Chris Gives Thanks!!

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Chris Feil...

Thank you love, thank you life, thank you faithful Film Experience readers!

2018 has been a busy year for yours truly! Between being TFE's resident soundtrack obsessive, starting a podcast, and having another go at TIFF, it's nice to indulge in a little bit of reflection on what this year has meant to me cinematically. As always, I'm grateful to our benevolent host Nathaniel for allowing me to share my voice with you all and my fellow genius cowriters here at TFE. In a terrifying world, our little corner of the internet is a salve. But as for the movies, I am most thankful for...

• "[staccato piano keys] ... I'm alone in my HOUSE!"

• Nicholas Britell's majestic If Beale Street Could Talk score. The rare beast that feels inextricable from its images, forever tied together in my brain.

• Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer in general, but specifically "Pynk" in particular. Listen, if folks are allowed to put Twin Peaks on their best films of the century lists, I can put a music video in mine...

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Jason Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Jason Adams... 

For all of the hairs on my head and the hours of sleep that I've lost in 2018 I do feel, just a little bit,  as if I've traded them in for a couple of worthy life lessons this year. Enough to make up for the state of the world? Not for all the hair and dreams that have ever been or ever will be. But I will say that feeling in a near constant state of emergency has made me a smidge bit of a better writer, and it's nudged me ever so gently towards getting some of my shit together. To paraphrase Ryan Gosling's schtick -- one small step for me, one giant leap (into the abyss) for mankind. Helluva trade. Here's some of the great stuff I'm thankful for the nudges from...

• Moviepass burned high and too too bright this year, echoing our migraines, but I'm thankful to the service at its height for letting me see Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name in the theater a personal record shattering 18 times - in a crazy world those six summer weeks learning about love and peaches with Oliver and Elio and Elio and Oliver were the only thing that made any sense to me. For a film so warm and sunny I'll weirdly forever associate it with walking through cold weather in Central Park to get to or from the Paris Theater, "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs blasting in my ears. (I rounded up most of my writing on the film right at this link.) 

• Funny enough the end of 2018 belongs to Luca too, as the only music haunting my ear buds this Autumn has been Thom Yorke's by turns gorgeous, terrifying score for Suspiria. I'm thankful for that whole unholy beast of a film, bursting with ideas and emotions and Tildas...

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Lynn Gives Thanks

Team Experience members were invited to give thanks this week so you'll be hearing from a few of us. Here's Lynn Lee..

In many ways, 2018 – like the two preceding years, only even more so – has felt like a nauseating carnival ride that I, for one, would like to stop and get off.  But the one welcome constant was always having something genuinely engaging to watch and, in the best cases, elevate my feelings on the state of the world and humanity. 

In that spirit, here are some of the many things I’m thankful for:

• The electrifying last 15 minutes of Nanette, wherein Hannah Gadsby turned stand-up comedy into something else altogether – and left our collective jaw on the floor.

• Daveed Diggs – so good in Hamilton, even better in the riveting and underrated Blindspotting.

• The shimmer in Natalie Portman’s and Oscar Isaac’s eyes at the end of Annihilation, one of the most bonkers and most unexpectedly rewarding films of 2018...

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West Side Story, Pt 3: Tonight Won't Be Just Any Night

Occassionally Team Experience passes a movie around amongst the team for a retrospective. This month's installment is West Side Story (1961), one of the most popular films of all time and winner of 10 Oscars.

Part One - by Lynn Lee
Part Two -by Eric Blume

Part 3 by Nathaniel R

Growing up I watched West Side Story as often as I could. It was surely my most formative film though as a kid I didn't really know the hows and whys of movies, only how they made me feel. Some movies were good for laughing, others for crying, and a lot of them just to get caught up in adventures and stories. West Side Story was, no, IS, all the things a movie could be in one massive tuneful package. I devoured it every chance I got as a kid. 

When Eric left us in Part Two Maria and Tony had just symbolically wed, lit by heavenly golden light, as they finished singing "One Hand, One Heart". A soft, reverent hush fell over the scene as the lovers kissed and the music faded. Then an abrupt cut to:

01:34:59  This impossibly bold red sky. It's a hard image with a blaring aggressive music cue signalling a major shift within the movie.  From here on out: tragedy. The juxtaposition of the wedding with this image, remains to this day, one of the most violent cuts I've ever seen in a movie. Red is the only choice for it. The camera then swoops down to street level as the Jets begin to sing "Tonight"...

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West Side Story, Pt 2: I Feel Pretty in America

 Team Experience is passing West Side Story around in honor of Leonard Bernstein's Centennial

In part one Lynn brought us through the first 50 spectacular minutes of West Side Story, tossing the baton to me exactly at one of the film’s highlights, "America" where Anita (Oscar-winning Rita Moreno) and Bernardo (Oscar-winning George Chakiris have begun to argue about their lives and opportunities as immigrants... 

Part 2 by Eric Blume

50:32 The first thing you should note about the transition from the first refrain to the full number is a lovely piece of blocking where everyone rearranges themselves for a slightly different tableau, while the camera remains blessedly static. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, co-directing, had great filmmakers instincts for when to keep something “theatrical” (in this case, proscenium with a change in blocking) and when to do something “cinematic” (e.g., cutting, which they do throughout this number mostly to highlight individual performance lines).

Quite simply, there are few dance numbers in cinema equal to “America”...

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