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.)
Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman) is the third actor Spike Lee has a directed to a nomination after Danny Aiello (Do the Right Thing) and Denzel Washington (Malcolm X)
With the upcoming Academy Awards celebrating their 91st year, the Oscars have plenty of history to obsess over. One of the less-discussed pieces of history is which directors have the most pull with the Academy's acting branch. Today's topic: directors who have guided multiple actors and actresses to nominations and/or wins.
With this season's nominations, directors Bradley Cooper (3), Yorgos Lanthimos (3), Peter Farrelly (2), and Marielle Heller (2) all join a group of directors who've guided multiple actors to Oscar nominations. In this season's crop of films Vice's Adam McKay (4), Roma's Alfonso Cuaron (3), If Beale Street's Barry Jenkins (3), BlacKkKlansman's Spike Lee (3), Bohemian Rhapsody's Bryan Singer (2) and At Eternity's Gate's Julian Schnabel (2) all add to their previous tallies since each had previously directed either one or two actors to a nomination.
In the 91 year history of the Academy Awards, 1757 performances were directed to an Oscar nomination. I tracked every single one of them to come up with these numbers. More notes after the jump...
"The Furniture" honors the Production Design of The Age of Innocence (1993) for its 25th anniversary year. The Martin Scorsese classic is newly available from the Criterion Collection. (Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.)
The final act of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence leaps through time. The ever-roving camera comes to a temporary rest in the home of Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), married to May (Winona Ryder) and entering the longue durée of family life. But this relative physical stasis comes with the sudden acceleration of time. Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker fast-forward through years of business, leisure and child-raising. After nearly two hours of social whirlpools and lingering formalities, suddenly it’s a new century.
But despite the speed of this sequence, it’s important to pay close attention. On the wall of Newland’s family home rests one very famous painting. Somehow, through the magic of cinema alone, our hero has ended up with JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.
It’s an icon for his last days, a masterpiece of a bygone era being towed away...
on this day (August 31st) in history as it relates to showbiz
1897 Thomas Edison patents his movie camera the "kinetograph"
1987 Michael Jackson's video "Bad" directed by none other than the master Martin Scorsese premieres. It is 18 minutes long (!) because Martin Scorsese never saw a lengthy running time that didn't make him salivate. The short gave Wesley Snipes one of his earliest gigs prompting the short's switch from black and white to color as Wesley riles Michael up with a "you ain't bad!" burn.
Princess Diana, Brokeback Mountain and more after the jump...
Two women talking: a recipe for witchcraft, an unnatural feedback loop, a cursed redundancy. Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona is a landmark for many reasons, but its legacy, which has show no signs of age in the 50 years since it was released in the U.S. and the U.K., is how it stared that anxiety in the face and opened up a loopy, meandering conversation that’s still going on to this day...
More Linkage Keyframe 'The Year of Nicole Kidman' don't force her to prove herself all over again Variety Cannes lineup is "high on "awards intrigue, low on safe awards bets" /Film Aquaman is overflowing with villains, 3 already for a first solo film? (not a good sign) and a fourth may have been added Coming Soon Antonio Banderas will headline Lamborghini -The Legend (working title) a biopic about the Italian entrepeneur of automobile fame. Alec Baldwin will play his rival Enzo Ferrari
Boy Culture "STREEPSHOW" a drag comedy about "characters one played by Meryl Streep" living together in the East Village will be playing NYC in June. Sounds hilarious but I have to admit that it took me quite some time to figure out the characters in the photo (and there seem to be two Miranda Priestleys?) which is maybe not a good sign. Shouldn't they be instantly recognizable? Guardian Mixed messages from Cannes as TV premieres from auteurs are happening but they've also banned Netflix from future competition unless they stop skipping theatrical releases Variety Gay gasp! The BBC is producing a series of 15 minute monologues called Queers which is set to star Ben Whishaw, Alan Cumming, and Russell Tovey and others Awards DailyGypsy teaser, a new series starring Naomi Watts Variety Hugh Bonneville will play Roald Dahl in a biopic set in the early to mid 1960s. This means they're going to have to cast someone to play both Dahl's wife Patricia Neal and her most famous co-star Paul Newman (see Hud) and both of those roles will be a Herculean casting task! The Guardian there's a documentary playing Cannes about Cary Grant's experimentation with LSD from 1958 through 196 Tracking Board Kenneth Branagh to direct himself in a movie about the father of Anne Frank The Keeper of the Diary
Not Remakes Though You Might Mistake Them For Such /Film Martin Scorsese starts filming mob drama The Irishman this summer with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci Gothamist Leonardo DiCaprio will star in The Black Hand about an undercover mob cop... (Ummm, haven't all these people already made these movies? Why not mix it up with a romantic comedy or a sci-fi picture?)
Exit Video Look it's the first clip from Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck. It may be impossible to follow Carol but we're glad that he got back on the horse so quickly after that long time away from us. How does this clip strike you?
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. The 81 year old artist was a crucial figure in making me the movie maniac that I am today. Michelle Pfeiffer on the piano top in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) -- hell the entire movie -- being a defining image in my life, after which I went from enthusiastic regular moviegoer to celluloid-devouring obsessive.
Ballhaus had retired after Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) making only one German movie in the last decade of his life and we had hoped each year that he'd be announced as an Honorary Oscar recipient. His three scant nominations -- The Fabulous Baker Boys, Broadcast News, and Gangs of New York -- do no justice to his long and gorgeous career. That's because they don't feel representative of his career as a whole and because, apart from his crowning glory (Baker Boys -- which ought to have walked away with Cinematography in just about any year, let alone 1989) aren't even his best work.
Ballhaus and Fassbinder worked together all through the 70s
Ballhaus got his start as a young man of 24 in German television but quickly graduated to features...
Friday, February 8, 2019 at 9:27AM 
Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman) is the third actor Spike Lee has a directed to a nomination after Danny Aiello (Do the Right Thing) and Denzel Washington (Malcolm X)
