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.)
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Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 12:15AM 
I was just randomly thinking about Splendor in the Grass. You?
Natalie Wood, Splendor in the Grass Monday, December 28, 2020 at 6:20PM Many people discovered new hobbies while under quarantine. I, however, re-discovered my love for movies. As many film fans can attest, it sometimes feels like you have to watch so many new films each year that it can be hard to find time to fill in classic blind spots. But with the 2020 quarantine (plus the fun of insomnia), I turned to the Criterion Collection and basically got a whole second film school education. As 2020 comes to a close, I’ve had over 120 new-to-me watches for the year, not counting films released in 2020. They span from silent era cinema through Camp (2003).
Since the final week of December is always about lists, here are my top 10 favorite first-time-for-me watches from 2020...
Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 12:00PM by Nathaniel R
Pedro quarantined and tripping through memory lane.
You can keep all those celebrity sing-alongs or other social media attempts to cheer us up collectively. Instead give us gossip to chew on. More juicy shared "diaries" of stir-crazy stars, please!
The occassion for this request is that we've just finished reading a new article by Spanish genius Pedro Almodóvar. He wrote a piece for the Spanish website el diario about... well, a lot of things. It begins with memories of getting dressed up to go on an errand during quarantine and segueways into other memories of getting dressed up for movie events. Lots of fun anecdotes follow including a night with Jane Fonda (!). But the bulk of the piece centers on 1990-1991 when Madonna entered his life via Dick Tracy through the essential documentary Truth or Dare (1991). You must read the whole thing -- Spanish readers will probably enjoy it most but the rest of us will have to suffer through a google translation.
I've excerpted the Dick Tracy story after the jump...
Friday, May 4, 2018 at 1:29PM by Nathaniel R
Natalie and the Boys
Did you know that without Natalie Wood, the seminal gay play and subsequent film The Boys in the Band (1970) might never have existed? 1970 is our year of the month but the story began much earlier when Natalie met the playwright Mart Crowley on the set of Splendor in the Grass (1961). He was working as an assistant to Elia Kazan but Natalie immediately snatched him up for herself, taking him along for her West Side Story ride...
Tuesday, February 14, 2017 at 4:46PM P F A N D O M
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 6
by Nathaniel R
Pfeiffer is a hormonally charged pflapper in the remake of Splendor in the Grass
[Editor's Note: Due to a scheduling issue with DVDs and a two day internet outage at your host's home last week we're a bit out of sequence & behind. Apologies]
Last week we got an early glimpse of Michelle Pfeiffer's bad girl side with the campy plodding Texas melodrama Callie & Son (1981). It was one of three telefilms the young actress co-starred in the year before her first leading movie role (Grease 2). Her last two TV movies before stardom make a fascinating double feature for their good girl/bad girl dichotomy and their foreshadowing of more famous roles...
