Beauty vs Beast: Grande Dame Guignol

Jason from MNPP here with a new edition of "Beauty vs Beast" that was so obvious, so "sitting right there and staring me dead in the eyes," that I couldn't believe I hadn't done it already and had to do three searches just to make sure. But no, it's true, we have somehow never used What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? for this series. Perhaps our minds had blocked it off until Ryan Murphy's Feud became a reality? Well much like Emmy nominations for Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon, its moment has come. Of course now it might be tougher than ever to sort through all the extraneous on-set shenanigans to get to the ladies behind the ladies - the Blanche and the Baby Jane behind the Bette and the Joan. It's always about billing, you know. But let's try.

PREVIOUSLY The now classic rom-com My Best Friend's Wedding is celebrating its 20th very soon and you can tell the movie still works because it still has the ability to divide our sympathies among its two extremely charming leading ladies - while the numbers went back and forth over the course of the week in the end it was the pretty woman in the lead who walked away with just over 53% of your vote. Said brookesboy:

"This is one of Julia's best performances. The way she combines ruthlessness with charisma is unique. You realize how awful she is all along, but you still can't help relating to her. That's a pretty nifty trick. And this is a comedy that's actually kind of a tragedy. I hate myself, but I'm Team Jules. GAWD!"

The Furniture: Repairs for the House in "20th Century Women"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in much more magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber...

"The house is a character in its own right," everyone says. It’s one of our more meaningless cliches, poltergeists notwithstanding. But the sentiment behind it is understandable. A building, though hardly alive, can still offer charisma. A dynamic visual language can be built from its beams.

20th Century Women has one of these abodes. The house in question belongs to Dorothea (Annette Bening), who lives with her son Jamie (Lucas Zumann) and two boarders, Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and William (Billy Crudup). As she explains to a fireman she’s invited to a party...

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C O N S I D E R - Favorite Actresses of 2017, 1st Qtr

With the year's first quarter over, here's a listicle of noteworthy performances we'll eventually compare to what's to come. We've already listed fav male performances and favtechnical achievements thus far - from screenings and releases as of March 31st. Herewith the 17 best female performances from the year's first quarter, divvied up into three categories. Did these women speak to you?

Disclaimer: I missed The Last Word, United Kingdom, and Wilson  which all have prominent female roles for talented actors. If you've seen them give their MVPs a shout-out in the comments. 

6 LEADING ACTRESSES

Paula Beer as "Anna" in Frantz

16 more talented women after the jump...

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On this day: Jungle Book's First, Dolly's Near Last, and Annie Hall vs. Star Wars

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

1882  The titular event in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) happened on this very day in Missouri
1893 Leading man of the 1930s Leslie Howard (Gone With the Wind, Of Human Bondage) born in London
1921 Jan Sterling born in NYC. (We recently discussed her Oscar nominated performance in The High and the Mighty )
1922 After years of "which year is it?" it's finally settled... Doris Day was born on this day 1922. So happy 95th birthday to the icon, still with us, today. 
1924 Another cinematic icon, Marlon Brando, born in Omaha

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Bossy Babies & Ghostly Shells at the Box Office

What did you see this weekend?

I caught the three top new titles and we'll share feelings about them over the next few days along with reactions to tonight's forthcoming Feud and Big Little Lies episodes. So much to talk about. It's going to be a big week at The Film Experience, so stay tuned and return often.

TOP WIDE
01 The Boss Baby $49 new
02 Beauty & The Beast $47.5 (cum. $395.4) Review
03 Ghost in the Shell $19 new
04 Power Rangers $14.5 (cum. $65)
05 Kong Skull Island $8.8 (cum. $147.8)  Review

TOP LIMITED 
01 The Zookeeper's Wife $3.3 new 541 screens
02 T2 Trainspotting $400K (cum. $1.1) 140 screens
03 The Devotion of Suspect X $330K new 43 screens
04 The Last Word $212K (cum. $1.4) 289 screens
05 Kedi $165K (cum. $2) 105 screens Review 
06 Personal Shopper $159K (cum. $791K) 150 screens Review

That's a good start for The Zookeeper's Wife which risked a nearly-wide opening despite not being "bankable" in the current ways (i.e. not being an animated comedy or franchise-oriented or effects driven). 

A lot of people online have been gleeful about Ghost in the Shell's lukewarm start (given the controversies over whitewashing Asian stories) but we're rarely gleeful about failure considering Hollywood often learns the wrong lessons from it. We would love casting to be more racially appropriate -- we've been shouting about giving Asian actors more roles forever here at TFE -- but we would also really love ambitious provocative sci-fi pictures and female-driven genre pictures to do well and knowing Hollywood they'll probably blame the failure on "too female" and "not enough action" rather than the more optimistic takeaway that the internet is pushing, i.e. "people want Asian leads in Asian stories"