The Furniture: Breaking House in Colossal

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

Colossal is a movie built upon one very, very big metaphor. Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) are highly destructive people, each at a different stage of addiction and personal crisis. They also have kaiju-sized avatars that tromp across Seoul every time they drunkenly stumble through a playground at 8:05am, the result of a bizarre electro-magical accident. It’s quite the premise.

But it works because director Nacho Vigalondo doesn’t rely exclusively on CGI monsters to get his point across. After all, they are only exaggerated versions of Gloria and Oscar, stomping through their lives. It matters not whether their feet land on a playground or through the first floor of an office building.

  

Or, as the case may be, their homes...

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Review: The Glass Castle

This article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

‘This would be easier to take on the page.’

That thought kept striking me from odd angles all during the new movie THE GLASS CASTLE  now playing nationwide. In 2005 the writer Jeanette Walls turned the rags of her childhood into adult riches with her memoir “The Glass Castle.”  The book won several awards and sold millions of copies. It was translated into dozens of languages. The big screen, however, has a tricky vocabulary and grammar all its own.

The Glass Castle flashes back-and-forth between adult Jeanette Walls (Brie Larson), a gossip columnist ashamed of her oft-homeless parents (Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts), and her memories of her difficult nomadic childhood...

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Beauty vs Beast: Murder on the Orientation Express

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" entertainment - I don't know if you've noticed by now that I will take any opportunity to talk about Alfred Hitchcock, but I will take any opportunity to talk about Alfred Hitchcock, and his birthday (which was yesterday) offers one of the best. Thankfully we've still plenty of choices - not many directors adored their villains like Hitch did, and so this series is a perfect fit.

And here's a good one! 1951's Strangers on a Train offers up one of Hitch's greatest bad guys in Bruno Antony, murder theorist and gay icon, played with giddy panache by Robert Walker. And Farley Granger's no slouch as the clearly-enticed-no-matter-how-hard-he-pretends-otherwise tennis-pro Guy Haines.

PREVIOUSLY It's one of her greatest roles so I'm not surprised that Joan Crawford stampeded her way to a win with last week's Johnny Guitar contest - she outgunned Mercedes McCambridge with 73% of your vote. Said Claran:

"This overlookes gem is one o JC's best. Much as I enjoy McCambridge all out evilness n Hayden's macho smotherness, it is Joan's icy confidence n eletricfying performance that keeps this western together n makes it a delicious camp. Afterall, it IS a Miss Crawford's pic n dun cha forget it!!"

would you rather...?

And now for a silly celeb-filled distraction from the awful real world (I threw my back out yesterday somehow and can't be with the marches against hate and on Trump Tower which is my real answer to what I'd rather be doing. But let's play anyway.

Would you rather...

• shower with Salma Hayek?
• night shoot with Rachel Bloom and Vincent Rodriguez?
• cockpit train with Mahershala?
• call Reese on her shell phone?
• share a moment with Luke Evans and his friend Lakshmi?
• play with Josh Brolin's snake?
• have some ice cream with Tony Shalhoub?

Pictures to help you decide after the jump.

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Resist