Stage Door: "Beetlejuice" and "Pretty Woman"

by Dancin' Dan

Adapting a non-musical film to a stage musical is always a dicey proposition. Leave the story exactly as is and just add songs, and you risk the show feeling rote and uninteresting. Change the story so that it fits a musical structure better, and you may alienate fans of the source material. This Broadway season has practically been a study in how to adapt a film to a musical. We’ve already talked about Tootsie, but this season saw three other screen-to-stage adaptations of varying levels of quality: Beetlejuice, King Kong, and Pretty Woman: The Musical. Each has proven divisive in varying ways, and they had much different degrees of success with the Tony nominations. I’ve recently seen two of them, and what one lacks, the other has in spades...

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Aladdin Pt 1: The 'street rat' and the princess with an edge

Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma & Louise, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A League of Their Own, and Rosemary's Baby in the past.  -Editor

Part 1 by Ben Miller

Welcome to Team Film Experience's Aladdin Retrospective.  This film was a big part of my childhood and I’m proud to join in on the fun to revisit it with you before the live-action remake hits.  Disney in the 1990s might have been the animated studio's peak.  They were coming off the surprise success of The Little Mermaid in 1989 follwed by the monster hit and then-historic Best Picture nominee of Beauty and the Beast in 1991.  The massive success of Aladdin the very next year felt like a commercial/critical apex (at least until The Lion King arrived two years later).

0:00:26 – Alan Menken probably does not get enough credit for the score he put together.  Yes, he won an Oscar for it, but it doesn’t get put into the conversation enough for GREAT animated scores.

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Cannes: Female directors making waves...

by Nathaniel R

Leyna Bloom at Cannes

Cannes buzz never ends. So after the jump let's talk about how a handful of new films directed by women have been received including but not limited to Un Certain Regard titles like the trans drama Port Authority, and two very buzz competition titles (Atlantique and Portrait of a Lady on Fire) that sound like Palme contenders. Exciting times ahead...

COMPETITION TITLES

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Showbiz History: The Best Cannes Year? The Birth of Cher!

Here are 10 things worth celebrating on this day in showbiz history, May 20th.

Federico Fellini and Jeanne Moreau were both winners at the 1960 Cannes festival but they look none too happy about it!

1891 Thomas Edison's prototype kinetoscope gets its first public display (to the National Federation of Women's Club). Could any of them have imagined the colossal artform that would spring forth in those early days?

1960 The 13th annual Cannes Film Festival wraps up with Federico Fellini's masterpiece (well, one of them at any rate) La Dolce Vita taking the Palme d'Or. The competition lineup was insanely rich...

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Beauty vs Beast: Still I Think He's Rather Tasty

Jason Adams from MNPP, fully ready to admit that if you get me drunk enough and put me in front of a karaoke microphone I could sing to you any one of the songs from 1992's Aladdin without having to look at the words on the screen once. I don't know if that's what Disney had in mind but it is what it is and it is how I spent a hefty amount of my time, when I should have been studying, in college. I might not remember anything from that Geology class I was forced to take at nine in the morning but get outta the way when "A Whole New World" comes on. Anyway with Guy Ritchie's live-action version out this Friday, and a retrospective from Team Experience beginning tonight, what better time to "Beauty vs Beast" the original -- I'm shocked we haven't done this before honestly, since Aladdin's got one of Disney's greatest villains...

survey services

PREVIOUSLY A week ago we wished Sofia Coppola a happy birthday by looking back upon her last film Beguiled, and today we're minded what a fool's errand it is for us to ever face anybody off with Nicole Kidman -- even Colin Farrell's hotness couldn't muster up more than 29% against the queen Kidman. Said Ben:

"Miss Farnsworth is the only one who thinks primarily with her head instead of her heart. That's why the only logical thing to do was to cut off his leg, then kill him. Makes sense to me!"