Queering the Oscars: "Heavenly Creatures" for Best Original Screenplay

For Pride Month, Team Experience is looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations...

by Nick Taylor

Hello! Are you an enterprising young queer and/or MILF lover fresh off the newest season of Yellowjackets looking for another story of dangerous, imaginative, mentally unwell young women starring THE Melanie Lynskey? Would you like it to focus on an obsessive life-bond so intense it has almost no choice but to be queer? What if this one was based on a true story? Then have I got a film for you! Try your hand at Heavenly Creatures, the restaging of the infamous Parker-Hulme murder case in 1954 New Zealand about two pubescent girls so wrapped up in the fantasy world they’ve created over two years of isolating friendship that the only way the can imagine protecting each other from life’s unsustainable realities is to kill Mom.

Heavenly Creatures was directed by Peter Jackson, an inspired, imaginative artist whose soul would soon be held hostage by The Shire for decades. The film brought Jackson to international attention for the first time in his career, and netted an Original Screenplay nomination at the 1994 Oscars for himself and his writing/life partner Fran Walsh to boot. This is the sort of Screenplay nomination I deeply admire the Academy for making, even if I wish this pocket of support could have somehow translated to love for the direction, the actresses, the cinematography, and every technical element necessary to bringing Borovnia to life...

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Let's Spend Forever With Kent

by Jason Adams

I don't know how you guys all felt about The Nightingale -- that is if you've gotten the chance to see The Nightingale -- but Jennifer Kent's divisive second film has been, for me, a 2019 favorite. Add it up with The Babadook and I'm ready to follow Kent anywhere now, and it looks like we know where she's taking us next -- to 1890s Tennessee to be precise. 

She'll be adapting Alice + Freda Forever, Alexis Coe's 2014 true-crime retelling of a story that captivated / horrified the unprepared nation, involving two teenage girls who fell in love and whose sapphic obsession quick turned to violence and most unsavory murder...

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Beauty vs Beast: Political Animals

Jason from MNPP here, posting today's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" from deep down inside my underground election bunker -- it's kind of like 10 Cloverfield Lane only depending on which way things go tomorrow I'm possibly going to be dissolving myself in acid. Until then, cheers! And don't go blind from drunkeness.

But first I've got to put in front of you the most obvious poll for this week's contest that I could possibly have gone with. When it's right, it's right, ya know? In 1999 Alexander Payne dropped Election, his second-best movie, on the world and it's resonated deeply and profoundly every four years since. There's a character for every type - Paul Metzler's a little bit Bush and a little bit Obama; I like Tammy too much to attach Trump to her but their shared anti-establishment rhetoric is pretty on-point. And as for Tracy Flick, well... obviously.

But for "Beauty vs Beast" it only make sense to face off the real adversaries of the film. There are morals, and there are ethics, and it's one lone man's job to police the distinction...

PREVIOUSLY Last week we tackled the love-struck teenaged maniacs of Heavenly Creatures and I forced you to split the duo in two like you're they're heteronormative parents side-eyeing their affections - it was close (I was hoping for a tie!) but Winslet's Juliet squeaked it out with 54% over Lynskey's Pauline; seeing as how Juliet is ever so slightly roped into the killing by the more enthusiastic Pauline I suppose we can understand. But said our host Nathaniel (and I'm prone to agree):

"I love this movie with all my heart (the best of its year if you ask me) and this is an awful thing to be expected to answer! Cruel, Jason, cruel."

Podcast: The Handmaiden and Other Heavenly Creatures

We're back to weekly podcasts! This week Nick and Nathaniel revisit a summer favorite that's now on DVD and have divergent feelings about The Handmaiden despite their mutual Park Chan-wook history.

Index (41 minutes)
00:01 A Heavenly Creatures revisit
05:10 The Handmaiden and that time Nathaniel and Nick watched a Park Chan-wook together
25:00 Almodóvar's Julieta and Farhadi's The Salesman
34:00 Doctor Strangé & Captain Fantastic briefly to wrap-up

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?  

Referenced in this conversation:
Nick's Isabelle Huppert e-mail hack | Nathaniel's photo op with Viggo Mortensen | A recent rewatch of Witness | Alama Drafthouse Night Out | 1994 Oscar Races 

The Handmaiden Fantastic

Beauty vs Beast: The Princesses of Borovnia

Jason from MNPP here -- with most holidays I think it would suck to share a birthday - who wants their birthday on Thanksgiving? Or even worse, Christmas? Everyone else getting presents on your day? What a nightmare. But Halloween is the exception - I would love my birthday to be on Halloween. Costume parties every year! A cake shaped like Frankenstein's head! Or even better - a cake shaped like the Bride of Frankenstein's head! (Because more cake.) 

And you wanna know who I bet has the best Halloween Birthday Parties? Peter Jackson, that's who. I bet he dresses up like the STD-riddled rabbit from Meet the Feebles or like the Mouth of Sauron every year. Damn you, Peter Jackson. 

Oh well - we'll go ahead and wish him a happy day today with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" anyway, and since we're going to be seeing his 1994 masterpiece Heavenly Creatures on a big screen (with Film Experience fave Melanie Lynskey in person!) in just a couple of days thanks to the brand new Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, we'll go with a show-down between teen dreamers Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline (Lynskey). Good luck choosing with this Sophie's Choice, folks...

Instead of doing the usual "Previously On..." here (Eli won last week's Let the Right One In contest though) I want to keep aboard the Melanie Lynskey Express for a minute since we're here and she's wonderful and we all love her so - she's got a new movie coming out this weekend! It's called Rainbow Time and it stars Lynskey as a woman pulled into the weird relationship between two brothers (played by Timm Sharp and Linus Phillips) and the movie's really fine and funny and I highly recommend it. Watch the trailer now: