The Link Where It Happens

Link love time.

• Vulture Michelle Pfeiffer's ten essential roles
• Prizeo Lin-Manuel Miranda offers up the chance to win VIP tickets and a meet and greet at the opening night of Hamilton in Los Angeles with a donation to "Immigrants Get the Job Done Coalition". (And FYI two former Tony nominees Joshua Henry as Aaron Burr and Rory O'Malley as King George are in the company) 
• Vanity Fair on how difficult it is to get a gay film made in today's Hollywood. The headline to this is a bit misleading since it's like "in a post-Moonlight world" but let's be reasonable. Moonlight only made its dent a handful of months back. So most of the films cited didn't have Moonlight to point to when seeking financing

• THR More dirt on what happened behind the scenes on the troubled Han Solo movie
• Nerdist Why Megara is the MVP of Disney's Hercules
• Playbill The glorious Audra McDonald finally makes her West End debut, no big deal after 6 Tony Awards, reprising her Tony winning / Emmy nominated  Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill Billie Holiday role
• Buzzfeed the hardest game of 'would you rather' with hot cartoon dudes. I don't know. Most of these were easy for me but your mileage may vary.
• Variety offers up a franchise report card on the various series that are taking up so much of Hollywood's time and capital. But shouldn't Bond and Tarzan have been included in this roundup?
• Decider lists the '20 best foreign films on Netflix'... though the list would have been more exciting had they editorialized rather than just pulling the RT scores to determine which 20 to feature
• MNPP pic of the day with Edgar Wright at a Baby Driver screening

Exit Video
Check out this glorious montage of NYC (hat tip to Gothamist) as seen through the movies.

New York in Cinema - Supercut from Sergio Rojo on Vimeo.

God, I love living here. And one of my fav things in movies is city street scenes where the main character is just part of a huge walking crowd (the most classic visual example being Tootsie I think). How many movies did you instantly recognize?

Pride Month Doc Corner: 'No Dress Code Required'

We have been looking at LGBTIQ-themed documentaries for Pride Month. We conclude this mini-series with No Dress Code Required, which just played the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Right off the bat, director Cristina Herrera Borquez has a leg-up on other LGBTIQ civil rights documentaries by focusing on a (presumably) little-known fight for marriage equality in the Mexican state of Baja California. Queer stories from this region are not surprisingly few and far between. In No Dress Code Required we follow a gay couple – Victor Fernando Urias Amparo and Victor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza (“The Victors”) – who are withheld from marrying in spite of Mexican law.

What starts as Borquez simply documenting the seemingly minor court case, eventually leads to her having a front row seat in a national media frenzy that shines a necessary light on the dynamics of Mexico’s complicated relationship with the gay rights movement...

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"Pitch Perfect 3" Teaser

Chris here. Are you ready for another acapella round of pop mashups and "pitch" puns? Anna Kendrick and the rest of the Barden Bellas will be back for a third trip to the stage for this Christmas's Pitch Perfect 3. And we just got out first glimpse of what fun is in store with a first teaser trailer.

Except this trailer looks very little like what we've loved in the past. Instead of musical numbers, we get hints of action sequences and icky jokes at timeliness like Rebel Wilson in a "Make American Eat Again" hat - looks like we might be headed for the pitfalls of "a sequel means we must go bigger" syndrome. Where is the charm? Where is the heart?  Where are the TUNES?

Perhaps worst of all, it looks like they will be sidelining Hailee Steinfeld after her young songwriter livened up the second installment with the pop ballad "Flashlight" - I guess the Bellas are back to preexisting music full stop based on what their competition says about them in this trailer. Or maybe the film will just be reliving its global plot points from that last go around.

You can't blame the film for not spoiling the chosen tracks just yet and since that's a major part of the joy of these films, we'll hold out on a full Yes No Maybe So treatment. But needless to say this first look is... suspicious. Have a look for yourself and tell us your thoughts. Also: what musical artist would you like to see the group cover this time?

Beauty vs Beast: Follow That Bird

Jason from MNPP here, delicately fondling every cane in sight in honor of the birth of one of my favorite all-time scene-stealers, Mr. Peter Lorre, who was born on in this day in the year 1904. I, like many of you, probably first knew Lorre without actually knowing him, via his animated likeness always popping up for a quick n creepy gag in Looney Tunes; funny enough my mom wasn't rushing to show me Fritz Lang's masterpiece M as a child. But once I did see M... wowza. And Casablanca. Double wowza! And Hitchcock's original The Man Who Knew Too Much -- wowza squared! And on and on... but for today's "Beauty vs Beast" let's pit him against that other favorite of the Looney Tunes animators, his co-star in John Huston's 1941 classic noir The Maltese Falcon...

PREVIOUSLY I'm sure some of you are still wearing your Nicole Kidman party hats - the celebration never ends! - but let's take stock of last week's Moulin Rouge competition oh right shocker Nicole Kidman won. She took 58% of your vote over poor suffering Ewan. But y'all were torn. Said Sawyer:

"The Hardest One Ever. As usual, it's Nicole by a nose."

The Furniture: A Humble Palace of Moral Struggle in David and Bathsheba

"The Furniture" a weekly series on Production Design by Daniel Walber 

The 1951 box office was topped by Quo Vadis, a sword-and-sandal epic with thumping Christian overtones that cost well over $7 million. Crowds flocked to see Peter Ustinov’s Nero fiddle over the burning wreckage of Rome. And when the Academy Awards came around, the film picked up eight nominations.

Nevertheless, this is not column about Quo Vadis. If you scan a bit lower on the list of 1951’s biggest moneymakers, you’ll find David and Bathsheba. Next to Nero’s gold, it seems minor. It grossed less and scored fewer Oscar nominations. But it makes up for this deficit in sparkle with its unique character, intimate drama in a biblical package. The Oscar nominated production design, sprung from a much lower budget, illustrates that as much as anything else...

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