Beauty vs Beast: Bustin' Spies Makes Me Feel Good

Well here we are and it's Monday and I'm Jason from MNPP and this is your weekly "Beauty vs Beast" moment. Ya ready? This Friday (otherwise known as my birthday!) Paul Feig's loooooong awaited and ultra discussed reboot of Ghostbusters comes out. Maybe you've heard something? Something about ovaries or something? I don't know. All's I know is the reboot's got four of the funniest lady-people who make funny today in Melissa McCarthy & Kristen Wiig & Kate McKinnon & Leslie Jones, and I'm all in. Hell, I even liked the much-reviled trailer.

In fact the only thing that's given me a sad face in the lead up to Ghostbusters was when I scanned through the cast list and I realized that Rose Byne's not in the movie. How great would Byrne have been playing the dastardly William Atherton role from the original? But then I did just re-watch Feig's previous film, the gets-funnier-every-time-you-watch-it Spy, and speaking of...

PREVIOUSLY Two weeks ago (sorry for the July 4th lapse) we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Jim Henson's film Labyrinth by pitting a pretty girl against a Golbin King, and this time around David Bowie's bulge came out on top with almost 3/4s of your vote. Said Glenn:

"The tights are most definitely not a con."

Keep your Swiddlestons and Hiddleswifts...

Despite whichever exotic beach you may find yourself on, it’s simply impossible for anything remotely I Saw The Light-adjacent to win the crown for hottest celeb couple snapshot this week. Compare yourself to Rose Byrne – studio comedy’s reigning queen of deadpan and broad gesture alike – and her hammy man Bobby Cannavale, exuding effortless shimmer at Sunday’s Tony Awards, and you can’t help but look like someone’s demented aunts on vacation – no matter who you are. Behold.

The Natural Comic Genius of Rose Byrne

This weekend's Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising certainly has enough antics to discuss for this month's Girls Gone Wild focus, but its most delightful element is returning star Rose Byrne. While she's not as impactfully utilized in the sequel as she was in the original, she is still just as charming as a slightly reluctant adult who understands what makes the youngsters tic.

The film leaves you wanting more time with her, but when isn't that true even when she is better served?

Over the past decade, Byrne has been steadily becoming our most reliable comedic actress. Her peers may be larger box office draws or recognizable names, but none of them match her consistently rich performances or surprising hysterical highs. The trifecta of Spy, Bridesmaids, and Neighbors are all starkly different women, for Byrne never fails to surprise us with the type of laughs she can deliver with ease...

Click to read more ...

Dean & The Meddler: A Grief Dramedy Double Feature

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on two grief-driven features.

Dean (Winner of The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature)
Dean (Demetri Martin, who wrote and directed the film) is a professional illustrator whose first book of drawings was described as “full of whimsy.” The same could be said for the film itself. Just as Dean’s illustrations (Martin’s own) are simple, at times humorous, sketches (a faceless man wearing a t-shirt that reads “Ask me about my face,” a centaur to a horse-headed human body: “It’s not bestiality if we 69!”), the film finds comedy in simplicity; there are some surprises here but mostly this is a straightforward affair. You could say that Dean is a whimsical bicoastal dramedy about grief and it succeeds precisely because it's so assured.

Brooklyn-based Dean has lost his mother, and the narrative follows his attempt at coping with this loss. His father, played with relish by Kevin Kline, is seemingly moving on too fast, wanting to sell the house he shared with his wife, a decision that pushes Dean to flee to Los Angeles. Both men find themselves engaging with women that help push them past their comfort zones. Lessons are learnt, and personal growth is unavoidable, but Martin uses the film’s whimsy to his advantage: split-screens and his quirky drawings visually highlight the levity that runs through his script (a meet-cute with Gillian Jacobs is impossibly twee and surprisingly spunky at the same time). That I’m using words like “whimsy” and “twee” in positive terms should tell you that I fell in love with this film even as I know it works within a very specific register that may not be for everyone; then again, any film that gives Mary Steenburgen and Kline a flirtatious scene centered on criticizing a Broadway play about (maybe?) time travel was always going to appeal to my interests. Grade: A-

Susan Sarandon shines after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Jason Gives Thanks

Howdy folks it's Jason here - with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" we gave some thanks for two classic Christina Ricci performances (have you voted yet?) but it's a rich world with lots of good to great stuff in it so here are a few more things that have brought a big dumb smile to my big dumb face this year.

- For Getting On and the spectacular showcase it's given three crazy talented actresses (not to mention all the smaller roles they fill in with even more under-used gems), letting each of them be both hysterically funny and heartbreaking within the matter of milliseconds (and for introducing the phrase "anal horn" into my vocabulary - that one's a keeper!)

- For the venom that dripped off of Rose Byrne's every ace line reading in Spy (this scene in particular)

- For whoever is tailoring Chad Radwell's khakis on Scream Queens so they're more obscene than if Glen Powell was wearing nothing at all (don't get me wrong, he looks good that way too)

- For the way that Donald Sutherland says the word "PLUCKED" at Julianne Moore in Mockingjay Part 2, which will become my ringtone the minute the clip is available

- For the way that the camera made sweet love to every golden angle of Matthias Schoenaerts in Far From the Madding Crowd (runner-up: Alexander Skarsgard in Diary of a Teenage Girl)

- For the Film Society of Lincoln Center here in NYC, which has spent the last several months spinning from the New York Film Festival (Carol and The Lobster holla) to their annually wonderful "Scary Movies" program to the currently running Todd Haynes retrospective to the upcoming David Lynch & Douglas Sirk series that will swallow whole my holidays -- it's like they're programming one of my favorite screens in the city (at Walter Reade) just for me and me alone, and I like that

- Related to the previous, I am beyond thankful for having gotten to see Bernard Rose's 1988 gem Paperhouse on a big screen, something I've been waiting to do for 25 years

- For Greta Gerwig in Mistress America, who gave yet another stellar comic performance that we'll be grooving on decades from now, long after whatever wins the Best Actress trophy is remembered as much more than a statistic #justiceforcomicbrilliance

- For Catherine Keener's wig on Show Me a Hero

- For Golden Girls repeats (a perennial blessing but Keener's wig made me think of it)

- For Guillermo Del Toro's infatuation with oozing wounds and puffy sleeves and incest, maybe not in that specific order

- For Furiosa!

- For Nathaniel who generously opened up the doors to The Film Experience and let this lunatic in. And of course for all you wonderful people out there in the dark, indulging my whims week after week and offering up some of the funniest randomest and smartest retorts on the web - as a wise old woman in little girl ringlets once said you are all the wind beneath my wings. Fly away, you let me fly so high, oh you, you, you.

While Jason Adams wishes his parents had named him after the killer in the Friday the 13th movies, he takes comfort in the fact that on their first date they went to see The Exorcist. He writes lots of daily nonsense at My New Plaid Pants, mostly about movies and dudes in movies, not necessarily in that order.  [Follow Jason on Twitter]. All of Jason postings here.

More "About" Team Experience.