SAG Award Seating. Any Requests?

Thanks to Sasha Stone for tweeting this. It's a SAG Awards seating chart (of sorts).

I can't make out the faces as well as I'd like but Jessica Chastain and Denzel Washington are right up front with Helen Hunt just the next table back. Expect lots of reaction shots from the front. Do you think any of them will win tomorrow night?

BFFs since before they were famous - Nicole & NaomiTV Guide has a partial seating chart which indicates that Les Misérables and Argo have front row tables both to the right of the stage and get this, SAG honors requests so...

BFFs Naomi Watts(The Impossible) and Nicole Kidman (The Paperboy) asked to sit together and are placed at Table 21. 

Awwww!

Double nominees get to choose where they sit so Bryan Cranston opted for the Breaking Bad table instead of sitting with King Ben of Argopolis. 

Which table would you most want to carouse with? Will you be hear for liveblogging tomorrow? I promise to stay put to avoid tech difficulties as with the Globes.

Clips w/out Context: Nicole Kidman in "Stoker"

So many people have sent me that first official clip from Stoker over the past week, a monologue from Queen Kidman, that I figure it's a sign from the cosmos that I've been neglecting my genuflections. (I had had another big Nicole (!) piece planned last week and then they went and snubbed her/spoiled it. And then there was The Hours anniversary and I thought maybe I had Kidmandeered the blog too much. Apparently not!)

Lights on. Camera. Actress!

Almost every time someone has sent or linked to the clip they've done so with a variation of "OMG!!!" or "all the Oscars for Nicole!" in their text and a quick check of online reactions fall roughly along those lines too. My reaction was more like "..." with a side of "♥"

...which I shall explain alongside the clip and Stoker @ Sundance madness after the jump.

Click to read more ...

10 Years Ago, This Weekend, "The Hours" Won Best Picture at the Globes

Nicole Kidman was having a pretty great night. 

Meryl won for "Adaptation" and Nicole won for "The Hours"

Hanging' out on all sorts of red carpets with Meryl Streep usually helps in that regard. If you can't share scenes with her at least have her on your team by way of a shared movie.

Our 10th Anniversary Celebration of The Hours

• Nicole Kidman remembers her Oscar win (Exclusive Interview!)
• Breakfast with... Clarissa, Virginia and Laura Brown
• Epic Discussion Part 1: Ravenous Kisses, Fidgety Hands
• Epic Discussion Part 2: Score, Performance, Re-Casting

We hope you enjoyed this look back. I imagine The Film Experience would be more popular if it stuck to current movie news all the time like every other site but I cannot live without my retro celebrations. I'm greedy. I need films from all eras in my movie diet. 

This next part is for Hours and Film Experience Obsessives only...

Click to read more ...

"The Hours" Discussion Pt. 2: Score, Performance, Re-Casting

previously... Joe Reid and Nick Davis discussed fidgety hand acting and ravenous kisses in The Hours for it's 10th anniversary. We rejoin them for the second half of their conversation. - Nathaniel R

JOE REID: OH that Phillip Glass score. I'm with you, obviously. I actually did much of my writing with that soundtrack playing in the background in the year or two after The Hours, because I'm just that kind of impressionable. But beyond being beautiful and haunting music in its own right, it also immediately sets the mood of the urgently mundane which pervades the whole movie. Laura trying and failing and trying again to bake a cake. Virginia scrawling out a first sentence. Clarissa getting the flowers. The score is repetitive and plain but increasingly frantic. I could roll around in it, crumbs in the frosting and all. 

So not to get too common about it, but rather than risk ignoring the elephant in the room, let's get to evaluating and ranking those leading ladies, am I right? You mentioned some ambivalence about Julianne Moore's performance, and I think I read somewhere that you value Streep's work here quite highly? Feel like making some friends/enemies among the blog-reading populace?

Nick's answer and more provocative questions after the jump

Click to read more ...

Breakfast With... Clarissa, Virginia, and Laura

We begin our 10th anniversary celebration of The Hours, in the only logical place: morning rituals

Good morning ladies: Laura would like to sleep in, Virginia never sleeps, Clarissa sleeps fitfully

A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day, her whole life. 
-Virginia Woolf, The Hours

The central framing ambition of The Hours, is vocalized about 17 minutes in after the genius author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) has written the first and soon to be rather famous sentence to (one of) her masterpiece(s) "Mrs. Dalloway." I'd liken it to that moment when the tea kettle starts whistling except that nobody is having tea. But, nevertheless the movie's three strands (1923, 1951, and 2001) have been simmering with, bubbling over and spilling into one another in Stephen Daldry's pot and we're definitely full steam. But first things first... what are our ladies having for breakfast?

Click to read more ...