Beauty vs Beast: Sister City, Sister Bumpkin

JA from MNPP here with today's very special Labor Day edition of our "Beauty vs Beast" series. Whether you're employed crunching numbers and dodging bitchy CEOs in the big city offices of Moramax or you've opted for the more laidback homey halls of the Hollowmade factory down in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia, I hope we can all take a breather from doing the work we love today to unite over one indisputable fact - Lily Tomlin, who is turning 75 today, is a national treasure.

Clearly we've chosen 1988's twin comedy Big Business as this week's theme - as I was eleven and deep in a Bette Midler phase when this film came out I hope you'll forgive me for admitting this movie means a lot to me. (I have previously done an extensive appreciation over at my own site.) Rewatching it for the possibly one millionth time this weekend it's impossible for me to tell if it's actually any good or if it's just so deep-seated inside of me I can't see the forest for the Plaza Hotel.

But man does it make me laugh, and I go back and forth each time between who's funnier: Lily Tomlin as City Rose (slapstick with muffins and dogs in elevators) and Country Rose (Rattlesnake bracelets and water-tight frog asses) or Bette Midler as Country Sadie (Lee Press On Nails and UFOs) and City Sadie (Blood Clots and Tiaras). So I'm making y'all pick!

poll by twiigs.com

Before anybody says anything yes I was torn between doing the poll this way and asking you to choose Country Sisters vs City Sisters instead, but a showdown between the two actresses ultimately won that dispute in my mind. If you'd like to offer up your cases whichever way in the comments though, feel free! You have seven days.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we were wishing Sean Connery a happy birthday by dipping our Goldfinger into the James Bond pool, and sure enough it's that wascally secret agent who floated to the top with a whopping 77% of the vote. Said Henry:

"Seriously? Put Bond against Bond or Villain against Villain and you might have a fight, but there is no way a Bond can lose against anyone but an equal and Bond has no equals."

Beauty Vs Beast: Double Oh Golden Boys

JA from MNPP here, using this week's round of our "Beauty vs Beast" series to commemorate the occasion of the 84th anniversary of the birth of that paragon of brute debonair charm, Sean Connery. Who even knew "brute" and "debonair" could be a simultaneous thing til he showed us? Rock 'em sock 'em and shake them martinis, it's a Bond off. I waffled between a couple of villains to face him off against - I do love Dr. No and his awesome plastic head bubble - but when it comes to a bigger-than-bad personality I think the odds are in Gold's favor.

poll by twiigs.com

I just flicked the laser's ON switch - you have one week to make your choice before your bits-and-pieces get all crispy-like, so maybe make it timely this week? I mean, I'm only thinking of your privates.

PREVIOUSLY We dove down under da sea to duke it out between Disney's ginger mermaid princess and the big bad brassy sea-hag whos after her pipes... well poor sweet Ariel kinda never stood a chance against so much divine deliciousness; Ursula swam off with a pirate booty's full two-thirds of the vote. Said Alan P:

"Ariel may be the leading lady we all love, but a diva is a diva, and a diva is forever!"

Tues Top Ten: Hottest Hotties of 1989

Here's abstew to continue our celebration of 1989 as the 'year of the month'. Happy 25th, 1989!

As we look back at 1989 in preparation for the Smackdown, it's important not to forget what the movies have always been about: really attractive people. The Me Decade of the 80's, perhaps the greatest/craziest time in regards to fashion and hairstyles, if they taught us anything at all, it isn't that less is more. Oh, no. More is MORE! More shoulder pads, more eye shadow, more crunchy perms with mall bangs. So let's celebrate the 80's excess with these cinematic hotties of 1989. 

Honorable Mention: Julia Roberts "Blush and Bashful Hottie", Daniel Day-Lewis "Method Actor Hottie", Meg Ryan "I'll Have What She's Having Hottie", Kenneth Branagh "New Shakespearian Hottie", Nicole Kidman "Just An Ozzie Girl On a Boat With Billy Zane Hottie"

10. Sean Connery

You Call This Archeology Hottie

Why Him: The once and eternally forever Bond star proved that even at the age of 59, he could still make the ladies swoon when he played Indiana Jones' father in the number one box office hit of 1989, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Romancing women half his age, and even managing to make a tweed travel suit and bow tie as sexy as one of Bond's tuxes, Connery like a fine aged wine, just got better with age.

Sexiest 1989 Moment: People magazine named the Scot The Sexiest Man Alive for its 1989 cover story. The headline hilariously reads, "Older, balder...and better! Here's one leading man who doesn't need to fake it." No word on exactly what other leading men were faking at the time. And apparently John Goodman was up for the title that year, so...yeah. People magazine - the nation's leading authority of unconventional sex appeal.

9. Rosie Perez
(and 8 more sexpots after the jump)

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We Need To Talk About James Bond's **** in "Goldfinger"

[This article contains 50 year-old spoilers.]

Goldfinger (1964) Directed by Guy Hamilton.

If you're alive and semi-conscious about pop culture you know the James Bond template even if you've never seen one: Action Prologue, superfluous; Bond Girls, multiple not all of whom survive; Locations, multiple across the Globe; Talkative Villains; Impressive Gadgetry; Salty Quips; Fancy-Ass Title Sequence (with its own mandatory template items). Much of that was established or fine-tuned right here in the third Bond film Goldfinger (1964).

But we need to talk about James Bond's cock. By my count, imagination, and visual cross-checking [ahem] he is exceptionally virile, has an impressive rock-hard member, and beds three women in Goldfinger.

And yet...

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Beauty Vs Beast: Him Freud, Her Jane

JA from MNPP here - The Film Experience is taking a look back at 1964 all this month and so it's the perfect time for our "Beauty Vs Beast" series to take a look at a movie that's turning 50 next month (it was released on July 22nd, 1964) and wades so deep into morally murky waters you're never quite sure which end of the screen you're rooting for (if any), making it perfect for this poll - I speak of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie.

Starring Tippi Hedren as the titular troubled girl turned to theivery and Sean Connery as the businessman alternately turned on and repelled by that rascally blonde's baser instincts, Marnie's awash in dream symbols (so many snapping purses!) and psychiatry talk - too much of the latter by my count; like Hitch's film Spellbound I  always find his movie's at their least interesting when they're explicitly spelling out his psychological obsessions. Give me the fluid illogic of Vertigo over it any day. But like the keys and key-holes that clutter every other frame of Marnie, the film is most interesting as far as the clues it further offers us towards an understanding of Alfred Hitchcock and his never not fascinating psychological profile. It shuffles some not-before-seen puzzle pieces into place.

Hitch was always putting the audience into morally compromising situations, getting us to side with bullies and lunatics - even his most well-intentioned heroes found themselves doing terrible things (think of the scene in the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much where Jimmy Stewart drugs Doris Day without telling her so he can calm her down). But Marnie for me is the tipping point in Hitch's filmography where his characters become almost uniformly unlikeable; there's an angriness (or worse, an indfference) to the last decade and a half of his work (yes even in the so-called comedy of The Trouble With Harry) - it reaches its apex with Frenzy, a film I find exceedingly unpleasant to watch with its cast of shrewish women and sweaty men (it works as a horror film, but it makes me extraneously sad all the same), but the seeds are planted with Mark and Marnie, two people just a little too damaged and bizarre for me to ever find myself rooting for them in any way.

So why not force us to pick?!

poll by twiigs.com

You've got one week to vote and to sell us in the comments on the frigid blonde or the manly man that's come to beat some sanity into her. Choices, oh choices.

PREVIOUSLY And speaking of choices, with last week's poll pitting Natalie Portman's White Swan against Mila Kunis' Black Swan? Y'all couldn't make one! IT'S A TIE, YOU GUYS. 428 votes, split perfectly at 50/50. I can't even tell you how giddy that makes me - the movie about doubling and dopplegangers split us right down the middle. We look in the mirror and we see all of the faces. We are legion. I'll share to two quotes from y'all since we went both ways:

"Nina only cause I don't think Lily would take the loss as hard." -- SVG

"Team Lily because that fierce little Russki NEVER would have fallen flat on her ass on opening night. Get your shit together Nina!" -- TB