Twenty long years ago, popular comedian Adam Sandler was in serious awards conversation for the first time for his dramatic collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love. Three years ago, a handful of prominent citations and an Independent Spirit Award for Uncut Gems looked like it might finally help him breakthrough to a first Oscar nomination (it did not). Now, Sandler is somewhat unexpectedly making an awards play (sports reference?) again thanks to a surprise SAG nomination for his basketball drama Hustle, which is streaming on Netflix.
Sandler stars as Stanley Sugerman, a scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who becomes tired of missing his daughter’s birthdays each year while he’s traveling throughout Europe or somewhere else in search of the next great talent...
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...
• /Film Michelle Yeoh may be headlining a Star Trek spin-offseries • Towleroad Greg Berlanti (Love Simon) plans to direct a Rock Hudson biopic • Variety This is so cool. The animation studio Aardman (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, etcetera) is transferring its ownership to its employees. Peter Lord will stay on as creative director
• MNPP Raúl Castillo joins the already amazing cast of Rian Johnson's Knives Out • Awards Daily Adam McKay promoting Vice says something he might regret about the difference between Cheney and Trump • Playbill Did you hear they're releasing another album for The Greatest Showman? This one is all covers. Kelly Clarkson is doing "Never Enough" • Kinja great deal if you're a Potter person. All 8 Harry Potter films on bluray for just $40 • Cinema Eye Honors, which honors documentary films (we guess it's the week for that?), release their nominations for the year with Bing Liu's Minding the Gap leading with 7 nominations and Bisbee '17, Hale County This Morning This Evening and Shirkers each receiving 5. All are eligible for the Oscars this year, too. • Boy Culture what Matt said about this odd quote from Michael C Hall on his sexuality • The Guardian Controversy! German Playboy has published an interview with Ennio Morricone in which he trashes Quentin Tarantino. Now Morricone says he never gave that interview and will take legal action.
R.I.P. • Variety Stan Lee, Marvel's figurehead and comic book legend, has died at 95. One assumes we have four final Stan Lee cameos coming up, though. He gets a bit in Into the Spider-Verse (yes, I've seen it but we're not allowed to talk about it yet). And surely he'll be in Captain Marvel, Infinity War Part 2, and Spider-Man: Far From Home, since they're all in post production already. • The Guardian Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001 has died at 90.
Exit Video Here's another cover from The Greatest Showman Reimagined from P!nk and her daughter Willow Sage Hart
P.S. Alarming! Grammy winner Beck tweeted out that he was recording a score for Roma. Naturally this is upsetting because the movie has screened for months and actually has no score. The soundscape is so unique and immersive and tons of critics have praised the movie for this craftsmanship exactly. Why would they change it now after all the praise? I'm currently having nightmares of what happened to A Star is Born (1954) and The New World (2005) when the studio kept meddling after screenings with something that was already brilliant and perfect to the point where some people never could see the original version and in the case of A Star is Born it was lost for all time.
We the Animals has been compared to Moonlight (2016), The Tree of Life (2011) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). While the comparison is reductive it provides a shorthand for describing this film. It’s a story of three young brothers - one of whom is queer - and their relationships with each other and with their unpredictable parents. There are elements of magical realism in a story grounded in the economic desperation of a working class family in upstate New York.
Raul Castillo (HBO’s Looking) and Sheila Vand (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) give perceptive performances as the adults. However it is newcomer Evan Rosado, playing the central character of Jonah, who’ll take your breath away. More sensitive and conscious than his older siblings, Jonah increasingly embraces an imagined world in the secret journals in which writes and sketches. It is an assured narrative debut from documentary filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar. We loved the film when it played Tribeca last spring. We had the chance to speak to Zagar recently in New York.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Murtada Elfadl: You've said that you read the book in one sitting while still at a bookshop, before even buying it. What popped in the book for you and made you want to make it into a film?
Jeremiah Zagar: Literally the first page of the book is so visceral, rhythmic and immersive that I couldn’t stop reading it. Beyond that it felt like something I knew how to visualize. I read a lot of books but very few where I feel that I know how to make them into a movie. Somehow I felt this connection to the material that wasn’t only emotional, it was technical almost. I didn't want to change it at all, I just wanted to figure out how to put it on screen. I could see it, I could hear it, I could feel it in my head before it happened...
It’s hard to describe what We the Animals is about. It’s easier to tell you how I felt after seeing it. It’s akin to a recalling a hazy memory, one that you don’t quite recall but sharply and clearly remember how it made you feel. I felt elated, moved, joyful, sad and knowing I saw a fantastic film that I won’t soon forget.
We the Animals is a coming of age tale about three brothers. It is also about the summer (or year or years --time is an unclear element) that changed one boy’s life and his relationships with his two older brothers and their parents forever. The story flirts with magical realism while staying grounded in the economic desperation of industrial upstate New York. It’s a queer story about the secrets we hold so close that they are bound to either destroy us or set us free...
Wednesday, January 18, 2023 at 2:00PM 
