Jason Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Jason Adams... 

For all of the hairs on my head and the hours of sleep that I've lost in 2018 I do feel, just a little bit,  as if I've traded them in for a couple of worthy life lessons this year. Enough to make up for the state of the world? Not for all the hair and dreams that have ever been or ever will be. But I will say that feeling in a near constant state of emergency has made me a smidge bit of a better writer, and it's nudged me ever so gently towards getting some of my shit together. To paraphrase Ryan Gosling's schtick -- one small step for me, one giant leap (into the abyss) for mankind. Helluva trade. Here's some of the great stuff I'm thankful for the nudges from...

• Moviepass burned high and too too bright this year, echoing our migraines, but I'm thankful to the service at its height for letting me see Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name in the theater a personal record shattering 18 times - in a crazy world those six summer weeks learning about love and peaches with Oliver and Elio and Elio and Oliver were the only thing that made any sense to me. For a film so warm and sunny I'll weirdly forever associate it with walking through cold weather in Central Park to get to or from the Paris Theater, "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs blasting in my ears. (I rounded up most of my writing on the film right at this link.) 

• Funny enough the end of 2018 belongs to Luca too, as the only music haunting my ear buds this Autumn has been Thom Yorke's by turns gorgeous, terrifying score for Suspiria. I'm thankful for that whole unholy beast of a film, bursting with ideas and emotions and Tildas...

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Lynn Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Lynn Lee..

In many ways, 2018 – like the two preceding years, only even more so – has felt like a nauseating carnival ride that I, for one, would like to stop and get off.  But the one welcome constant was always having something genuinely engaging to watch and, in the best cases, elevate my feelings on the state of the world and humanity. 

In that spirit, here are some of the many things I’m thankful for:

• The electrifying last 15 minutes of Nanette, wherein Hannah Gadsby turned stand-up comedy into something else altogether – and left our collective jaw on the floor.

• Daveed Diggs – so good in Hamilton, even better in the riveting and underrated Blindspotting.

• The shimmer in Natalie Portman’s and Oscar Isaac’s eyes at the end of Annihilation, one of the most bonkers and most unexpectedly rewarding films of 2018...

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Blueprints: "Coco"

Feliz Día de los Muertos! To celebrate, Jorge looks at how the script for Disney’s “Coco” mixes two languages the same way the movie interconnects cultures.

I’ve written a couple of pieces in this site before about Coco. It was an extremely intimate and touching experience to be able to see my native culture represented to accurately and lovingly. It is a movie that perfectly captures the spirit of Mexicanism, of our fragile and ever-present relationship with death, family, and tradition. 

I saw the movie twice in theaters: once in its original English, and once in its Spanish dub. While I consider the dub to be a better version (but that perhaps has to do with the way I’ve always experienced animated films), the English one made me consider a new aspect of the film: the way it handled Spanish. It’s a movie explicitly set in a different country; one where a different language is spoken (unlike say, Brave). How can the script incorporate this essential cultural element without making it seem unauthentic? It turns out, they do it muy bien.

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Beauty Break: Halloween Pin-ups

Apologies that TFE has been out tricking and treating instead of entertaining you. But please enjoy these Hollywood beauties getting into this highly specific autumnal mood. HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE

Paulette Goddard

Myrna Loy, Janet Leigh, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and other 'it' girls from Old Hollywood are after the jump with their pumpkins, witch hats, scary books, and cats.

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Halloween stays on top. Suspiria packs houses (albeit only two of them)

by Nathaniel R

Staying power or lack of competition? Halloween, A Star is Born, and Venom held on to the top three spots in wide release (with Venom booting Crazy Rich Asians out of the top ten films of 2018...sigh) while the platforming Oscar hopefuls continued their slow crawl towards public awareness beyond people like us if you know what I mean...

Weekend Box Office Estimates (October 26-28)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1.  Halloween $32 (cum. $126.6) Review	1. 🔺 Johnny English Strikes Again $1.6 on 544 screens *NEW*

2. A Star is Born $14.1 (cum. $148.7) Review, Soundtracking, Podcast	2. 🔺 Free Solo $1 on 394 screens (cum. $5.1)

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