Netflix for April - Screengrab Roulette

As we do, we've spun a handful plus of new to Netflix titles and posted whichever screengrab we landed on - no cheating. Do any of these make you want to see the movie? ALSO: Which of the "new" streaming titles would you most want to read a write-up on this month? I'll obey your consensus command. 

You're in luck my little immigrant. This is America!

An American Tail (1986)
Ouch. That line of dialogue isn't aging well. (I feel like Don Bluth doesn't get the credit he deserves for being basically the only independent animator who managed to frequently get pictured made before the current animated boom which sees so many animated pictures from so many corners each year. He turns 80 this year.)

Complete list after the jump...

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Thoughts I Had... While Rewatching "Grease 2"

Grease 2 gave me such writer's block in the Pfandom series because what to even focus on with such an event? I finally powered through but the focus naturally had to be on LaPfeiff's career. So, herewith a random collections of thoughts and observations from this viewing which I think was my 6th or 7th? The movie is terrible but I'm addicted to early Pfeiffer's lusty bravado in it, hence the multiple revisits.

(This is gif heavy so be warned...)

Dody Goodman & Eve Arden reprising their Grease roles as "Blanche & Miss McGee"

↑ But these are the faces you'll find me making every time I find myself watching it. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS AGAIN?!?!?

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Pfandom: Cool Rider and a Pink (Leading) Lady

on the set of Grease 2, her first lead roleP F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 8 
by Nathaniel R 

We've mostly focused on Michelle Pfeiffer's acting in our Pfandom retrospective. We're sure the star who has described herself as "extremely private" would like it that way, but this would be the appropriate time for a brief bit of personal context.

Though the young actress had been working nonstop since the late 70s in television roles and a few features, she'd been struggling offscreen. She was impatient with the way her career was developing. She'd also become involved with a cult, an experience she's always been cagey about in interviews. She had given them too much of her money and was eating strangely at their insistence. In 1981, she took back control of her life.

At the Grease 2 premiere in NYC with her new husband Peter Horton and producer Allan Carr

Two marriages and two divorces (of sorts): in her personal life she fell in love with fellow up-and-coming actor Peter Horton (who would later become a TV star on thirtysomething), and broke free from the cult; in her professional life she dumped her first agent to sign with the much more powerful William Morris Agency. The shakeup had an immediate effect on her career...

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The Furniture: Thoroughly Modern Millie

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Thoroughly Modern Millie opened 50 years ago this week, in the spring between San Francisco’s Human Be-In and the Summer of Love. None of 1967’s Best Picture nominees, immortalized as the birth of the New Hollywood in Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, had yet opened, but there was already something in the air.

Director George Roy Hill capitalized on this countercultural moment with an extravagant show of concentrated nostalgia. Thoroughly Modern Millie leaps back to the Roaring 20s, America’s last moment of liberated sexuality and conspicuous consumption before the Great Depression. Its flamboyant, frenetic ode to the flappers and their world was a big hit, making more than $34 million and landing 10th at the yearly box office. The film was nominated for seven Oscars including Art Direction-Set Decoration.

Yet its portrayal is not without contradictions...

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Review: Disney's recreation of "Beauty and the Beast"

This review was previously published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Tale as old as time
True as it can be

You wouldn’t think that ‘tales as old as time’ would need so much retelling but they do. Certain properties never go away or are open to constant reinterpretation like the Shakespeare oeuvre or, well, fairy tales. A cursory bit of research reveals that there have been at least a dozen feature films or TV series from various countries based on Beauty and the Beast tale.

If you have never existed before today, here’s what you need to know: A cruel prince is cursed and transformed into a beast. If the Beast doesn’t learn to love and be loved in return by the time the last petal on a magic rose falls, the curse will become permanent. Enter a beautiful girl who could be the one to break the spell...

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