Beauty vs Beast: The Princesses of Borovnia
Monday, October 31, 2016 at 2:42PM 
Jason from MNPP here -- with most holidays I think it would suck to share a birthday - who wants their birthday on Thanksgiving? Or even worse, Christmas? Everyone else getting presents on your day? What a nightmare. But Halloween is the exception - I would love my birthday to be on Halloween. Costume parties every year! A cake shaped like Frankenstein's head! Or even better - a cake shaped like the Bride of Frankenstein's head! (Because more cake.)
And you wanna know who I bet has the best Halloween Birthday Parties? Peter Jackson, that's who. I bet he dresses up like the STD-riddled rabbit from Meet the Feebles or like the Mouth of Sauron every year. Damn you, Peter Jackson.
Oh well - we'll go ahead and wish him a happy day today with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" anyway, and since we're going to be seeing his 1994 masterpiece Heavenly Creatures on a big screen (with Film Experience fave Melanie Lynskey in person!) in just a couple of days thanks to the brand new Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, we'll go with a show-down between teen dreamers Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline (Lynskey). Good luck choosing with this Sophie's Choice, folks...
Instead of doing the usual "Previously On..." here (Eli won last week's Let the Right One In contest though) I want to keep aboard the Melanie Lynskey Express for a minute since we're here and she's wonderful and we all love her so - she's got a new movie coming out this weekend! It's called Rainbow Time and it stars Lynskey as a woman pulled into the weird relationship between two brothers (played by Timm Sharp and Linus Phillips) and the movie's really fine and funny and I highly recommend it. Watch the trailer now:
Reader Comments (5)
I love the movies juxtaposition of happiness with delirious
It's a shame what happened to Peter Jackson, if, unfortunately, not unexpected. It's very similar to what happened to Sam Raimi or Tim Burton as filmmakers. (Speaking of Burton: If that Beetlejuice sequel happens, I think Keaton is the only actor I MIGHT want back, and that's because my dream Beetlejuice sequel isn't Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian or anything dumb like that that might happen, but just a simple bridge between the movie and the cartoon. Unless, of course, that dumb idea is how they "sell" the bridging, but I think there's enough just in "how do you get from the end of Beetlejuice the movie" (where Beetlejuice has just tried to force Lydia into Green Card marriage, basically), "to the start of Beetlejuice the cartoon" (where they're best friends now, somehow) that you don't need that level of dumb "hook." What you do NEED for that now is to divorce yourself from Winona, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, specifically, inhabiting those roles again. Keaton could go either way, though. (Even in the original movie, he looked ambiguously 60 or so anyway, so if you were still attached to Keaton at least, that just means a little less waiting in the makeup chair).
I think of Melanie Lynskey the way I think of Viola Davis.
I'm always so happy when she appears in a movie. She's the heart of the movie, and for a minute there, everything is so real and true.
Often Viola and Melanie's parts are the only bit of the movies they are in that I remember.
i love this movie with all my heart (the best of its year if you ask me) and this is an awful thing to be expected to answer! Cruel, Jason, cruel.
adri- that's beautiful
mark - totally! they're ptitched in such eerily similar ways, like a knife-edge separates happiness from madness
So true,everything and everyones walking a fine line.