wright Brothers. Steven Spielberg wants to make one as it turns out. Seems like a good fit, no? [/Film] • Life on the red planet? There's water at least. Did Fox pay NASA to announce this the week before the opening of The Martian ;) ? [The Guardian]
• Rising star Jonny Beauchamp says he owes everything to Roland Emmerich. Oh noooo. Tough debt. Also there's a photoshoot [Interview magazine] • "I was being talked to like I was a silly pop singer." Grace Jones is still quotable/fabulous/singular. Just released a memoir [Time Out] • "I've got tea. I've got cookies. No cake!" I cannot tell you how often my best friends and I quote The Log Lady from Twin Peaks. RIP Catherine Coulson [Wired] • "Marlene Dietrich believed her pussy was magic" is the first sentence of this article so you know you want to read it. Why can't we get a biopic about THESE anecdotes? [Pajiba] • Is this really Frank Grillo (from Captain America: Winter Soldier) younger & NSFW? [OMG BLOG] • Everyone in the world has forgotten that Disney was going to make an Enchanted sequel. Except Disney apparently. It's going to be called Disenchanted. I shudder to think of the web exploding with "who should replace Amy Adams?" articles [Coming Soon] • "we were certainly looking for shots that told the story without a lot of cutting." - Roger Deakins on point of view and action sequences in Sicario [The Film Stage] • First image of Woody Harrelson as LBJ in Rob Reiner's forthcoming biopic [Empire]
Image of the Day Thor and The Vision making out from theAvengers: Age of Ultron gag/blooper reel. Love the elegant placement of Thor's hammer. The best part of the image is surely that man about to shoot in the corner.
Video of the Day #1 The Revenant gets a new nearly 3 minute trailer. I won't be watching it because I love the teaser so much (previously discussed, the one with all the heavy breathing) and I don't want any more information in my eyeballs before seeing it than we've already gotten. The reaction online seems breathless/"MASTERPIECEY"! but one should never bank on trailers to tell you what the finished quality of a movie will be, only to tell you whether it looks like you must see the movie. The last trailer that fooled me with "oh, this will be a masterpiece, hands down!" was Little Children (2006) and that's where I learned my lesson once and for all that the art of cutting trailers into 2-ish minute expressive gems was an entirely different art form (a beautiful art form if you don't give too much away) then making a 2 hour movie.
Video of the Day #2 "Bitch Better Have My Money" Barbershop Quartet Quintet style with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 9:33PM 
An intimate convo this week as Nathaniel R and Nick Davis discuss recent flicks. This was recorded right before Nathaniel's birthday but we are late uploading it. Here it is now for your enjoyment. Lots of Tully and Disobedience talk (among other films) all without spoilers if you haven't yet caught those early release gems!
