Happy New Year from the Team Experience!

by Cláudio Alves

As the year draws to a close, here’s a final thank you for reading The Film Experience and engaging in this cinema-loving community. Have a wonderful time tonight and let’s all hope for a good 2025, even if the odds may feel against us.

Also, remember, you are one. Don’t make the same mistake as Miss Sparkle in The Substance. Then again, we should all enter the New Year with a Monstro Elisasue type of smile – broad, bloody, mad and maddening, bursting in ecstasy beyond reason and full of star power. Cheers!

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Soundtracking: When Harry Met Sally

by Chris Feil

“It’s very clear / Our love is here to stay...”

When Harry Met Sally is a love story of then and now, both in action and in spirit. As it jettisons us across the years with once tense acquaintances, to then friends, to eventual lovers, the narrative’s timelessness is undercut by contemporary observation of its era. To break up its chapters, we’re given testimonials from long-married couples that intensify the feeling of inevitability that Harry and Sally will finally come together. 

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Soundtracking: "200 Cigarettes"

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Chris rings in 2018 by looking back at the 80s via the 90s with 200 Cigarettes!

Remember theme parties? Well, 200 Cigarettes is a film version of an 80s theme party, set over New Year’s Eve as several lovelorn folks slowly make their way to Martha Plimpton’s house. Sounds like a party we would all want to go to, so you would think that the film would have had a longer shelf life than it did. The film is as forgotten as the old acquaintances "Auld Lang Syne" talked about, and shouldn’t be considering its easy charms, famous cast, and relentless gifability. But while parties are meant to be replaced by other parties, the music stays the same.

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Happy New Year: "The Apartment" (1960)

by Chris Feil

The week between Christmas and New Year’s can be a disorienting time - an inescapable amount of parties, reflections on the closing year, and hope for the one to come. For the more somber sort, it’s the feeling of being alone in a series of crowded rooms you can’t escape. New Year’s Eve is simply the worst holiday - like “Auld Lang Syne” it proposes joy and companionship, but always comes up feeling solemn.

Such is the emotional terrain of Billy Wilder’s classic romance The Apartment, a very best Best Picture winner. In its indifferent, wintery New York City, it’s easy to feel isolated and cast aside when everyone else goes on about their lives - but the very thing that sets you apart is what will make you feel less alone when you see it reflected in another person. The film is all the more romantic for being a love story for the melancholy, its soaring hope all the more hard won and transformative.

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Happy Birthday Hannah (Plus: New Year's Resolutions)

Oops. Now I've ruined Kate Winslet's surprise for Hannah! It's a birthday cake.I've always felt bad for people whose birthdays fall around the holidays. They have to share the spotlight with something huge and impersonal (to them) and I hope that they pretend that the world around them is just celebrating their special day with a holiday-themed blowout party. So when I learned that Hannah M, a devoted member of the The Film Experience community was born on New Year's Eve I vowed to wish her a happy birthday this year. So...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HANNAH!

And happy birthday to any of you reading who were born during holidays of any sort. I hereby vow as one of  my New Year's Resolution to bring back the 'Reader Spotlight' in 2013. That was fun when we were doing it.

As for other resolutions about life here on the blog, feel free to make suggestions in the comments though I'll be aiming for more interviews (albeit more spaced out), video blogging and festival coverage (maybe if I can find the money) and more commemorative hoopla for special films and actors. As always your comments, donations, subscriptions (see right hand sidebar), sharing and liking, and retweeting and whatnot are invaluable to keeping TFE going since this has always been a passion project indie site surrounded by behemoth corporate movie blogs. And more and more of them each year, too! It's not easy. Every year I think it'll be my last and then I here from one of you about what the site means to you or see the odd new subscription donation (one cup of coffee a month - cheap!) and I start typing again.

The point is. The site would have folded long ago without its passionate readership. So here's to next year (we survived 2012!)

MAY YOU ALL HAVE A MEMORABLE NEW YEARS EVE!

And here's to 2013 being a huge step up from 2012, which was a tough year for so many people around the world.

Be safe tonight. xoxoxo

-Nathaniel