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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Saturday, February 8, 2020 at 11:44AM Hello beloved readers and fellow cinephiles. Sorry for this ultra-last-minute prediction post (which is cross-posted at Towleroad) but let it serve a dual purpose. It's to be read now and/or laughed at after the Oscars once I've shown that my crystal ball is totally defective.
If you've been living under a rock the Best Picture field looks like so...
Monday, February 3, 2020 at 6:18PM 
BAFTA came and went with the almost all of the Oscar frontrunners crowned. The only real surprise was Parasite taking Best Original Screenplay rather than a Tarantino victory though that shouldn't be a surprise given the Korean hits ingenious construction and terrific dialogue. After the jump the winners list in some speeches...
1917, BAFTA, Joaquin Phoenix, Joker, Margot Robbie, Parasite Sunday, February 2, 2020 at 5:09PM 
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…
Sunday, February 2, 2020 at 9:00AM 
The trend of rereleasing critical darlings in black and white is apparently here to stay. After George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and James Mangold’s Logan, it’s time for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to be revisited in sharp monochrome. The artistic value of such exercises is dubious, but they do offer a chance to reflect upon a film’s visual idiom and aesthetic construction. After all, do these works gain something by being in color? Is that an intrinsic part of their form or simply a consequence of convention? Would they be better, at least better looking, in black and white?
Those answers will have to remain unanswered, but as a fun exercise here are some from this year’s Best Picture nominees. They’ve been drained of color for your pleasure…
Friday, January 24, 2020 at 8:00PM 
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...
