The Manipulative Monarch of "Farewell, My Queen"

We're celebrating Marie Antoinette for a few more days this week. Here's abstew - Editor

The legendary figure of Marie Antoinette has been the subject of gossip and infamy for over 200 years now. Although most scholars agree that all we may think we know about the excessive queen is mostly a misunderstanding. Even the most well-known phrase attributed to her, "Let them eat cake!", has been debunked as never actually been spoken by her. Even in her own time, there were pamphlets spread around France accusing her of infidelities with both men and women. At her trial, she was accused of staging orgies at the Palace of Versailles and even committing incest with her own son. Playing off of these rumors, French director Benoît Jacquot's 2012 film about Marie Antoinette, Farewell, My Queen, based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, invents a lesbian relationship between the Queen and a duchess at court...

Click to read more ...

The Many Genres of "Jane the Virgin"

Please welcome new contributor Jorge Molina to the team. Here's his take on "Jane the Virgin," returning to TV tonight, two seasons in...

Jane the Virgin returns tonight on the CW for season 3Jane the Virgin has always been a hard show to describe. Even its one-line, high concept premise takes a couple of reads to fully grasp: “A young Catholic Latina virgin gets accidentally artificially inseminated. Hilarity ensues.” 

Two seasons in and the show hasn’t gotten any less complex. Each episode adds more layers on plot, character, and style: someone will get pregnant or thrown down the stairs; there will be flashbacks, and murders, and small meaningful moments; and it will be as bombastic as it will be intimate. Sometimes in a matter of scenes.

Jane the Virgin is the rare case of a show that’s created entirely on pastiche, and yet has an unmistakable originality and essence that’s fully its own.

It embodies many genres, and weaves them all together in one single, coherent, Latin-loving storyline.  Five genres as example after the jump...

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: The Shrieking Color Scheme of Ghostbusters

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber on Ghostbusters, just out on DVD and Blu-Ray

Paul Feig movies tend to be about comic excess. There’s always a nearly too much humor jammed in, not infrequently with the side effect of a bloated running time. To be fair, there would be more time for Melissa McCarthy and Leslie Jones to adlib about dancing if Ghostbusters weren’t also required to have a number of standard narrative beats, but that’s Hollywood.

The point is that Ghostbusters, like Spy, displays a remarkable dedication to extravagant nonsense. Its excessive approach, pushing every joke as far as it can go, is also true of its design. Production designer Jefferson Sage, Oscar-winning set decorator Leslie A. Pope (Seabiscuit) and the rest of the design team provide a a unifying absurdity in both color and texture that keeps Ghostbusters on a collision course with comedy...

Click to read more ...

Actressexual Alert: Big Little Lies Trailer Drops

Manuel here starting our Monday with the best of news. "Who knows what lies there beneath the surface?" Reese Witherspoon asks us in the first trailer for her latest collaboration with her Wild director, Jean-Marc Vallée. Yes we finally get our first look at Big Little Lies, the HBO miniseries based on Liane Moriarty's best-selling novel (which I devoured in one day; it is that addictive and appropriately sudsy). 

The project is a smorgasbord for us actressexuals with Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, and Shailene Woodley joining Reese in this suburban mommy thriller. As the trailer suggests, we'll be introduced to an idyllic seaside suburban enclave where certain revelations (it's best not to spoil, and thankfully the teaser doesn't really) send shockwaves throughout the community, leading to a violent, murderous end. It'll be a fine tonal balancing act but the show, written by David E. Kelley looks like it might just pull it off...

Click to read more ...

On a Clear Day You Can See Anniversaries Forever

On this day in showbiz history...

1886 Spring Byington is born in Colorado Springs. Goes on to supporting actress glory in Hollywood including Marmee in Little Women (1933, her feature debut) and an Oscar nomination as the eccentric hobbyist mom in You Can't Take It With You (1938). Curiously her screen daughter in that best picture winner Jean Arthur, an even bigger star, shares her same birthday (for the year of 1900)
1888 Thomas Edison files a patent for the Optical Phonograph (an early step in creating the cinema)
1903 Author and screenwriter Nathanael West is born in NYC. Movies adapted from his work include Lonelyhearts (1958) and The Day of the Locust (1975)
1915 One of the world's most celebrated playwrights, Arthur Miller, is born. His classics include Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View From the Bridge. After marrying movie star Marilyn Monroe, he wrote The Misfits (1961) for her which would eerily (considering its elegiac tone) be the last film for both her and co-star Clark Gable and one of the very last for Montgomery Clift who was born on this same day in 1920...

Click to read more ...