Beauty Vs Beast - Choose Life Choices

JA from MNPP here with a new round of "Beauty Vs. Beast" for us to play... this week's inspiration? It's the 54th birthday of one of my favorite actors, Scotsman slash raving lunatic Robert Carlyle. Alright yes he's (probably) just acting the "raving lunatic" part... over and over again... so well... by all accounts he's a very nice gentleman. Think how sweet he seemed romancing Linus Roache in Priest! That was the first place I ever saw him - it was two years later where he'd cement the scary status he'd carry on to roles in Ravenous and 28 Weeks Later (which I actually prefer to the original) with the one and only terror that was Begbie in Danny Boyle's 1996 phenom Trainspotting.

Did I say "one and only"? Make that twice and doubly - now that Ewan and Danny have finally made up following DiCaprio-Gate (Boyle cast Leo over Ewan in The Beach, which Ewan did not take well at the time) they seem to be very serious about making Porno, the Trainspotting sequel, their next project. I haven't read Welsh's book so I don't know where the movie will find Renton and Begbie and all the boys twenty years later (yes the 20 year anniversary is coming up in 2016) but til then, we can at least pick our sides!

poll by twiigs.com

You have one week to shake off the drug haze and pick your poison - and make sure to give yourself over to pro and con proclamations of varying lucidity in the comments.

PREVIOUSLY ON Last week we celebrated Francis Ford Coopola's 75th birthday with a face-off between the two devil courtesans in his 1992 version of Dracula... Winona Ryder's initially demure Mina versus Sadie Frost's wanton wedding belle... sure enough it was flame-haired Lucy we, like the Count, couldn't keep out shadowy fingertips off of. In the comments John T made a solid point (and connects us back to the previous week's contest winner)...

"Sadie got distracted by Jude Law in the 90's-who can blame her for not pursuing career over that?"

Pulitzer Prize Winners

Congratulations to this year's Pulitzer Prize winners. 

FICTION - "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
DRAMA - "The Flick" by Annie Baker
HISTORY - "The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832" by Alan Taylor 
BIOGRAPHY - "Margaret Fuller: A New American Life" by Megan Marshall
POETRY - "3 Sections" by Vijay Seshadri
GENERAL NONFICTION - "Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation" by Dan Fagin
MUSIC - "Become Ocean" by John Luther Adams

Have any of you read or listened to any of these? I'm intrigued by the description of the Drama winner "The Flick" since it's film related:

The Flick, a still from the Playwright Horizons production last year

a thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.

Many Pulitzer Prize winning plays end up as movies eventually. You can see past winners after the jump including three recent Oscar nominated films...

Click to read more ...

Yes No Maybe So: "The Homesman"

I've been anxiously awaiting this trailer so let's hitch our Yes No Maybe So wagon to Hilary Swank's as she transports three crazies across the country to Iowa in the western The Homesman. We knew from interviews and a cursory knowledge of the novelist Glendon Swarthout only a handful of things before seeing this trailer.

Oh nos. Nathaniel is talking about me again.

1. Six of Swarthout's other books have been adapted for the screen, most famously the ür spring break girls-gone-wild movie Where the Boys Are (1960) and The Shootist (1976) starring John Wayne
2. "The Homesman" refers to the job title that Swank's farmer character Mary Bee Cuddy signs on to perform, carting insane women across the country 
3. Meryl Streep's role is small and she has no scenes with Swank (according to Swank herself) but her character has some part in collecting the three women in the wagon
4. It's directed by Tommy Lee Jones and shot by Brokeback Mountain's cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto
5. It takes place in the 1850s. 

The trailer and the breakdown after the jump...

Click to read more ...

MM@M 7.1 Time Zones and Lost Horizons

As Mad Men at the Movies returns for its final bifurcated season so do we for Mad Men @ the Movies. 

Mad Men seasons never begin with a bang. They take time to gather momentum for their emotional, psychological, and thematic impact. The seventh season opener "Time Zones" proved no exception. Though we aren't clued in to a specific date I believe we're at the end of January 1969 given references to events of the previous season being "a couple of months" back and the weather which is pleasant in Los Angeles and frigid in New York. One smart out of time detail: Peggy, who lives alone much to her agony but spends all her time at work, still has a Christmas tree up in her apartment well past the holiday.

At the close of last season the newly merged ad firm was going bicoastal. We begin checking in with the New York characters before we return to our anti-hero lead, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) who is tellingly tied to neither coast and thus in limbo. 

Click to read more ...

Links: MTV Movie Awards and More...

The Guardian asks a really good question. Had James Dean lived would he have been a Newman or a Brando?
Nerd Approved swapping the genders on Disney characters
Comics Alliance one minute of the opening battle from X-Men Days of Future Past. Looks exciting
The Guardian an interview with the disfigured actor from Under the Skin
Vox 21 Times Stephen Colbert has dropped his satiric character and been himself 
Telegraph an unusually candid confession: Pierce Brosnan doesn't think he was good enough as James Bond
Empire Harrison Ford talks Bladerunner sequel 

MTV Movie Awards
I "forgot" to watch. But the internet provides the highlights anyway. Like Zac Efron getting his shirt ripped off. The masses have now seen his chest approximately in everything but it still excites them (More is more?)

Comics Alliance one minute of the opening battle from X-Men Days of Future Past. Looks exciting
Towleroad Jared Leto's AIDS focused speech. Yes he won another award for Rayon "Best Transformation"
YouTube they aired a commercia lfor A Million Ways to Die in the West. Charlize Theron's look is very Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead, right? Only with humor.
In Contention has a best and worst list from the night
Variety has the complete winners list which were awful... Mila Kunis terrible terrible villain in Oz: The Great and Powerful won (there were such better options like my Best Villain Nominees). Yikes. For what it's worth Hunger Games: Catching Fire won Best Movie and both lead actor prizes. Yes, Josh Hutcherson too! Since this is, you know, MTV and Twilight no longer exists.

This Weekend's Miracle
Michelle Pfeiffer left the house!

click to embiggen

We always have to report on it since it's so rare. She was at Coachella in California this weekend with an undetermined friend.

Today's Watch
Awesomely talented Laura Benanti explains the current Broadway season. (I don't understand why a great TV series doesn't snap her up. She was so good on the short-lived Playboy Club and in The Sound of Music: Live and surely she deserves better than a Law & Order franchise. Especially since the bitch can sang.)