Stage Door: The Crucible w/ Ben Whishaw & Saoirse Ronan

On Monday's (the "dark" night for many shows) Stage Door, we talk theater ...and often its film connections.

Arthur Miller's classic allegory about the Salem witch trials The Crucible is back on Broadway for a limited engagement currently scheduled to run through July. Expect Tony nominations as it's a gripping night of theater with high profile actors like Saoirse Ronan as the vengeful aggressive Abigail, fresh off her Oscar nomination, and acclaimed Brits Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo as the doomed Proctors.

The Crucible has only been adapted to cinema twice, once in French in 1957 and most famously in English in 1996 with Winona Ryder, Daniel Day Lewis and Joan Allen (Oscar-Nominated) in the principle roles. That film was no classic so it's easy for the current production to obliterate it in the mind's eye. But for Joan Allen's utterly brilliant rendering of Goody Proctor. [More...]

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Reporting From The Edge of Oblivion

Team Experience still reporting from the just-wrapped Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on 'Special Correspondents' and the doc 'Obit.'

Do you ever watch a scene and just feel terrible for the actor being forced to deliver the dialogue they're being forced to deliver? There's a scene in Special Correspondents - a triviality that played Tribeca just before debuting on Netflix later this week, starring Ricky Gervais (who wrote and directed) and Eric Bana as a pair of journalists faking their war reports from the comfort of a Queens attic - that had me feeling just awful for one of its actors. 

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Everybody Wants Some Podcasting !!

Nathaniel, Nick, and Joe kick off a whole new season of the podcast by hitting the road with Michael Shannon and family in Midnight Special and going back to college with Richard Linklater's baseball boys in Everybody Wants Some!! We believe its our 8th season, so we'll just go with that.

42:30 minutes 
00:01 The Crucible Broadway & Film
02:12 The Slumdog Oscar Year
05:00 Everybody Wants Some!! delightful & sexy
15:00 Pro & Con on Midnight Special
32:00 Hello My Name is Doris,  Zootopia
40:30 Favorite Prince songs

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Please continue the conversation in the comments. Did you "want some!!" and where do you fall in the all-over-the-place reactions to Midnight Special.

Everybody Wants Season Debut

Beauty vs Beast: All Their Jazz

It's Monday and this is Jason from MNPP writing at you, so it must be time for another round of "Beauty vs Beast" -- this week's duo are each individually and together beautiful and beastly all at once, and I don't know which their prouder of, honestly. A little of this, a little of that, some razzle dazzle and a lotta sheba shimmy shake. Indeed we speak of that pair of murderin' funny honeys Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones) & Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) in Rob Marshall's 2002 Oscar winner Chicago. Today is Renée's 47th birthday and this we do in celebration of her. Now make like Lipschitz and choose.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we took a little ride on the Pineapple Express and y'all decided it was James Franco's Saul that two-thirds of you decided you wanted bringing up your caboose. Seth Rogen had his defenders though -- taking up his cause in the comments forever1267 had this to say:

"Big laugh. Big personality. Big Dorkiness. Big Chest hair. Seth Rogen is my secret crush boyfriend."

The Furniture: The Lady with the Van Paints a Crime Scene Into a Home

"The Furniture" is our new design series. Here's Daniel Walber...

The Lady in the Van begins with a bloody hit-and-run accident. The title van-driving lady, played by Maggie Smith, collides with a young man and leaves him for dead. On the lam, bound by necessity to a vehicle that may also be a murder weapon, she finds her way to a quiet neighborhood full of artists and bourgeois intellectuals.

Then it turns into a delightful comedy about the social anxieties of Alan Bennett.

It’s a bit abrupt, to be honest. And it may take a fair while to warm up to the neurotic, Adaptation.-style doppelgangers that represent the split personalities of the playwright protagonist. The vans themselves, though, quite effectively capture a much more gradual transition, one that charts Mary/Margaret’s arc with care. What begins as an all-in-one murder weapon and crime scene becomes a home. [More...]

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Next up on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"

 How to play? It's easy. You:

1) watch the movie
2) pick your shot
3) post it with the "why" 
4) and we link up. 

Tomorrow Evening April 26th
THRONE OF BLOOD (1957) 
Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Cinematographer Asakazu Nakai

Have we really not done a Kurosawa film in this series? My apologies. It's a Japanese classic with Kurosawa's muse Toshiro Mifune as a would be violent king with a scheming ambitious wife. Is it the best Macbeth movie ever made? Find out. (This is one of the gaps in my Kurosawa knowledge so I'll be discovering it with you.) [iTunes | Amazon] 

Tuesday Evening May 3rd
DEATH BECOMES HER (1992)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Cinematographer Dean Cundey

I need to talk about... Madeline... Ashton"

To celebrate the release of the new collectors edition BluRay (due April 26th), let's drink the potion with the vainglorious "Mad" (Meryl Streep) and vengeful "Hel" (Goldie Hawn) in this 'immortal' comedy classic, pun intended.  [Amazon | iTunes | Netflix]