I'm wishing... (I'm wishing)... 🎶

Someday our funds will come...Hello dear readers!

Today is your host's birthday (c'est moi, Nathaniel R) and I want to thank my team for filling in for me while I was on a wee vacation --special thanks to Chris Feil who has been a superstar since joining the team and really jumped in daily in my absence. In case you don't follow me on twitter or instagram, I was away at Disney World, a birthday treat from my bestie.

I'm not quite back up to speed from the trip so I shall return in the morning with a jampacked Wednesday through Friday of blogging for y'all since I know you haven't heard from me in a bit. I'll answer reader questions, return to Pfandom retrospective, oh and also BEST SHOT - PARENT TRAP (tomorrow night - pushed back 24 hours so you still have time to join us!), and more.

Since it's my birthday, I'm allowed to do a wee bit of fundraising. I did some wishing at Snow White's well while I was away and if she can survive a coma, get a Prince Charming, and a whole kingdom, and a whole new set of miniature friends, surely The Film Experience can continue strong another year with your support! 

C O N S I D E R 

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Whether you love the Oscar coverage, actress-obsessing, theme weeks, retrospectives, random silliness, or any of our goodies show your love. There are two ways to donate, subscription (which is wonderful as its steady and something we can count on) or a one time donation. A huge sloppy wet kiss and thank you to the few handfuls of you who have already done this. $2.50 a month from multiple people really helps more than you'd think.

C O N S I D E R . . .

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Wonder Woman at The Alamo Drafthouse

Please welcome guest contributor Shannon Fox with a report from the all female screening of Wonder Woman at the Alamo Drafthouse.

Photo Credit: Proma Khosla/Mashable (Right to left: Stephanie Barnes, Annemarie Mancino, Shannon Fox)

Be careful.”  

This was the general response by friends and family, both male and female, upon learning that I had secured tickets to the women-only Wonder Woman screening at my local Alamo Drafthouse.  And, I mean, sure, we live in a scary world nowadays-- crazy things happen.  But it’s a pretty atypical response to catching a flick, you know?  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I usually hear “let me know if it’s any good” rather than “please don’t get murdered” when it comes to going to the movies.

But if that isn’t telling of the female experience in today’s society, I’m not sure what is.  

Alamo’s women-only screenings have garnered quite a bit of press over the past week, thanks to the multitude of mostly-male detractors on the internet.  There have been lawsuits, threats of storming the theater, and demands of men-only screenings in the future (for the female-led The Last Jedi, inexplicably) to name a few. Because of that, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect this past Sunday...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin'

For pride month, we're looking at a new queer-themed documentary each week beginning with The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, which continues to play festivals around America.

“I’d like to tell you about the first time I had sex.”

This is a like spoken by the one and only Armistead Maupin in Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. It’s spoken by him as he sits in a relaxed chair on a plainly adorned stage in front of a crowd of predominantly gay men. It garners a laugh from those in the audience there (as well as presumably the audience at home; I did), but it’s a moment that is quite indicative of the film around it.

Kroot’s film is not one that is shy about sex. It couldn’t possibly be. To do so would be to deny the essence of what made Maupin such an important figure in both literary and queer history. Sex was an important part of him and his work. To hear it spoken of with such ease in this documentary is a relief – and that’s before even getting to the part where he details where and how he met his future husband, a moment that adds a wonderful dash of gay modern reality to a story so rooted in the allure of 1970s gay life.

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Terry Gilliam's "Quixote" is Complete

Chris here, with some heartwarming news: a film nearly twenty years in the making has finally wrapped filming. You'll remember Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempts to adapt Cervantes's legendary Don Quixote to the big screen as they were told in the documentary Lost in La Mancha - floods, lost funding, and casting woes made this film one of the most notorious productions of all time.

But now Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will rise from the ashes of cinema history. Gilliam has completed filming - with a new cast that includes Adam Driver, Jonathan Price, and Stellan Skarsgård - and Amazon will bring the film to theatres sometime next year. Someone please protect the digital print (or film, if Gilliam went that route) from any mishandling so that Gilliam isn't put through the ringer again!

Gilliam's last film The Zero Theorem came and went quietly, but we suspect this one will get much attention on arrival given its unfortunate history. You can probably bank on a major film festival to debut the film as well. Regardless, it will be fantastic to see this story come to a happy ending for Gilliam! Do you have any troubled productions that fascinate you?

Beauty vs Beast: Bad Romance

Howdy, everybody - Jason from MNPP here with a brand new round of "Beauty vs Beast" for you on this first Monday of June. Coming up on this first Friday of June a movie called My Cousin Rachel is coming out (you can watch the trailer right here) that stars Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin and is adapted from the 1951 book by Daphne du Maurier (who also wrote The Birds and Rebecca). The book was already turned into a movie once in 1952 with  Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland (which I have never seen; have you?) - anyway it's one of my favorite genres, the overheated gothic romance, brimming with lace and poisons, and I can't wait.

So in the spirit of such things this week we're tackling one of the greatest of all when it comes to these stories - Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. There are a couple of film adaptations but let's go with the most recent, Cary Fukunaga's 2011 film starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, since I found it a grand adaptation.

PREVIOUSLY We spent last week trapped in that damn cryogenic container so we've got to skip back two weeks to our last competition, which pit the Ellen Ripley of Ridley Scott's Alien against the Ellen Ripley of James Cameron's Aliens. And it was the bigger badder bitchier (her words not mine!) version of the latter who stomped away with 67% of your votes. Said markgordonuk:

"Alien is my favourite movie but the Aliens performance is something else, the looks and glances, the fear, the physicality, the line readings, the no bull attitude, I could go on, such an Iconic performance, everyone knows who Ripley is."