Cannes at Home: Day 7 – Death to Reality!

by Cláudio Alves

Park Chan-wook and David Cronenberg have arrived. Livening up the 75th Cannes Film Festival, the two auteurs debuted new works, prompting many to sing their hosannas in reverent tones. The Film Experience's own Elisa Giudici has declared Decision to Leave the film of the festival, a sentiment shared by many critics who've celebrated the picture's surprising romanticism and Tang Wei's performance. Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future was less ecstatically received, but the reactions are still positive. The verdict is that the film is less shocking than advertised but more elegiac in tone. Nevertheless, as the director predicted, multiple spectators walked out before the end credits rolled.

While anticipating these filmmakers' new offerings, let's remember their past works – Thirst's sicko love story and eXistenZ's visions of a violent future…

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Are you watching "Squid Game" or "Midnight Mass"?

by Nathaniel R

I received an email from a reader yesterday earlier this week suggesting that we discuss "Squid Game" which has become very popular, quite rapidly, all over the world. We've had lots of internal discussion here at The Film Experience about how much television to cover since TV and Film have been merging into a two-headed amorphous beast for at least a decade now. The movies the general public likes best now are inarguably, the "continuing series" movies which makes them much more like television than their blockbuster ancestors. Today I screened Dune and it is literally just half a movie!  Meanwhile the TV series that win the most acclaim, if not always the biggest audiences, are inarguably the ones that feel the most "cinematic", a simmering change that reached a boil with Mad Men (if you ask us) since it looked and sounded as delicious and expensive as the very best the cinema itself had to offer. For the past ten years movies are getting longer (the new James Bond is almost three hours. WTF) and television seasons keep getting shorter! I suspect younger audiences don't fully get how much different the landscapes are now than they were even 15 years ago... but I digress. This is all a long way of saying we never know which series to cover and we obviously need a bigger team!

Speaking of longwindedness. If every showrunner on earth is now allowed to just make people wait for something to happen until episode two or even three (that would have got you immediately cancelled pre-2010s when shows would shove every possible hook they could into a pilot episode) I can begin this discussion of Squid Game with a detour to Midnight Mass... 

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Best International Feature: Chile, Mexico, South Korea

by Cláudio Alves

Nathaniel has recently shared the Best International Feature Contenders List and given us an overview of the stars and directors and stats. Like last year, I'll be reviewing as many of the contenders as I can get my hands on, beyond the reviews already shared here at The Film Experience for the submissions from Czech Republic, Georgia, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Palestine, Romania, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Venezuela. The number of contenders is at an all-time high!

To start our voyage around the world, let's take a look at the submitted films from the last three champions of the category: Chile (2017, A Fantastic Woman), Mexico (2018, Roma), and South Korea (2019, Parasite)… 

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Parasite's Architectural Storytelling

by Cláudio Alves

This year's Oscar nominations weren't particularly rich in surprises, positive or otherwise. Still, there are plenty of things to be ecstatic about like the Best Production Design nomination for Bong Joon-ho's Parasite. It's relatively unusual to see non-anglophone films score nods outside the Best International category and even rarer for the Academy's design branch to recognize excellence in contemporary narratives. Usually, period movies, sci-fi adventures and fantasy extravaganzas are de rigueur choices in these categories. However, the Korean masterpiece turned awards season juggernaut was able to overcome whatever prejudices the Academy might have and score a very deserved nod for the work of production designer Ha-jun Lee and set decorator Won-woo Cho.

With that in mind, let's celebrate this miracle of design, an essential element for a film about class in which social hierarchies are materialized in architecture…

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The Miraculous Power of a Perfect Montage

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes you can forget why you love cinema so much. The world gets you down and it's like nothing can bring you up to the light, rolling clouds of cinematic mediocrity make it even difficult to remember there was a light to start with. Before you know it, going to the movies is more like a chore than a pleasure. If you give in to despondency, those belabored affirmations of the death of cinema may start to ring true. But are they?

No. We know this because even in the darkest times, there are small miracles that prove cinema is alive and thriving. Parasite is one of those miracles.

Allow me to elaborate on a bit of recent personal history. At the beginning of last summer, after hitting an emotional roadblock and getting to a point I couldn't function anymore, I finally looked for professional help...

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