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.)
Tee hee. The Best Picture nominees are still very much in the air in this week's tweet collection after the jump. Subjects include but are not limited to: Black Panther, Lady Bird, Best Picture time frames, and a visual reminders of what Three Billboards is good for. Plus a visual reminder why the cat documentary Kedi had such wonderful "characters"...
news • Coming Soon first image Zac Efron as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked • TMZ Meryl Streep files for trademark claim on the use of her name. Wonder what prompted this? • WSJ Is the Star Wars franchise slipping in popularity? (This seems like a lot of panic for nothing since the movies are regularly grossing a billion)
• Variety Bernadette Peters off to a great sales start taking over for Bette Midler in Hello Dolly! on Broadway • Tracking Board Juliette Lewis joins the cast of the next Sam Taylor-Johnson movie A Million Little Pieces • The Wrap Oprah responds to her action figure from A Wrinkle in Time • Tribeca Film Matthew Eng, who co-writes our "Months of Meryl" column, interviewed the queen herself! Check out his chat with Streep about her work on The Post. • AV Club Sam Raimi likely to direct the Kingkiller Chronicles which already has Lin-Manuel Miranda attached for the music
opinion • Film Mixtape Our own Chris Feil's top 15 films of the year: Lady Bird, Raw, Personal Shopper, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and more... • Advocate Sir Ian McKellen on the 30th anniversary of his coming out • Fandor "What if Pixar made Phantom Thread?" <-- SPOILERS in that article, major ones, so be warned. I'm not sure what to make of this piece. I love the concept and the header image and the cartoon being described but it's basically like 2 separate articles shoved up against each other since they keep leaving the imaginary film for multi-paragraph detours into the real one. • Cinematic Corner Sati picks her 35 best shots of the year
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Nicole eats "micro-livestock" aka bugs for Vanity Fair's secret talent theater. Jason made me lol with his response to this video:
Nicole Kidman dislodged her jaw and swallowed Lars Von Trier whole one time on the set of Dogville so bugs ain't shit"
Marvel at this feat of fashion engineering. Somehow the 16 actors (+ god knows how many stylists) got together and took the title This is Us to heart and made it work. Everything was gorgeously coordinated and complimentary though not samey samey. From the royal blue throughline of the gowns to small color accents on the tuxes to the peppering of earth tones, purples, blacks, and golds to keep it vibrant and versatile. The more you look the more cohesive and beautiful it becomes. Bow down. Okay now on to the gowns...
BREAKING: Nicole Kidman has finally used her Instagram account which had been taunting us for years (or at least it felt like that... months?) with "no posts yet". Here is the beauteous moment in full.
For those of you who don't have Twitter and thus missed any of these delicious bites, photos, or observations, here you go. These are culled from the vastness with speed and imprecision but I hope you find a chuckle you might have otherwise missed...
The costume designer Stacey Battat has, to date, worked mostly in female-oriented contemporary indies. That's quite a perfect niche to build a design career from. Or at least it is when the women who've visually helped define your early work are such stylish talented icons themselves. Battat first made her mark on two Parker Posey features in the late Aughts (Broken English, Happy Tears). Soon after she was deep in the Julianne Moore business (Still Alice, Freeheld, What Maisie Knew). Other credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him and Mozart in the Jungle but it's been her partnership with writer/director Sofia Coppola that's come to define her young career.
The two began working together on the LA dreamy Somewhere (2010). Battat proved invaluable to all the fashiongasms of Coppola's arguably most underrated feature The Bling Ring (2013). Then came an atypical challenge: a forgotten girls school deep in the Civil War era.
I spoke with Battat recently by phone to talk about one of the most visually striking films this past year, The Beguiled, and what she brought to it. Our interview, edited for clarity and length follows...