Beauty vs Beast: Love Bound

Jason from MNPP here back from turkey break and prepping a fresh "Beauty vs Beast" for y'all to feast upon. The Spanish provocateur Pedro Almodovar's latest film Julieta (which our pal Manuel reviewed right here via the New York Film Festival) opens in the U.S. in just a couple of weeks and so the Museum of Modern Art is celebrating all things Almodovar with a great big retrospective, starting tomorrow. The series runs through mid-December and they're showing pretty much everything he's made - don't miss out!

And so in turn for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" I'm asking you to look back to Almodovar's 1990 romantic comedy of kinky kidnapping, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (aka ¡Átame!) and its rope-crossed lovers -- Ricky (Antonio Banderas), fresh off the psych ward, and Marina (Victoria Abril), the actress and recovered drug addict who finds herself on the receiving end of Ricky's deranged affections.

PREVIOUSLY Last week's contest between Gaston and The Beast from Disney's Beauty & the Beast went back and forth and back and forth between the two big strapping hairy-chested menfolk in belle's life for awhile, but in the end true romance won out - y'all softies - and The Beast took it home with 55% of your vote. Said Nick T:

"Kudos to Gaston for having such a great song, but The Beast is such a lovely character. Even if my memory of him is blurrier, it's still warm."

With Six You Get Linkroll

Towleroad Florence Henderson, "Mrs Brady" herself, dies at 82
Letterboxd "movies where jessica chastain gets fed up with the useless men around her so she decides to save the world herself"
EW Martin Scorsese's Silence to get world premiere at The Vatican
Medium "a letter to Tom Ford from a fat moviegoer" regarding Nocturnal Animals
Coco Hits NY finds Moana distractingly relevant to the current political situation
Elle Magazine all the different women who've played Jackie Kennedy (amazing, really)
The New Yorker the evolution of Pedro Almodóvar

oops that was seven links 

Exit Video
Doctor Strange as 8 bit game

They only do this for action and genre flicks since they're a natural fit but wouldn't it be satirical fun to do it for an unexpected non-teen boy favorite like say... Carol or The Hours?

Manuel Gives Thanks!

Manuel here. This is now my third year giving thanks as part of the TFE team and it really is a gift to be part of such a wonderful group of writers and commenters. One should always give thanks in front of food, so be sure to order some Cuban food from the hot Miami cook in the back.

This year, I'm thankful for...

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European Film Award Nominations. Good news for 8 Oscar contenders

The Precursors are coming! The Precursors are coming! Though the European Film Awards hardly have Oscar on their minds when they vote (bless them) it's all part of the grand circus of November-February honors to commemorate each film year. Several European films hoping to score Oscar nods in the Foreign Language Film race have reason to be hopeful given their warm embrace here.

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NYFF: Almodóvar's Julieta

Manuel here catching up with Pedro's latest at the New York Film Festival

Following the New York Film Festival screening of his 20th film, Pedro Almodóvar admitted that, in adapting Alice Munro’s short stories (from her collection, Runaway), he had aimed for a more restrained tone. Indeed, especially in comparison to his previous outing—the mile high club comedy I’m So Excited!—Julieta is an aggressively austere affair. Of course, “austere Almodóvar” is still inimitably Almodóvar. Take the film’s first shot: we’re awash in a sea of red fabric. It looks like draperie, perhaps a bedsheet or even a curtain. It pulses like a heart...

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