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.)
Travel back in time with me to the late 70s. Superman (1978) birthed the modern superhero film with the instantly classic visual-effects spotlighting tagline "You'll believe a man can fly." If the internet had been around back then, it surely would have become a meme and been parodied ad infinitum. (Maybe it did in whatever form memes used to take?). The very next year The Muppet Movie (1979 - our year of the month!) could have used the tagline
You'll believe a frog can bike.
My movie memories are super spotty until the 1980s but I have a handful from the late 70s and this is one of them. My eyes going wide and little jaw dropping at the sight of Kermit the Frog on a bicycle. I must have been aware that my beloved Kermy -- stand down, Miss Piggy! -- was a puppet since being a puppeteer was the childhood career goal. So how was this possible; puppets don't have legs because people's hands go up their butts!
Happy National Bike to Work Week!
The Muppet Wiki tells us how this was accomplished and the Muppets are on the brain since they'll be revived for primetime next season. Does this trailer sell you on a contemporary version? (On a scale of Yes No or Maybe So... I regret to inform that I'm not fully in the first column.)
P.S. This trailer reminds us that Kermit is kind of an awful husband/boyfriend. Miss Piggy is the faithful one. He's the commitment-phobe. And yet she's always painted as the shallow one. Hmmm.
David Dastmalchian concludes his guest blog takeover with this playlist (which we've helpfully collated on Spotify for you) - you should follow him on Twitter & Instagram ! - Editor
Photograph by Braden Moran
Soundtrack of My Life -by David Dastmalchian
I read once that memory is like film editing. We cut and paste the sequences together in a way that make our past fit into the context of our present. I have this strange kind of daydream that feels like a movie trailer and I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I look at a time in my life – or my life as a whole – and imagine it with few words but with a great deal of music. I change the songs often and the points of focus shift from day-to-day but I will share just a few of the predominant soundtrack jams from the life and mind of, well, you know – me.
1. Shine on You Crazy Diamond – Pink Floyd My parents used to shoot super 8 films of us as kids in Kansas and my dad had them all edited together onto a DVD a few years back. There’s no audio so you’re just sitting there watching us all blowing out candles or learning how to swim in silence. Actually, I think there was some bad Vince Guaraldi rip-off jazz that the Costco or wherever people had dubbed in. I just popped in my Wish You Were Here and listened and watched. Perfect music to sum up so much.
2. The Rainbow Connection – Jim Henson The Muppet Movie and its effect on my life are no small secret. I first took to a stage when I was 6 years old in Kansas so that I could strum a ukulele in my overalls and sing this song which says EVERYTHING you need to say about love and imagination. Beautiful, man.
3. Come Together and Let it Flow – Spiritualized These anthems of my late teens and early twenties sum up the tracking shot of a dude with blasted pupils, sitting wayyyyy back on a couch in a poster-lined apartment in Chicago and watching the wax slowly melt off the candles. I believe that I was really trying to find some way to link up with the people around me and only inadvertently succeeded in isolating myself from them all.
4. Goodnight, Irene – Leadbelly And old pal of mine used to do a bang-up version of this song when he would play around Chicago – but it really strikes up an image for me of driving across the long expanse of endless highway across my Kansas homeland. Those early memories of sitting in the back of my parents station wagon and rolling through the wheat-lined roads of the Midwest are some of my most cinematic mental images.
5. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes – The Platters My mother had a “Golden Collection” of the Platters (one of those record sets you’d order off TV that came with special liner notes and fancy packaging) and I loved it. We would listen to the records on the old Motorola console in our living room and I would slow dance with an imaginary woman of my dreams – I think at that time it was probably Kristy McNichol or Justine Bateman. Or Lita Ford.
6. Simple Twist of Fate – Bob Dylan AND Joan Baez have versions of this classic jam that sum up the quick cuts of my early 20’s when I was hitch-hiking and riding Greyhound busses from Seattle to Asheville and trying to find my way back to Alaska while riding out the decade-long trip of simpleadventure and recklessness that was starting to ramp up in speed and severity, which leads to….
7. Stuck on You (Failure) One of those songs that plays perfectly in the long, spiraling overhead crane shot as it comes down to face a guy who thought he knew what he was getting into and didn’t realize until it was too late that he was in way, way, way too deep over his head.
9. Which leads to that final deathbed moment. It’s a beautiful song but sad – but shouldn’t it be sad? It’s okay for deathbeds to be somber. I don’t want a marching band playing “Oh When the Saints” – I want all my loved ones crying and lamenting that we won’t be having any more adventures… for a while at least. Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd) Yes, that IS two Pink Floyd songs on my trailer track list – so sue me. It’s my guest blog and I can do what I want.
And now I leave you with this – the trailer for our upcoming release, ANIMALS, which will be in theaters and on VOD on 5.15.15. For details on where you can see the film, please visit www.animalsthefilm.com And if you love the song as much as we do, it’s from a band called “Lavendar Diamond”. Go find and buy all of their beautiful music here: www.lavenderdiamond.net
Thanks for reading and THANKS to Nathaniel for letting me sit in the driver’s seat for a day. It was a lot of fun and I hope you didn’t get too many unsubscribes during my brief tenure. Now… back to your regularly scheduled programming!
One of our favorite rising actors, David Dastmalchian, is Guest Blogging! Learn his name. He's working with great people -Editor
Photo by Evelyn Leigh"What I Saw..." -by David Dastmalchian
There are so many films that have a special place in my memory and their impact on my life was made all the more powerful by how and where I saw them. My earliest memories of film-going are the Kansas City drive-in’s where I caught second-run screenings from the back of my folks old station wagon of Grease, James Bond flicks like View from a Kill and Moonraker, and being in my mom’s arms at the back of the theater at a matinee with my family of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I thought the tarantulas in the opening sequence were climbing the walls of the theater… Here are a few spectacular memories that I will always treasure:
What I Saw: THE MUPPET MOVIE Where I Saw It: The Oak Park Mall Cinemas (KS)
This will remain one of the most profound movie-going experiences of my life. The characters, colors, sounds, music, performances all exploded in front of my little face on the big screen as I sat enraptured beside my childhood buddy, Brian Bishop and his wonderful mother, Kathy. We went to a matinee at the local cinema and this was one of my first ventures into an actual movie theater. At that point in my development, the whole “suspension of disbelief” in my imagination was so strong that I believed wholeheartedly that ‘Sweetums’ the monster Muppet actually crashed through the screen in our theater auditorium at the end of the film. For years I would proudly boast that I had seen the film in a theater where a REAL Muppet made an appearance. The “Rainbow Connection” became my first on-stage performance in a preschool talent show and my wife even chose the song for her processional at our wedding. The effect of this film on my life continues to this day. Several times a year (especially in moments of disillusionment with the entertainment industry), I will watch the final five minutes of the film – from the moment that Orson Welles offers Kermit “The Rich and Famous Contract” through the end. Go do this now. Bring the Kleenex. You’re welcome.
Cinemascope Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir) is working on a stop motion animated film about Anne Frank. Yes, that Anne Frank The Stake has a great piece on Tina Fey's firestarter comedy, especially its willingness to constantly poke at our racial discomforts Playbill has fun making Stephen King's books into stage musicals Pajiba has seen (well the first ten minutes) of a porn parody of Guardians of the Galaxy with characters named Star Load, and Bonin EW shares the 20 best episodes of Mad Men. Great choices overall - I'll be furious forever that Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss didn't win Emmys for "The Suitcase" MNPP I missed Matthew Goode's birthday but this is the perfect gif set with which to celebrate
Women and Hollywood the annual Crystal Awards for women in film are here and this year's honorees are Nicole Kidman and Ava DuVernay Boy Culture celebrates the one and only Buster Crabbe with some pre-code footage Deep Dish celebrates Bette Davis on her birthday with lots of clips from TV & film The Guardian raves about Carey Mulligan's career and artistry. She is currently playing Bill Nighy's ex-lover on Broadway at the moment in Skylight. Yes, Nighy. He is 36 years older. Theater Mania yes, it's true. Cats will be revived on Broadway Salon Michelangelo Signorile writes about the bleak state of gay characters on TV, usually sexless even in shows where their straight counterparts have plenty of physical intimacy (this is especially sad to read after Looking's cancellation though the article doesn't mention that) Comics Alliance the superhero craze has officially jumped shark? an Avengers inspired menswear line is upon us. No, not a boys underoos line, a menswear line. Kind of brings us back to that gender doublestandard discussion again, right? Huff Post Comedy speaking of double standards read this great piece on the headlines that would follow Madonna if she did the same things celebrity men her age or older did Maria Shriver's Blog also has a piece on ageism and sexism via the prism of Madonna i09 proof that awards are always political -- and it isn't just Oscar that's perpetually under attack -- in this investigative piece about a very weird two years for sci-fi's "Hugo" Awards TV Line "The Muppet Show" will be returning to ABC at some point. Let this serve as your reminder that they tried to revive it one other time in the 1990s and Michelle Pfeiffer was a guest! Here is video proof. (Yes, I was very excited that night)
Unfortunately, as in The Muppets (2011) they thought it wise to invent a new Muppet character that wasn't even a tenth as good as any of the originals. Why does this keep happening? I'm all for shaking things up lest one be fossilized in nostalgia but if you can't come up with a good character DO NOT steal screen time from the good ones!
Amir here, to welcome you to another edition of Team Top Ten, a poll of all of the website’s contributors. The topic du jour given that it's Emmy season is Best Films Adaptated from TV Series.
For as long as film and TV have coexisted, their fates, stars, successes, failures and histories have been entangled. Their ever-shifting dynamic has had an immense impact on both industries. The complexity of their relationship made devising a list like this one quite difficult, beginning with the question of what really constitutes an adaptation. For example, The Holy Grail and Life of Brian are not adapted from Monty Python'sThe Flying Circus; they are inspired by it, but one is more inspired than the other, so we rendered the former film eligible and the latter ineligible. On the other hand, series like Mission Impossible and Naked Gun present a different type of challenge because the sequels are continuations of the original film, rather than the TV series, but we considered them eligible nonetheless. We faced another difficulty with franchises like The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values, based on a series that is itself based on comics. The extent to which the films were inspired by either source was taken into account and we considered only the former film eligible in this case though the latter has far more ardent fans among the team here.
And so on and so forth. The point is to take this list with a grain of salt and add your personal favourites in the comments below. Without further ado…
TEAM TOP TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME INSPIRED BY TV SERIES
10. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Unlike these days, David Lynch needed to make a film in order to portray all of the incest, rape, pedophilia, murder and drugs that his and Mark Frost’s television series mostly only alluded to. While Twin Peaks, which ran for two seasons in the early 1990s, was a woozy blend of murder mystery, soap opera, dark comedy and surrealist imagery, the film was an altogether different beast. A dark and often brutally ugly ‘horror melodrama’, it angered many fans and even filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino was not a fan). For people willing to take the plunge, however, into the dark recesses of Lynch’s mind, it is a compelling and tragic affair that remains one of the definitive directorial statements of the ‘90s. Plus, David Bowie as an FBI agent who may be a ghost. Or an alien. Or a shape-shifter. Who can tell? –Glenn Dunks
9. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Ghost Protocol seemed like a squeaker eligibility-wise, with the show a distant, tenuously related memory and three other movies interceding between them. But the film is one of the great pop entertainments U.S. studios have produced in recent years, dynamically edited and gorgeously shot by Robert Elswit without the self-conscious handsomeness of There Will Be Blood or Good Night, and Good Luck. With set-pieces as stunning as the Kremlin infiltration, the sandstorm chase, and everything else that happens in, on, or around the Burj Khalifa, this is top-notch, exuberant, and imaginative action filmmaking. I liked De Palma’s gimcrackery and Abrams’ more traditional and character-driven suspenser, but Ghost Protocol is the franchise’s happiest marriage of scene construction, silliness, and star charisma (not just from Cruise, but from everybody). Its division into discrete, flavorful sequences gives it the roaming energy of a television serial. You want to binge four more movies afterward. –Nick Davis
Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 4:30PM 
