Thursday, March 16, 2017 at 12:25PM Would you rather...
...play dressup with the men of Beauty & The Beast
...attend John Barrowman's bday party?
...snack with Pratt?
...book club with Missi Pyle?
... eat popcorn with Brie and Tom?
... or get an in flight spa treatment with Brie Larson?
Pictures after the jump to help you decide.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017 at 5:00PM With Disney's live action remake of "Beauty and the Beast" hitting theaters this Friday, here's Jorge Molina to take a look into the yearbook of forgotten movies and another recent Beauty & the Beast adaptation...
I’ve been always fascinated by the mythology, tropes, and interpretations of fairy tales. They are one of our most lasting and frequently sought pieces of folklore. They are the ultimate piece of intellectual property, belonging to the collective consciousness of entire generations. We love to tell them, retell them, repackage them and resell in as many forms as we can conjure up.
I also was once a teenager that wanted to write movies.
Now, let’s imagine that my thirteen-year-old self (with all his growing pains, confused sexual identity, and overflowing longing for deeper meaning) was given the task of reimagining the classic tale of Beauty and the Beast in a modern setting...
Monday, March 13, 2017 at 1:00PM 
By Lynn Lee
With the live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast just around the corner, what better time to revisit the original animated masterpiece and its endlessly hummable songs? If you saw the movie when it came out in 1991 and happened to be a bookish, musical theater-loving little girl (or boy) at the time, odds are you got the soundtrack and learned it by heart. (I plead guilty on all counts.)
While I have no idea what happened to my copy, every beat and lyric – by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, respectively – are still firmly etched into my memory. I never saw the Broadway musical, which restored a song that had been scrapped from the movie (“Human Again”) and added several new songs by Menken and lyricist Tim Rice, but reportedly the new movie isn’t including any of the latter. Instead it’s adding four newly new songs by Mencken and Rice. However, fear not, fellow original Disney B&B enthusiasts: it appears that all of the Mencken-Ashman songs from the 1991 movie will be in the mix. As Cogsworth would say, “If it’s not ba-roque, why fix it?”
We’ll have to wait to debate the merits of the new songs but we can discuss how the original ones stack up against each other. With the caveat that this feels a bit like picking one’s favorite kid, here’s my ranking from lowest to highest...
Friday, March 3, 2017 at 3:20PM Vanity Fair's Emma Watson cover story (with a really cool photoshoot by Tim Walker that of course is getting flak due to one semi-topless photo)
Daily News JJ Abrams says Mark Hamill will be up for an Oscar for The Last Jedi next year. Uff, we're going there already? (What is it with blockbuster teams especially that like to make these predictions. Remember when Vin Diesel was sure Fast & Furious was going to be a Best Picture nominee?)
Variety a movie theater in London plays a prank, showing a bit of La La Land before a Moonlight screening
Variety a movie theater in Alabama, one of those states that just can't help being a stereotype of itself, won't show Disney's new Beauty & the Beast due to...
TFE ...the earlier announcement that there'd be a gay character
Playbill Hairspray Live!'s directing duo will reunite for the live version of Bye Bye Birdie -- that's good news as I really think Hairspray Live was by far the best of these productions yet
THR strange cast assembled for what's billed as a romantic drama that has something to do with death. Irreplaceable You will star hotties with star hotties Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman as well as Christopher Walker and Steve Coogan
i09 filmmakers discussing why video game movies always suck
/Film Disney may reboot Tron for... Jared Leto. Hrmmm.
Oscar Crumbs
Jezebel an Oscars story we accidentally didn't cover but for a brief mention on the podcast - Oscar winner Patricia Arquette is understandably upset that Alexis Arquette was left out of the In Memoriam montage
AV Club Sir Ian McKellen's advice to awards show presenters to avoid the Beatty/Dunaway fiasco
Off Screen
The Hairpin "Everyone wants to be this raccoon" Amen
Theater Mania Sondheim and Bernadette Peters attend the opening night of the new Off Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, with the theater transformed into a pie shop. The show has already extended its run all the way through December. Wheeee
Mark Harris's Book Gets a Documentary Version
Yes, I wish we were talking about Pictures at a Revolution (because we can never get enough Oscar lore) but it's his book about Hollywood directors during World War II which is also fascinating. Here's the trailer for Five Came Back which premieres at the end of the month
Friday, March 3, 2017 at 8:00AM 
Chris here. Anticipation for Bill Condon's live action Beauty and the Beast remake is up and down around these parts, and those feeling may have gotten a little more complicated. Speaking to Attitude magazine, Condon states that the film will feature Disney's first "exclusively gay moment" and for none other than... sidekick LeFou?
Aside from the suggestion that Condon has apparently forgotten about Disney's gayest hour, "Poor Unfortunate Souls", this bit of gay news is somewhat troubling. LaFou, played here by Josh Gad, is Gaston's dimwitted and devoted bufoon of a sidekick - and Condon elaborates that there may be feelings beyond comradeship:
LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston... He’s confused about what he wants. It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings. And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that’s what has its payoff at the end, which I don’t want to give away.
This all sounds like a cousin to the kind of gay revisionism we've seen with the likes Dumbledore and Luke Skywalker, but more like being told in advance of queerness that remains subtextual. If Disney wants to applaud itself for depicting queer attraction, LeFou is an innocuous and fairly uninvolved character to the narrative to really represent that impact. If they want to make a push for representation, wouldn't it be more meaningful or worthy of this self-congratulation if that affection was also reciprocated? I mean, Lumiere and Cogsworth are right there!
Beauty and the Beast opens in two weeks! What are your thoughts on the potential of this "exclusively gay moment"?
