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.)
In the fifth episode, we've reached what has to be a boiling point as Jane, Madeline, Celeste and Renata all seem to be coming absolutely unhinged simultaneously. Spoiler alert for the rest of this post: this show is just superb and it's giving us more actressing than we even know what to do with. *tosses roses at television*
Top Ten MVPs of Big Little Lies. Episode 5 "Once Bitten"
10. Madeline's Dream Bonus points to the show for having a sense of humor about its hardcore annoying refusal to let us know who was murdered. Also any Avenue Q reference is golden.
09 "Bully Free Zone" That damn bright yellow & red sign.
Don't you feel like it's constantly just taunting everyone in the school? At least half of the adults in this show are bullies themselves and everyone seems so helplessly ill equipped to deal with bullying in school on top of their other issues...
THR amazing casting news: the great Patricia Clarkson will play Amy Adams estranged mother in HBO's Sharp Objects. Both roles are so juicy. Filming starts soon but we're talking next summer's Emmy nomination's not 2017's. Speaking of... Decider Joe Reid's already thinking of the Lead Actress in a Miniseries Emmy race: 10 women, only 6 slots /Film original Ghost in the Shell actors will dub the new film for Japanese relates
Salon looks back at memorable Russian villains in movies and on TV All Things Considered wonders if you can make a King Kong movie without perpetuating racial undertones Variety winners for the Miami Film Festival: Family Life and Maria (and Everybody Else) Awards Daily 77 films about women on the way. That sounds like a lot, so, yay! The Sun a couple of more pictures from the set of Mary Poppins Returns. A polka dot bowtie on Mary! DeciderGirls found the line that HBO wouldnt cross for sex scenes /Film Edgar Wright's Baby Driver starring Ansel Elgort premiered at SXSW so here's the trailer W Mag classic Linda Evangelista photo. Love.
French Waves, Not New The New Yorker has an article / theory on why France hasn't produced a great director in three decades. Interesting ideas but I disagree with the thesis. France may never be the critical hotspot in international cinema -- there's always some exciting country of the moment in international cinema and it changes every handful of years -- but they're consistently strong.
Thirty years ago was 1987. Directors who made their first feature films after 1987 include Claire Denis (1988), Arnaud Desplechin (1991), Jacques Audiard (1994). Does The New Yorker really exclude all of them from a list of great French directors? I admit France isn't turning out the greats as consistently as they once did and Brody is right that the new exciting directors dont seem to stay as exciting for as long as they should now (what happened to Christophe Honore, for example?) but let's be reasonable! I personally have high hopes for Celine Sciamma (Girlhood), Deniz Gamze Ergüven (Mustang) and Alice Winocour (Disorder) so maybe the future is female?
"Complicit" Did you see SNL's perfume ad of Ivanka Trump starring Scarlett Johansson? The Titanic joke is rich.
Top Ten MVPs of Big Little Lies. Episode 2 "Serious Mothering" In episode 2 we learn that Celeste's husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) is abusive and even their love life is violent. Meanwhile Renata and Madeline get into a screaming match in a restaurant over an upcoming children's party, and Madeline's two husbands -- the ex Nathan (James Tupper) and the current Ed (Adam Scott) -- rub each other the wrong way.
A list of ten wonderments from this installment after the jump...
This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad
You've seen the moment many times. Two future lovers see each other in a crowd, and something clicks. In West Side Story that moment prompts a blur on the edges of the frame, with only the lovers in focus. In La La Land, it takes the form of a camera push-in with all the lights, but for a spotlight, going out. The moment is so familiar in fantasies (and desired in reality) that there's even an old showtune about it.
Some enchanted evening, you will meet a stranger You will meet a stranger across a crowded room. And somehow you know, you know even then...
The last place you might expect to see it deployed is in a new French film which begins with 18 minutes of explicit activity in a sex club...
Nathaniel R reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept 8th-18th)
On any given day around the movie internet you will see the headine "What You Need To Know About ['Movie You Haven't Seen Yet']". It's clickbait. The sum total of what you need to know about a movie before you see it is nothing. Go to the movie theater and actually experience it. So if the promise of a new acclaimed Paul Verhoeven feature (his first since the riveting Black Book in 2006) that's been loudly labelled a "rape comedy" starring the world's most casually transgressive movie star Isabelle Huppert is enough to sell you a ticket I urge you to not read any reviews before seeing it, including this one. It's not that the film has twists that can spoil the experience if they're known ahead of time so much as it's in the way the movie is itself twisted.
Just how twisted is revealed through the careful deployment of its psychosexual landmines. And just how often they're successfully played for laughter ... albeit of the discomforting 'what am I laughing at?' variety.
Two provocative legends (Verhoeven & Huppert) on set
Which is not to say that the rape itself is the subject of comedy...
Wednesday, March 22, 2017 at 1:20AM 
Previously: episode 1 and 2, episode 3 and episode 4. Here's Nathaniel's take on Episode 5
