my new plaid pants

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Antichrist (2009)

He: Acorns don't cry, you know that as well as I do.
That's what fear is, thoughts distort reality.
Not the other way around.

A happy 10 to what we thought would be Lars von Trier's most epic love poem to depression -- who'd have known that two years later he'd have Kirsten Dunst's sadness become so magnetic that it pulled a planet out of the sky right onto our heads, or that four years later he'd release a two part magnum opus devoted to the sight of Charlotte Gainsbourg getting sexually abused by sweet little Jamie Bell, or that nine years later he'd set up a series of comic interludes involving Matt Dillon, movie star of the 1980s, slicing up Elvis Presley's grand-daughter? Oh Lars, you devil.

In all seriousness though LVT remains, for all his eye-jabbing provocation, one of my favorite movie artists, and I think Antichrist is absolutely gorgeous and scarring and perfect in its own over-the-top traumatic way. And with Willem Dafoe giving the performance of the year here in 2019...

Willem Dafoe gives (give or take Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell) the performance of the year in The Lighthouse. He sells a speech at the film's midpoint so soaked in purple prose no mere mortal could deliver it and he delivers it like gangbusters, thereby proving DAFOE IS GOD NOW https://t.co/477bqHQK7n
— His Name Was Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 21, 2019

... I think it's also important to look back upon the decade this man has had just bug our collective eyes out in awe. Is any actor taking the risks, the real risks, that he is? Not just like taking a break from eating lunch to skinny himself down or rolling around in cow innards for an Oscar like some actors who get called risk-takers -- please point me in the direction of another person with a filmography this decade that includes the giant swings from Antichrist to Fantastic Mr. Fox to Nymphomaniac to Pasolini to John Wick to Finding Dory to The Florida Project to Aquaman to The Lighthouse?

And keep in mind for brevity's sake I skipped dozens of titles there, and these are just from the last decade without even diving back to his work with Lynch and Scorsese and on and on. As you can maybe tell this is just the front tip of the Awards Season spear of my proselytizing pro-Willem, so get ready for plenty such -- I warn ye!

Timothée Chalamet Three Times

Impatience demands I post the photos from Timothée's new L'Uomo Vogue shoot as I find them and not wait until they're all available, hence this being the third post in the past week about this -- see here and then see here for the others -- even though I know there are more to come, such as this one that at this link that hasn't gotten properly scanned online yet since the magazine just dropped today. What can we say? Timmy gets us excited.
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You Think You Know a Movie...

It's hard to believe that there's still things I can learn about Ang Lee's 2005 masterpiece Brokeback Mountain, but our pal Nathaniel just got one of those things out of the film's cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto at The Film Experience -- click on over to discover a thing!

And a happy 65 to Ang Lee today!

Five Frames From ?

What movie is this?

Good Morning, World

I've posted shots similar to the above of Julian Morris before -- see here and see here -- but that one above appears to be a fresh outtake from that shoot, and we'll keep on taking them and posting them as long as they want to give them to us. But even better if you ask me is the shot below, which comes via the stylist for the same photo-shoot seen at this link for 7th Man Magazine -- I can't exactly tell you for sure that that's Julian dropping trou down to his skimpy little CK briefs since, you know, his head's not there to identify him with, but since he's tagged as such by a working professional (and Julian himself liked the post) I think it's safe to assume this is totes legit, blessings upon us.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Find Me in 10 Days

I should turn this pair of new Timmy photos for L'uomo Vogue into a gif of Timmy covering his eyes because that's me whenever I see anything online about Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name book sequel, out next Tuesday -- I don't want to see it! Leave me be, internet! If you spoil anything for me I swear to GOD.

From Castles To Cannibals

If we have to make due without any Melanie Lynskey on the second season of Castle Rock -- don't get me wrong I am real excited about Lizzy Caplan playing Annie Wilkes, but still, Melanie Lynskey -- then at least we can hold on to today's super news of what the world's sweetest (but not in an annoying way) actress is up to: click on over to The Film Experience, and believe me it's worth clicking on if you like cool things, to find out.

13 Cakes of Halloween #4

When John Waters had a great big retrospective here in NYC a couple of years ago at Film at Lincoln Center they let him program some movies, and naturally one of those movies was the 1983 Peter Weller creature feature Of Unknown Origin, which has Robocop himself facing down a relentless rat tormenting him in his fancy NYC apartment.

A rat popping out of a birthday cake is quite possibly the Greatest Joke Ever Told About New York -- it's like New York Hero The Pizza Rat had to go and get a job as a stripper on the weekends in order to pay his exorbitant rent. And I'm obsessed with the endless montage of reaction shots in this sequence -- every kid at the party gets their moment!

Damn straight, little girl. This movie's kind of tough to see -- Scream Factory put out a blu-ray a couple of years ago but it's not streaming anywhere online I don't think and clips are even hard to come by. Not sure if YouTube will leave this up or if it will violate something but for now I'll post the clips of this scene here for your enjoyment:

Click here for all the Cakes of Halloween!

It's Lee Pace's Galaxy Again

When I was visiting my hometown last I was scouring the bookshelves of the local thrift store, as I'm way wont to do, and I saw some copies of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of sci-fi novels -- which I have never read -- and it both occurred to me that I should probably read those some time and also that it's probably only a matter of time until somebody tries to turn them into a series. Well one of those things is happening sooner than the other, as Apple's just announced they're adapting the books for their new TV platform and it will star sci-fi superstar Lee Pace (with this and The Hobbit and the Marvel movies he's basically got Comic-Cons booked until the end of time) and Chernobyl stud Jared Harris.

"Based on Isaac Asimov's novel series of the same name, Foundation chronicles the epic saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it. Harris will star as Hari Seldon, a mathematical genius who predicts the demise of the empire. Pace is set as Brother Day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy. David S. Goyer serves as the lone show-runner on the series."

(thx Mac) So who's read the books and what would you knowledgable people have to say about all of this? Since every time Lee Pace attaches himself to a new project my main and only thought process is -- how much time will this take from him signing on to do a new season of Pushing Daisies, and can he use his paycheck from this to fund a new season of Pushing Daisies, and so on. In summation here's a photo Lee posted on his Instagram of himself standing half-naked on a cliff-side whilst wearing long socks, as normal people do:

Quote of the Day

It is generally considered "a good thing" when you read an interview with somebody and it ends and you want more of the interview -- they did their job, they entertained you -- but I'm actually hella annoyed at this new interview with Kirsten Dunst at IndieWire for ending. It's not even especially short -- they cover several subjects from Lars von Trier's dumbness to her recent admission that she's tired of getting ignored come awards time -- but Dunst is, per usual, so delightful and smart and funny and did I say delightful, well, any short is too short. I could read interviews with her for days. Here's a choice bit about how she just replaced Elisabeth Moss on Jane Campion's next movie called Power of the Dog:

"“I feel for her,” Dunst said of Moss, who couldn’t go through with Power of the Dog due to a scheduling conflict. “It sucks, but it’s happened to me, too. But I’m also, like, ‘Great!'” She also teased, “Another piece of funny news is going to come out about this movie soon, but I can’t be the one to leak it.”"

LOL at "Great!" Anyway Power of the Dog so far co-stars Paul "The Riddler" Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch as brothers who're both ranchers in Montana in the 1920s, and who go to war when Dano's character marries Dunst's. It's based on a 1967 book by Thomas Savage -- anybody read it? It sounds like something I might want to read -- the latest edition has an afterword written by Annie Proulx and Amazon compares the book itself to Brokeback Mountain, in its "pitch-perfect evocation of time and place."

I wonder what Dunst's "funny news" about the project could be? Maybe her ex-bf (and the star of Dano's recent gem Wildlife) Jake Gyllenhaal will show up as some old-timey iteration of Jack Twist, making the Brokeback talk legits. One can dream. PS if anybody wants to go nuts with me about how wonderful On Becoming a God in Central Florida's first season was in the comments let's go at it.

Kirsten Dunst is the Great American Actress of our age pic.twitter.com/TL8JrmQuzU
— His Name Was Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) August 28, 2019

BHFF: A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio

There seem to be a few standards that will play every Horror Film Festival worth its weight in ripped off fingernails and butcher's aprons -- there's something for the Gore-hounds, there's something for the Goths, there's something for the Gays. (And if you're a gay goth gore-hound you're the luckiest person in the world... at least for one week of the year. Forget all those other awful weeks - this is your time to shine!) Well I think it's time to add to that list the Anthology film, which is inherently something for everybody thanks to that anthology structure -- our minds and selves have seemingly become so fractured and unfocused in this here brand new modern century it only makes sense that our movies would follow suit.

Anthology films have been around forever of course, but it does seem as if there's been an explosion of them with regards to the Horror Genre over the past few years -- they say that making a cheap nasty grimy Horror Film was a good way to kick one's way into the business; well making a short of note is even cheaper, and there are so many people trying to kick their way in these days that the Horror Anthology Film seems a natural fit.

A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, which played the Brooklyn Horror Fest yesterday, feels even more stripped bald right down to those bare intentions -- the shorts that make up the meat of this thing existed before this film, and were then gathered up by the Argentinian film-makers Nicolas and Luciano Onetti, who built an anthology around them. The structure sees a radio host, kind of a Stevie Wayne by way of Wayne's World, telling his own scary stories on the air, and accepting stories from call-ins, which then become the individual segments. (The radio host bits are by far the worst bits, as the actor playing the host is board stiff.)

Some of the segments are extremely short, and some are just normal short -- none of them feel especially meaty; there's nothing as memorable as any single segment of Creepshow, for instance. But there are good gags, good jump-scares and some real memorable ghouls on display -- per usual some are just better than others. It's really sort of impossible to review an anthology film unless you go piece by piece but you're never gonna get that take from me; just know I have seen worse anthology films in the past few years than this one, which does gift us with a couple of the real wallops you're looking for.

His Name is Luca

A happy 35th birthday today to Luca Marinelli, the old-fashioned-seeming Italian movie-star most recently seen by yours truly in the NYFF movie Martin Eden -- I never did review that myself but I thought it was pretty captivating; it felt like an old-school political epic a la Reds, in a good way? It was maybe a lot of movie, a big movie, to plunk down in the middle of a film festival -- it's one that deserves more thought than I could really give it before I shuffled off to the next one. I hope to revisit it when it gets a proper release here in the US, which it probably will... here in New York anyway. Anyway anyway click here to see a lot more of Luca, who we've feted before, and will most certainly again. He's got That Thing.