Beauty vs Beast: BFFF (Best Franco Friends Forever)

Jason from MNPP here, reporting for "Beauty vs Beast" duty from the middle of the Tribeca Film Festival -- I mean that literally; I am in between screenings right this very minute. (Sidenote: and since I'm not on my usual computer and don't have access to Photoshop, this week's edition is more lo-fi than usual, but we'll make due.) Anyway you know who else is here with me at the festival? James Franco. James Franco is everywhere, in every movie.

Okay okay maybe he's just in two movies - The Fixer and King Cobra - but on top of those I just finished watching 11.22.63 the other day plus it's his birthday on Tuesday, so he certainly feels omnipresent in my life at the moment. So for this week's competition let's look back at one of his finest moments -- David Gordon Green's 4-20-Perfect-10 Pineapple Express, opposite the Bacall to his Don't-Bogart-That-J Mr. Seth Rogen...

The Furniture: The Wonderfully Weird Production Design of the Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm

With Tale of Tales and The Huntsman: Winter’s War both opening this weekend, we have a sudden double feature of fairy tale movies on our hands. That makes it an excellent time to revisit the only fairy tale film nominated for the Oscar Best Production Design, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. (That seems impossible, I know, but it's true.)

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was the first narrative feature to be shot in the original 3-panel Cinerama process. The second, and last, was How the West Was Won, which I showcased two weeks ago. While the epic Western, or at least some its directors, tried to smooth over the unwieldy 3-camera process with landscapes and the occasional single-camera 70-mm shot, directors Henry Levin and George Pal really ran with Cinerama for their fairy tale epic. The results were a bit bonkers...

Click to read more ...

Who did Hugh Grant make cry & Meryl's most dubious

Murtada here. Graham Norton always manages to coax stories out of his visiting guests that somehow they never divulge on this side of the Atlantic.This week his guests included Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, selling Florence Foster Jenkins. Norton brings up a recent interview in which Grant claimed all his co-stars hated him. Julianne Moore, Rachel Weisz, Emma Thompson, Sandra Bullock and Drew Barrymore are name checked. Clearly the Music and Lyrics (2007) set was not a happy one as this is what Grant said about Barrymore:

She made the mistake of giving me notes. How would you take that?

Meryl's response is perfect and gets the biggest laugh. Deservedly. She knows how to land a line!

Meryl divulges the one movie in her oeuvre she isn’t happy with. I thought it would be Still of the Night (1982) which she has spoken about before. But it’s actually The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).

It's a fun talk show moment. And wouldn't we all love to get a glimpse of Renee Zellweger's 48 pages long emails. Do it Hugh, put them on twitter! Is The French Lieutenant's Woman really Meryl's most dubious moment on screen?

Emma Thompson's Category is: Hippie Chic Realness

Manuel here. I'm gonna keep it short and sweet and let wonderful being all around Emma Thompson do all the talking since her outfits for the upcoming Noah Baumbach film Yen Din Ka Kissa are loud! 

The film, as you may know already, stars Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller (three actors whose gifts for dry humor and acerbic comedy one hopes Baumbach will mine to great effect; he's done it before with Stiller, at least). But really—and I know I'm breaching Actor Month rules here at TFE—it's Thompson who I'm most looking forward to since her pairing with Baumbach (and with those outfits) is pretty promising. That she's described her character as a "dreadful, passive-aggressive alcoholic" is just icing on the cake, and has me thinking we may be seeing the bawdy side of Thompson we so often get on red carpets but so rarely on screen. Which boho look is your favorite?

We Wish You A Merry Everything

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.

In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).

But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.

And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving"  -- for every day a bloodbath!

Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...

Click to read more ...