How Swede It Is

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I think it's official - Swedish actor Sverrir Gudnason is the actor that I have posted the most about without ever having seen him act in a single damn thing. I was going to see the Borg McEnroe movie (in which he played the first half of that title) for you know, reasons but that movie came and left without much of any release and I still haven't gotten around to it. But all that is about to change...

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... now that he's the co-star in the new Lisbeth Salander movie, The Girl in the Spider's Web. (That there above is the brand new second trailer; see the first trailer here.) He is playing the Daniel Craig role, insert something something about Daniel Craig's little black underwear right here. 

Sverrir isn't the only hot piece stuck in this Spider's Web either - the film also co-stars Claes Bang and Lakeith Stanfield and new obsession of mine Volker Bruch, who's the lead on Tom Tykwer's Netflix show Babylon Berlin, which I recently burned through...

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It’s not fair how good Volker Bruch makes sickly eye circles look on Babylon Berlin pic.twitter.com/y8FLhHw6VO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) September 3, 2018

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Have any of you watched Babylon Berlin? I quite liked it and am dying for more, but I haven't heard many people talk about it. Maybe it's just that I'm late to the party -- I think it dropped on Netflix ages ago. Anyway to bring us back to the start I've got more of Mr. Gudnason (via, thx Mac) for us, hit the jump and there they'll be...

Quote of the Day

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"Oh my god. It’s such a distraction,” Johnson says. “I was like, guys, you’ve made a huge mistake getting him to do this, because everyone is going to forget everything that happened [in the film] until this point. Chris is going to come onto the screen, and his body is outrageous, it’s unbelievable, like a crazy, crazy thing to look at, and his shirt’s completely unbuttoned... Then he would eat a bowl of Smarties and you’re like: ‘You’re an asshole, fuck you!’ I don’t eat anything sweet: I eat green things for three months in order to fit into a pair of jeans. And he eats whatever the fuck he wants and looks like he was literally chiselled out of marble — it’s insane.”

Dakota Johnson has quickly become one of my favorite people, you guys. Making swift friends with her Bigger Splash director slash genius Luca Guadagnino helps obviously, but she's really made a great career out of horn-dogging on her hunk co-stars...

... bless her. She's doing the movie star thing right! That quote up top is Dakota talking to People Magazine (thx Mac) about her Bad Times at El Royale co-star Chris Hemsworth...

... you can see more of Chris' marble torso here in the trailer for the movie, which is out on October 5th. Anyway ever since this...

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This picture makes me love Dakota Johnson so very much pic.twitter.com/9GBY8cJlX6

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 2, 2017

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... I knew Dakota was our kinda people, and she keeps proving me right. I hope that this fall goes very well for her, with both Bad Times and Suspiria. We deserve it. Dakota deserves it, dammit.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Pretty Poison (1968)

Sue Ann: You know, when grown-ups 

do it, it's kind of dirty. That's because 

there's no one to punish them. 

A happy 50 to this movie, released on

this day in 1968. Who's a fan? 

Tuesday Weld is just so freaking good.

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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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View this post on Instagram

Buenos días! 📷 @albaniasofia

A post shared by Miguel Angel Silvestre (@miguelangelsilvestre) on Sep 17, 2018 at 12:55am PDT

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Morning to Miguel, and the rest of you people I suppose. 

I'm at NYFF screenings again this morning.

Entertain yourselves. I'll see you this afternoon.

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Run To Riz

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Okay I'm off to see The Sisters Brothers now. 

I will leave Riz here to keep you company. Enjoy.

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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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The Ones Who Crawl at Night

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Hey everybody -- I have a really brief window of time here in between finishing a screening of one Jake Gyllenhaal movie (Wildlife) and heading to another (The Sisters Brothers), and I'm using it point you over to The Film Experience, where today's edition of "Beauty vs Beast" is looking back on the last time Riz Ahmed and Jake shared the screen...

6 Off My Head - Fresh Frights For Fall

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Do you feel that? I think there's a chill in the air! And I think we all know what that means - Autumn is nigh and pumpkins and co-eds are due a good carving, one of them fictionally but I'll leave those choices up to you and your own personal moral compass. Halloween is a mere 44 days away now (meaning the holiday; the remake of Halloween is just 32 days away!) and the lead up to that  means one thing now in NYC - the annual Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is here!

And we'll be covering the fest this year -- thankfully it comes in (on October 11th) just as NYFF is about to leave... probably to murder it, thematically appropriately. Anyway BHFF runs a week, from October 11th to October 18th, and showcases all kinds of killer cinema -- the entire line-up can be scoped out on their website. Tickets are on sale right this very minute! But here, listen to me first, and let me share the six movies (six for evil!) that they're screening that I'm most looking forward to seeing. (Sidenote: I have already seen Cam and it is really great; read my review here.)

Knife + Heart (dir. Yann Gonzalez) -- We have already posted about this movie, when the trailer came out (see it here) - it's the arty gay (is anybody gonna yell at me if I say "Art Fag"? I can say it, I am one!) French slasher movie that played Cannes in the spring that stars Vanessa Paradis as a gay porn director who gets caught up in a murder spree. It looks very neon giallo, like Nicolas Winding Refn and Bruce la Bruce fucked and had a baby and it was a movie, this movie. (Buy tickets here!)

The Clovehitch Killer (dir. Duncan Skiles) -- I'm one hundred percent in on this movie, about a "church-going boy scout" who comes to fear his father might be the titular serial killer, because that boy scout is played by Charlie Plummer, and we're all in on Charlie Plummer after King Jack and Lean on Pete. But we're also pretty excited to see Dylan McDermott playing his maybe murderous pops, too. (Buy tickets here.)

Welcome to Mercy (dir. Tommy Bertelsen) -- This the season for blasphemous nuns (see also: The Nun) and so here's one about a young woman (Kristen Ruhlin) who starts having terrifying visions and goes to visit an isolated convent for assistance, and well you know, isolated convents being isolated convents and all, bad juju time. (Buy tickets here)

Starfish (dir. A.T. White) -- You basically have me sold on something the second you say it is "Cosmic Horror" because I do love me a good shoggoth. But then they went and described this movie - which is about a young woman mourning her best friend who is then suddenly caught up in an apocalypse - as playing "like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as remixed by H.P. Lovecraft" and, well, for sure. yeah. I'm there. (Buy tickets here.)

The Field Guide to Evil (dir. various) -- No genre does the Anthology Film better than the Horror Genre, a truth as old as time immemorial. And this sucker's selling itself with its line-up of up-and-coming foreign genre directors each taking a turn at tackling their home country's scariest myths - there are short films by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the directors of Goodnight Mommy), Can Evrenol (the director of Baskin), Agnieszka Smoczynska  (the director of The Lure), and Peter Strickland (who made Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy), among others. (Buy tickets here.)

In Fabric (dir. Peter Strickland) -- And speaking of Strickland he's got a new movie of his own playing here, in its NYC premiere - it just played Toronto and the little bit I skimmed (to stay spoiler-free of course) sounded very positive indeed. Anyway this movie's about a killer dress (a la Queen Elizabeth's noted fright frock, although probably a more consciously diabolical sort) so who cares what anybody else has to say -- I am seeing this for myself the first second I can. (Sorry folks, this one's already Sold Out!)

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And that's just scratching the surface - again, go check out the whole line-up right here. And on top of all the new stuff they're also screening an amazing batch of classics, including Sleepaway Camp, The Burning, The Funhouse, and the original and glorious My Bloody Valentine, so... you know. For sure. I am so so there. Save me a seat, Harry Warden...

Good Morning, World

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Hey, everybody! Yes you too, Lee Pace. (Always you, Lee Pace.) This is just a reminder of a thing I mentioned on Friday - namely that I'm starting NYFF screenings today and things will be kinda spotty in here for the next couple weeks, posting-wise. Today is especially crowded, but I do have a great big post coming later today for you that's pre-scheduled (it's up around 11am) so do check back. Sorry to leave you hanging but hey, you're hanging with Lee now.

Look For Me I'll Be Around

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A quick programming note! If you're looking for me (perhaps like that girl over Jake's shoulder is looking for him to jump on it) it is about to get a smidge tougher, temporarily. The press screenings for the New York Film Festival start next week, meaning posting's about to get real spotty real quick, at least for a couple of weeks. Actually now looking at my calendar it's about a full month of spottiness -- the fest  runs all the way through October 18th. Jinkies, I'm already exhausted. (Click here to see ten films I'm most looking forward to seeing at NYFF this year.)

Anyway Monday (which will probably be super quiet here at MNPP) is a thrilling day for yours truly - I'm seeing both of the Jake Gyllenhaal Autumn Films (Wildlife and The Sisters Brothers) that day, along with Elisabeth Moss' latest. But more to come on those, eventually. For now go stare at more pictures of Jake radiating hot gold-chained sleaze at this Calvin Klein event on ye Tumblr, and we'll talk when we talk. Have a fine ass weekend, everybody!

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The Great Golding

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While I should be preparing myself this weekend for the coming onslaught of ultra busyness coming my way (more on that in a bit) with anything except Seeing More Movies I fully intend to see both Paul Feig's A Simple Favor (co-starring our man Henry Golding here, pics via, thx Mac) as well as The Predator reboot this weekend -- y'all stay tuned for thoughts on those, maybe! Maybe? I don't know. Other movies out this weekend though - Slice, the pizza slasher movie that I reviewed earlier, and Lizzie, the latest Lizzie Borden with Chloë Sevigny & Kristen Stewart, which I reviewed right here. And if you guys out there reading this see anything worth mentioning why don't you tell me about it in the comments? Here I will lead you to them with a few more pics of Henry after the jump...

I Say A Little Prayer For You

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If you'd like to read a loving ode to most gorgeous restraint head on over to The Film Experience, where I just wrote something like that for Alessandro Nivola's work in Disobedience, a performance I still haven't been able to shake since seeing the movie way back in the spring at Tribeca. I'm a sucker for actorly interiority - the unshowy stuff that never gets good love from Oscar - so I usually end up unhappy come Oscar season, but I'm gonna sing its praises nonetheless. Anyway I'm also asking if y'all have anybody you're rooting for Supporting Actor wise this year, so click over and say!

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The Town That Dreaded Pepperoni

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One year at Thanksgiving I was poisoned by marijuana. I generally don't like being stoned at all - it tends to exacerbate my already semi-crippling social anxiety - but a friend brought delicious little appetizer empanadas to nosh on one holiday and I figured hey, why not a nibble? Cut to an hour later and I was gumming my mashed potatoes in a daze, the room spiraling around me - I had to go lay on my bedroom floor for the rest of the night.

That wasn't a nice feeling, and it was sort of the same feeling that I had watching Slice. Like this is somebody else's stoner party and I've got food drooling down my chin. The movie, which ostensibly is about a serial killer murdering pizza delivery boys, is actually about fifty other things on top of that - granola witches and ghosts, Chris Parnell painting three breasted ladies. It's a standard case of Try Hard that can't focus on the fork in front of it. Its bite is way off.

Okay I'll try to drop the Turkey Metaphors, pinkie swear. There are a lot of things going for Slice - that title being the giddiest among them, but it has an impressive up and comer cast (not to mention the A24 stamp of approval) given how sloppy the script is. Zazi Beetz, Y'lan Noel, Joe Keery, Hannibal Buress and Chance the Rapper all have their appeals. But Slice can't commit - it's all over the place. It's highly (highly, get it) reminiscent of Sorry To Bother You, but Boots Riley managed to hold all those balls in his hands at once - writer-director Austin Vesely isn't quite so dexterous as all that. 

Still I'm down with the strange and imaginative place that some movies have wandered towards these days, so I can't really hate on Vesely too hard for swinging for the fences and swiffing this once. My friend with the poisonous weed had good intentions, and Slice has some charm in its defiant individuality. It's like a pizza with fudge and guacamole on top - somebody's probably gonna love that, but it's not my taste. (You can watch the trailer here.)

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Snowpiercer (2013)

Wilford: Curtis, everyone has their preordained position, 

and everyone is in their place except you. 

Curtis: That's what people in the best place 

say to the people in the worst place. 

A happy 49 to director Bong Joon-ho today!

One Queen's Attitude

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Rami Malek is on the cover of Attitude magazine this month for the Queen bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody and inside the cover story (which we only have a portion of for right now; thx Mac) he apparently addresses the controversy that's been aimed at the film for "straight-washing" the character of Freddie Mercury. Says Rami:

"Let me say that I don’t think the film shies away from his sexuality or his all-consuming disease, which is obviously AIDS... I don’t know how you could avoid any of that, or if anyone would ever want to. It’s a bit absurd that anyone’s judging this from a minute trailer... The film needed to approach it in a delicate manner. You can’t shy away from it. It was an important moment to have in the film, one that ultimately is very sad but also empowering in a way... It shows you just how resilient human beings can be and how much we rely on the strength of our friends and family to get us through tough times."

"Which is obviously AIDS" is such hilariously awkward phrasing. Anyway to be fair to all of us bitching, Rami, the controversy's been around far longer than the arrival of the first trailer -- Sacha Baron Cohen basically said he dropped out of making the bio-pic circa 2013-ish because the surviving band-members didn't want to gay the thing up with too much focus on Freddie's promiscuity et cetera. So we've been anxious for awhile now.

I also think saying the film needed to approach the subject "in a delicate manner" betrays the spirit of Freddie fuckin' Mercury, who approached nothing in a delicate manner, but we'll see when the movie comes out in November I suppose. At least we've definitely got more of Allen Leech being gay with a mustache to look forward to. Hit the jump for the rest of Rami's photo-shoot for Attitude...

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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Some Blondie popped up on my iPod this morning (instantaneously making it a better morning, bless that Debbie Harry) and that mixed with the other's week's re-watch of American Gigolo and multiplied by yesterday's post ruminating on the theater antics of Paul Newman led me down the rabbit hole this morning of "Richard Gere starring in Bent on Broadway in 1979." He played the Clive Owen role (Mmm Clive Owen in Bent)... or rather the Ian McKellen role as it was originated in London. It wasn't Gere's first time on stage - he spent much of the 70s as a theater actor, understudying and replacing about fifty percent of the male characters in Grease for awhile - but his turn in Bent did smack right up against his turn in Gigolo, not to mention falling after his turns in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (swoon) and bouncing around in a jockstrap with Diane Keaton in Looking For Mr. Goodbar.

In a 2015 interview Gere said he thought nothing of doing the play, and its gay sex scenes, at the time - honestly before AIDS swept in and really and truly fucked up America's idea of gay sex I don't find it hard to believe; the trajectory of LGBT acceptance was set to chart an entirely different course circa the late 70s and early 80s. Anyway Gere got a fine review for Bent in the NY Times - "It may sound odd to speak of the actor's work here as subtle; but the state of mind that dictates his increasing ferocity is intricate, intelligible, as inevitable as it is appalling. Mr. Gere is a remarkable performer."