Beauty vs Beast: Two Princes

Jason from MNPP here, wishing a happy 44th birthday to the perennially underrated James Marsden today! He's not so underrated that he's ever really gone without work at least (and he's currently riding the zeigeist a bit with the success of Westworld, although I don't know if his moon-eyed compoke Teddy is really what's keeping anybody coming back to that show week after week) but underrated he still somehow seems. That's an impressive impression to give for someone as breathtakingly gorgeous as him! No small feat.

I suppose it's the "Nice Guy Loser" role he's been called on to play time and again - we've watched him watch The Girl go off with the right Mr. Right so many times we've built a stockpile of empathy for him. Speaking of, for today's for "Beauty vs Beast" let's hit up just one of those roles, the 2007 hit film Enchanted (which insanely is turning 10 in November, can you believe it)...

PREVIOUSLY Last week's It Comes at Night contest between Joel Edgerton & Christopher Abbott's survivalist characters was a tight race for a bit but the latter pulled out in front eventually taking 62% of your vote - said Nick T:

"Their scenes together were my favorite parts of the film, their beards my favorite characters."

Beauty vs Beast: Woods, Men

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- I usually try to choose older movies for this series because it's more likely y'all have seen them and have an opinion. That is unless we're talking about great big cultural juggernauts - those are usually safe. It Comes at Night isn't an old movie, and it wasn't so much a cultural juggernaut either, but here we are anyway. The film had a stellar ad campaign (thanks to A24, the king of stellar ad campaigns these days) so it did get some chatter at the time of its release, but it ultimately only made just under 20 million bucks. This is no Avatar.

And yet here on the eve of its release on blu-ray tomorrow I still want to highlight the movie, and I have faith that a good portion of the TFE audience, who already knew Trey Edward Shults' amazing Krisha, was the audience that sought the movie out. For good (I loved it) or for ill (I know a lot of people felt cheated by the ad campaign which baited and switched a supernatural horror film for a tense chamber piece). And you'll maybe have an opinion on who was in the right - Joel Edgerton's homeowner Paul or Christopher Abbott's encroacher Will.

PREVIOUSLY For no reason in particular we hit up Halle Berry's Catwoman for last week's contest but it was her nemesis, the skin-care supervillain played by Sharon Stone, who slinked away with the 65% win - said Eder Arcas:

"... the WINNER here gotta be SHARON STONE, the woman delivers camp like no one else , she`s elegant and graceful cool, because, well, she's Sharon Stone. You always get the feeling she's just about ready to snap a full on crazy - but that kinda IS what is interesting about Sharon Stone. Sort of a female Jack Nicholson, but hotter in heels and a skirt."

Podcast: My Cousin Wonder Woman, The Beguiled

Well, that was quite a hiatus. The podcast is back though we might be a bit slow to rev up to weekly again and please excuse all our airconditioners and fans running in the background. We're melting here in NYC.

In this episode Nathaniel reunites with Joe and Nick to catch up and talk five newish movies.

Index (40 minutes)
00:01 "What's this lady for?" (Part 1)
02:20 The Beguiled
08:25 My Cousin Rachel
13:50 Wonder Woman
29:30 Beatriz at Dinner
33:30 It Comes at Night (*spoilers*)
37:45 "What's this lady for?" (Part 2)

Best Question I've ever been asked by a 3 1/2 year-old: "What's this lady for?" Where to even begin? #nicolekidman #babysitting #guncle

A post shared by Nathaniel R (@nathaniel_tfe) on Jun 24, 2017 at 9:14pm PDT

 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. 

Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

My Cousin Wonder Woman

Review: "It Comes at Night"

by Chris Feil

After last year’s Krisha, Trey Edward Shults returns to the horror of family dynamics with post-apocalyptic nightmare It Comes At Night. This time he’s equipped with higher production value and more familiar faces than that astute micro-budgeted debut, though Night is just as personal. His resulting sophomore feature is part Greek tragedy, part vague social polemic, and one of the most terrifying films in several years.

Set in a remote, wooded mini-mansion, a family has made their home a fortress from some unspecified apocalypse. The elderly father of Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) has fallen “sick”, leaving her husband Paul (Joel Edgerton) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to dispatch of him for their own safety. The desperate invasion of another family (led by Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) tests both the reclusive family’s empathy and rigorously protected lifestyle. Meanwhile, Travis is having increasingly vivid visions of the encroaching malignant threat that test his (and our) sense of reality.

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"It Comes At Night" is Coming to Scare You

Chris here. While yesterday’s trailer for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled certainly rattled us, here’s another first look to give you the more terrified kind of chills: Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha follow-up, It Comes At Night.

Shults’ first film was a decidedly homegrown effort, but this looks to be a spooky step up in scale and ambition if no less psychologically taxing. The director has also assembled an intriguing cast with Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, and Christopher Abbott. The trailer keeps the specifics of this post-apocalyptic vision under wraps, but hints at some kind of malevolent force at play while Shults continues to mine tense family dynamics. From the opening shot of the trailer alone, we can probably bet this will be one of the year's most formiddable horror films.

Krisha was one of last year’s many promising directorial debuts (even if it had been kicking around for a while). Considering it played the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes, might Night be heading to the Croisette in some form as well? It Comes At Night opens on August 25.