with six you get linkroll

• Anna Biller would like you to stop calling old movies "feminist" because that has specific meaning. It does not just mean 'has great female characters' which many old movies do
• Deadline Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) is working on a biopic about the early life of Rosa Parks
• AV Club Ian McKellen: Playing the Part, is a new documentary out later this year. Apparently it made a festival appearance last year and is planning a unique release of some kind. 
• Vulture an interview with the legendary Bernadette Peters. She sounds like a tough woman to interview but somehow her constant reticence about the question and obvious withholding sounds charming rather than nightmarish
• Pride Sasha Lane (American Honey) comes out as gay
• Show-Score I wrote this piece (experimenting with the human interest profile format) about two women who travelled together inspired by the Broadway musical Come From Away. Hope you like.

Coco Rules Over the Annie Awards

by Nathaniel R

In one of the least shocking events of this awards season, Disney/Pixar's Coco swept the Annie Awards this weekend, winning in every category in which it was nominated. 2017 was widely seen as an underwhelming year for animated features but we should face facts: Coco would have been a strong contender for Oscar gold in many other years, too.

The complete list of winners (Coco wasn't eligible in every category) and a few more comments after the jump...

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The Furniture: Into the Marshes with Ida Lupino and Elsa Lanchester

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

This week marks 100 years since the birth of pioneering director and actress Ida Lupino. Twitter has been full of tributes to her work, including the eight feature films she directed. We've discussed a few of her films here before as well. For my part, I highly recommend her two episodes of The Twilight Zone.

However, I’m going to look at a movie from before she made the leap to directing, the only one in her filmography to receive a Best Art Direction nomination. 1941’s Ladies in Retirement is both a thriller and a play adaptation, a genre we don’t see too often anymore. But in that era it was fairly common, from comedies like Arsenic and Old Lace to the more explicitly malevolent Night Must Fall and Gaslight.

The setting of Ladies in Retirement, according to Reginald Denham and Edward Percy’s original play, is the “Living Room of an Old House on the Marshes of the Thames Estuary Some Ten Miles to the East of Gravesend, 1885.”

Of course, this being 1941, a location shoot in Kent would have been impossible even if the studio had wanted it. Instead, the marshes were built into a sound stage. The team was so proud of their ersatz swamp that they even set the opening credits in the muddy water!

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Beauty vs Beast: Sibling Rivalry

Jason from MNPP here wishing us all the happiest Lovely Laura Linney Day! Today Linney is celebrating her 54th birthday, which means we're celebrating as well because she's a national treasure that one. But that happiness and celebration might not last long, I ruin everything, because I'm about to force a horrible choice on you with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" contest and ask you to consider choosing between the siblings of Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 sibling masterpiece You Can Count On Me -- Linney's hometown mama and boss-schtupper Sammy versus Mark Ruffalo's home-crashing money-grubbing seatbealt-wearing Terry. Vote and then tell us why you voted how you voted down below in the comments!

surveys

PREVIOUSLY Last week's Best Actor contest handed Timothee Chalamet a win as sound (to the tune of 87% of the vote!) as his trounced competitor Gary Oldman's eventual win at the Oscars next month is assured, so let's just enjoy us getting it right anyway. Said hepwa (and this is a fine list that I'd love to hear if anybody has any of their own to add to this list, too):

"There are five great young male performances in the past forty years, in chronological order: Dennis Christopher in "Breaking Away", Michael O'Keefe in "The Great Santini", Timothy Hutton in "Ordinary People", River Phoenix in "Running On Empty" and now Timothee Chalamet in "Call Me by Your Name"."

Box Office: Jumanji and Showman Won't Quit

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (Feb 2nd-4th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
1. Jumanji $11 (cum. $352.6)	1. Padmaavat $2.5 on 354 screens (cum. $9.0)
2. Maze Runner 3 $10.2 (cum. $39.7	2. 🔺 Bilal: A New Kind of Hero  $278k on 300 screens NEW
3. 🔺 Winchester $9.2  NEW	3. 🔺 The Insult $118k on 36 screens (cum. $237k)
4. The Greatest Showman $7.8 (cum. $137.4) REVIEW | ANOTHER HIT MUSICAL	4. 🔺  A Fantastic Woman $70k on 5 screens NEW CAPSULE | REVIEW
5. Hostiles $5.5 (cum. $21.2)	5.Mary and the Witches Flower $57k on 30 screens (cum. $1.8)

Jumanji and The Greatest Showman continue to have incredible staying power in their 7th weeks, the former regaining its #1 berth and Showman holding tight at four...

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