Murtada Gives Thanks

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

It’s that time again when we tell you lovely readers of The Film experience what we’ve appreciated from all the stuff we watched in the past year. But first things first, I'm thankful for Nathaniel and The Film Experience. For the readers and those who engage in the comments, for this lovely oasis of a community.

And now for the movies, and the people behind them, who made me whoop with joy, cry silently in my seat and sometimes shake my head in amazement and awe.

• YouTube making "The Shallow" always available just a click away so I can watch as many times as I want and not just 200 like Andrew Dice Clay. Because just listening is not enough, I want to see Gaga and Bradley!

• The gut punch to the heart that Carey Mulligan gave me this year. On stage in Girls and Boys. On screen in Wildlife...

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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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Jorge Gives Thanks

by Jorge Molina

2017. What a year it's been, huh? Not only does the world seem to be changing / falling apart at every level, in general, it also has not been a particularly easy year for me on a personal level. I don't want to get too personal (that's for the actress that wins an Oscar for playing me to do in her monologue), but it involved lots of delayed visa paperwork, a forced exile to my hometown in Mexico, and a three-to four week delay in movie release dates.

But, throughout it all, I could always count on entertainment to pick me up and get me going. It was (as it always has been) my medicine, my way to fight back, and my chosen method of escapism. So this year, I am thankful for these little pieces of pop culture that made it all better:

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Blueprints: "August: Osage County"

Happy Thanksgiving! In these days of family forcefully gathering around for a meal, Jorge takes a look into “August: Osage County” to remind you that your relatives perhaps aren’t so bad after all.

 

Not unlike Thanksgiving itself, Tracy Lett’s August: Osage County is about a broken family that is bound to be around each other as past secrets, tensions and grievances slowly rise up to the surface.

The emotional climax of both the 2008 Tony-winning play and its subsequent 2013 Oscar-nominated adaptation is an almost 20-minute dinner sequence after the funeral that brought them all together. Matriarch Violet Weston (Meryl Streep) asserts her toxic matriarchal power over her family. And slowly but surely, tensions escalate to the point of explosion...

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