Cannes: Peter Jackson

by Elisa Giudici 

Peter Jackson. Photo by Elisa Giudici

At the end of the ’80s Peter Jackson arrived in Cannes for the first time as a self-taught splatter filmmaker from New Zealand and immediately got thrown out of the Palais for wearing shorts. Nearly four decades later, he returns to the Croisette as the director behind one of the most successful trilogies in cinema history. The director is still talking about movies with the enthusiasm of somebody who never stopped being the kid borrowing his parents’ Super 8 camera to film homemade monsters. Across an unusually relaxed and funny conversation at the festival, Jackson moved freely from King Kong to The Beatles, from Andy Serkis to artificial intelligence, from Tintin 2 to the collapse of DVD culture. What emerges most clearly is how little of his career feels planned in retrospect. Again and again Jackson describes cinema as a chain of accidents, obsessions, and strange coincidences somehow turning into films...

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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