Beauty vs Beast: Daisy Daisy Give Me Your Answer Do

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" contest  - the older I get the more amateurish and obvious it feels to call F. Scott Fitzgerald's book The Great Gatsby, which was published on this day in 1925, my favorite book... but then I go read the book again and it lifts me up and swirls me around wildly for 180 brief pages and drops me off along those boats beating against the current, and I'm reconvinced it remains the Great American Novel. So I take comfort in knowing I'm not alone - alongside me stand whole swaths of movie-makers who keep trying to turn it into The Great American Movie, time and time again, to wildly varying degrees of success.

So today let's focus in on the two highest profile adaptations - Jack Clayton's 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, and Baz Luhrmann's 2013 jazzy flick with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. And because we're all good and proper actressexuals here at The Film Experience let's head down to the end of the dock and stare at the green light across the bay to dream of the ladies alone. (Since they're both playing the same character I'm going to skip the PROS & CONS this time around since we're judging them by their performances.)

PREVIOUSLY Last week we sent a letter to daddy telling him how much we love What Ever Happened To Baby Jane, and specifically Baby Jane herself, since y'all gave Bette Davis' performance a full 75% of your votes. (But don't worry about Joan Crawford - she just showed up at my house to accept the award in Bette's honor.) Said Jones:

"Bette as Baby Jane is a master act with continuous high-wire moments that never feel absurd or over the top. Her acting shines masterfully when she reveals the broken soul within through tender shifts in her facial expression or voice intonation. The last few minutes are particularly heart-breaking and makes you feel for her. Joan is amazing, but I'm team Baby Jane unflinchingly."

On this day: Titanic sets sail, Newsies debuts, 3-D Begins...

On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1868 George Arliss, who won the Oscar for Disraeli (1929) born

1912 RMS Titanic set sail on this day from England on her first and last voyage. The rest is the subject of history, lore, and several plays and movies, most famously James Cameron's Oscar devouring Titanic (1997)

1925 The Great Gatsby is published. The classic novel failed at first but after F Scott Fitzgerald's death it became an indisputable classic, lateradapted to plays and movies and so on...

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MST3K Returns For a New Audience

by Chris Feil

This Friday marks the return of cult favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000, the spoof equivalent of sharing a movie theatre with a patron who won’t stop talking back at the screen. This time the crowdfunded production heads to Netflix, with many classic episodes also back on the streaming service as well. For some the original series is more of an acquired taste, but for its devoted cult, there is much to rejoice again.

The premise was simple: painfully bad films are forced upon two robots (the gumball machine-like Tom Servo and metallic rooster Crow) and one human (Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, and now Jonah Ray) in a plot for world domination by some crackpot scientist...

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Animated Feature, the April Foolish Oscar Predictions

If only Laika had waited until 2017 to release Kubo and the Two Strings -they might finally have won that elusive Oscar that almost always goes to Disney or Disney/Pixar.

Owen Wilson poses with a life size McQueen for "Cars 3"

As previously discussed this year's animated slate doesn't look too promising in terms of American studio features, and there's also a complete absence of stop motion features *sniffle* from abroad as far as we can tell. What's worse, the Academy's just-announced a rule change for voting on the animated features that might well make the category less penetrable for brilliant work from across the ocean. But we'll have to wait and see if our worst fears materialize.

First Oscar Predictions for 2017's Best Animated Feature

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What did you see or Smurf this weekend?

The weekend's biggest new film was Smurfs: The Lost Village... which probably says all you need to know about this mini Spring lull between blockbusters (another Fast & Furious is next).

Audiences weren't of one hive mind with people going to see a little of everything, though The Boss Baby and Beauty and the Beast still dominated as they did last weekend. Beauty and the Beast has been so dominant already that it will surely end the year as the second or third highest grosser. For comparisons sake, if you throw it back into last year's calendar, it would be #3 behind Rogue One and Finding Dory and ahead of Captain America: Civil War...

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