Review: Disney's recreation of "Beauty and the Beast"

This review was previously published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Tale as old as time
True as it can be

You wouldn’t think that ‘tales as old as time’ would need so much retelling but they do. Certain properties never go away or are open to constant reinterpretation like the Shakespeare oeuvre or, well, fairy tales. A cursory bit of research reveals that there have been at least a dozen feature films or TV series from various countries based on Beauty and the Beast tale.

If you have never existed before today, here’s what you need to know: A cruel prince is cursed and transformed into a beast. If the Beast doesn’t learn to love and be loved in return by the time the last petal on a magic rose falls, the curse will become permanent. Enter a beautiful girl who could be the one to break the spell...

Click to read more ...

On This Day: Glenn Close Born, Ben Kingsley Knighted, Sean Connery Bonded

Programming Note: Apologies that we're off schedule on episodes of Pfandom and Three Fittings. Performance anxiety (aka writer's block) at Film Experience HQ. While Nathaniel course corrects...

On this day in showbiz history...
Here are a few cinematic things to think about today March 19th. Which will you feel most festive about?

1859 Charles Gounod's Opera Faust premieres in Paris. There are multiple Faust operas just as there are multiple film versions of the 
1897 Betty Compson (The Barker, 1928), the only Best Actress nominee born in Beaver, Utah (I mean, she'd have to be, right?) enters the world. 
1915 Happy 102nd birthday today to 40s star Patricia Morrison (Dressed to Kill, Song of the Thin Man). Yes, she's still alive!
1947 Glenn Close is born in Connecticutt. 70 years later she still hasn't won her Oscar! She's back on Broadway in Sunset Blvd at the moment...

Click to read more ...

Linkshift

Leonardo Nam photographed by Ricky Middlesworth for Los Angeles Confidential

Golden Globes interview Westworld's fab Leonardo Nam
MTV Teo Bugbee on the texting in Personal Shopper
Inverse interesting interview with composer Hans Zimmer who is swearing off superhero movies. Sounds like he had a bad time on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Playbill celebrates Sutton Foster with a gallery of all of her stage work
Variety random selection of drunk scenes in honor of your St Patricks Day hangover
/Film Alicia Vikander to headline Ben Wheatley's Freakshift. Is the director about to break out with Free Fire?
The Guardian Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has 26 (!!!) films in development
People Surprise! Film star Amanda Seyfried and stage and tv screen star Thomas Sadoski eloped! She'll be giving birth any day now, being 8+ months pregnant
Boy Culture Paris Jackson is looking more like Madonna than Michael Jackson 
The Guardian The great Tony Kushner on T****'s proposed cuts to the Arts
This is Not Porn Jim Carrey on the set of The Mask. Just because
MNPP drools on Justin Theroux (it's only right) and shares the season 3 Leftovers trailer 
Tracking Board on how the design aspects of Beauty & the Beast (2017) lack a cohesive vision
Variety Weinstein Co's Oscar prospects this year include the biblical drama Mary Magdalene (Nov 24th) and the historical Thomas Edison drama The Current War (Dec 22) starring Benedict Cumberbatch

Exit Video
In honor of Sutton Foster's birthday, a great moment from Bunheads, a show we greatly miss (but at least we have Younger in its place for Sutton fixes) 

Tweetweek: Dull Iron Fist, Immortal Keanu Reeves, Gay LeFou

MARVEL NETFLIX SHOWS RANKED:
1. JESSICA JONES
2. Eh I guess the others are sort of watchable?.
3. Fireplace For Your Home
4. Iron Fist

— Chris Evangelista (@cevangelista413) March 17, 2017

 So, people weren't kidding about Iron Fist. It is T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E. The pilot never would have been picked up in a normal TV world. More amusing tweets of the week after the jump covering a multitude of topics including but not limited to: Big Little Lies, Tom Lenk's hawt red carpet recreations (I can't believe we haven't yet featured these) and The Matrix Rebooting...

Click to read more ...

Stage Door: Sally Field in The Glass Menagerie

by Dancin' Dan

This is not your parents' Glass Menagerie.

It's not uncommon for theatrical "reinventions" to take place nowadays. Ivo van Howe has made it into a cottage industry of sorts, creating an intimate, visceral A View From the Bridge and a raw, elemental The Crucible in recent years. Sam Gold is of the same cloth. He made his name with an audacious revival of Look Back in Anger at the Roudabout in 2012, won the Tony in 2015 for his sensitive in-the-round staging of the musical Fun Home, and most recently directed a searing Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig off Broadway at the New York Theater Workshop.

But all those pieces benefit from a stripped back, in-some-cases radical rethinking. Tennessee Williams's memory play is a much more delicate thing, announcing as narrator Tom Wingfield does right at the start that this is a subjective work of art, a piece of memory that may or may not represent what actually happened. Productions of it generally take after the play's quietest character, the "crippled" Laura - they are generally fragile, gossamer things, as light and airy as a thought or memory hanging in the air in front of us...

Click to read more ...