Beauty vs Beast: Woods, Men

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- I usually try to choose older movies for this series because it's more likely y'all have seen them and have an opinion. That is unless we're talking about great big cultural juggernauts - those are usually safe. It Comes at Night isn't an old movie, and it wasn't so much a cultural juggernaut either, but here we are anyway. The film had a stellar ad campaign (thanks to A24, the king of stellar ad campaigns these days) so it did get some chatter at the time of its release, but it ultimately only made just under 20 million bucks. This is no Avatar.

And yet here on the eve of its release on blu-ray tomorrow I still want to highlight the movie, and I have faith that a good portion of the TFE audience, who already knew Trey Edward Shults' amazing Krisha, was the audience that sought the movie out. For good (I loved it) or for ill (I know a lot of people felt cheated by the ad campaign which baited and switched a supernatural horror film for a tense chamber piece). And you'll maybe have an opinion on who was in the right - Joel Edgerton's homeowner Paul or Christopher Abbott's encroacher Will.

PREVIOUSLY For no reason in particular we hit up Halle Berry's Catwoman for last week's contest but it was her nemesis, the skin-care supervillain played by Sharon Stone, who slinked away with the 65% win - said Eder Arcas:

"... the WINNER here gotta be SHARON STONE, the woman delivers camp like no one else , she`s elegant and graceful cool, because, well, she's Sharon Stone. You always get the feeling she's just about ready to snap a full on crazy - but that kinda IS what is interesting about Sharon Stone. Sort of a female Jack Nicholson, but hotter in heels and a skirt."

TIFF: The Greek Theatre of "Sacred Deer"

by Chris Feil

Is it better to have good friends or a large number of friends? It’s a question asked casually in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer that hosts some of its more loaded themes: social connection, the difference between acquiring and appreciating, the futile pursuit of a nuclear unit. As discussed between odd teenager Martin and adult Steven, played by Barry Keoghan and Colin Farrell, it carries even more terrifying subtext for their unsettling relationship.

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The Furniture: Desigining Slapstick with Herbet Lom and Inspector Clouseau

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

Before we get started, let’s all share a brief moment of resentment that Judy Becker didn’t win a production design Emmy last night for Feud. Boo.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled episode of The Furniture. Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru, the character actor otherwise known as Herbert Lom. He fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 for Britain, where he would have a long career in both film and television. He appeared in three Best Production Design nominees: El Cid, Spartacus, and Gambit. I will be writing about none of them.

Instead, here’s some love for the design of the films for which he is remembered most widely. Lom played Police Commissioner Charles Dreyfus, the long-suffering boss of Inspector Clouseau, in seven Pink Panther films. The first of these, A Shot in the Dark, is probably the best of the lot. It also has some charmingly ridiculous prop comedy and an array of colorfully absurd sets.

Here, for example, is the first example of a gag that runs throughout the series...

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'The Shape of Water' wins Venice

 by Murtada

On Saturday night President Annette Bening and her jury, announced their choices at the Venice Film Festival. Guillermo Del Toro’s romantic fantasy The Shape of Water rode its wave of ecstatic reviews all the way to winning the biggest prize, The Golden Lion. More and a complete list of winners after the jump...

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The Greatest Party Photo of Our Time

Dame Helen, Divine Emma, Irresistible KST, and Queen Kidman at TIFF 2017.

P.S. I would like to thank whichever publicist did not invite me to this party thereby saving me from spontaneous combustion; I will live to see another movie.