🎬 😣 🤳 🙏

by Jason Adams

I fear that in delivering this news I will be able to actually see the liver spots pop up on the tips of my typing fingers and travel with sudden immediacy up my arms -- something like a smaller version of that scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the dude turns to a skeleton and dust in ten flat seconds. But throw all the "Old Man Yells At Clouds" memes at me you must, the news that Crawl director Alexandre Aja and producer Steven Spielberg -- who has recently made headlines about the sanctity of the movie-going experience, cough cough -- are teaming up to bring interactive-by-cell-phone "Choose Your Own Adventure" type storytelling to movie theaters makes my thin skin shudder and die...

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Thoughts I Had... while staring at the first promotional image from West Side Story (2020)

by Nathaniel R

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Toto, we're definitely not in Kansas Oz anymore. We've gone from incredibly expressive color to desaturated earth tones. Whose idea was it to base the color palette on a Nancy Meyers interior rather than from the incredible cinematography and design of the 1961 classic...

We're not the only ones worried about this very drab color palette. Consider...

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Months of Meryl: The Post (2017)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#52 — Katharine “Kay” Graham, pioneering Washington Post publisher who authorized the printing of the Pentagon Papers.

JOHN: Since it was first announced in March of 2017, deep into the first hundred days of the Trump presidency, The Post moved at a breakneck speed from rewriting to shooting to post-production before it quickly arrived in theaters in December of that year. Spielberg had paused production on his historical drama The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and after reading a spec script by Liz Hannah, set the gears into motion on The Post, assembling his usual team (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, among others), along with two screen legends who had never before shared a single frame. This urgent sense of timeliness is palpable in The Post, which is both a riveting period piece about a landmark historical moment and a rousing paean to the free press in our distressing present...

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Beauty vs Beast: Dame Julie, If You're Nasty

Jason Adams of MNPP here with our last "Beauty vs Beast" until the New Year, and what better way to ring out an exhausting 2018 than with a spoonful full of sugar to make all that bitter medicine go down -- the according-to-me scrumdiddlyumptious Mary Poppins Returns is hitting theaters this week and so let's get our Dame Julie Andrews on with a show-down between her two top roles, a frisky Alpine nun and a nanny from the stars... 

survey software

PREVIOUSLY Never underestimate the power of poetry, yall -- in our re-match between Shakespease in Love and Saving Private Ryan once again twas the Bard who came out on top, with 70% of your vote. Said par:

"The pen is mightier than the sword."

25th Anniversary Memoir: "Jurassic Park"

by Lynn Lee

June 1993.  It was my birthday, and I’d invited a group of my girl friends over for a small celebration that would include a movie outing.  I don’t remember exactly why I picked Jurassic Park.  I hadn’t read the book, I wasn’t yet a full-on movie buff, I didn’t like scary movies, and I wasn’t really into dinosaurs.  Yet something about the tremendous buzz surrounding this “adventure 65 million years in the making” must have penetrated my social bubble because I remember us all being excited to see it.

Whatever our expectations were, Jurassic Park blew them away.  From the moment that opening eerie chorus and single bamboo flute dissolved into the rustle of an unknown, unseen thing in a crate that within three minutes lay savage waste to one unfortunate worker, we were all transfixed in our seats and couldn’t have moved if our lives had depended on it...

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