Little Known Fact: It is designated a Hate Crime in at least sixty-seven states for a paparazzo to photograph Daniel Craig wearing suspenders on the set of a James Bond film while not getting a single solitary shot of Daniel Craig's backside. Hey Cary Fukunaga -- when I see your movie you better do way better than this criminal did!!!
ETA I did some digging and found some even better pictures worth your seconds, hit the jump for what I managed to dig up...
I am quite sure most of you who desire such things as this have already come across Brad Pitt's new GQ photo-shoot, which somehow manages to echo the Marlboro Man and Call Me By Your Name both at once...
Basically all I'm saying here is Brad, if you're gonna go for it, go for it, and get nakeder. Your forebears didn't run so you can walk. Anyway it's been a busy day with NYFF screenings so you'll just have to make do with these, poor dears; hit the jump for the rest...
Knives Out director Rian Johnson, of Brick and The Last Jedi fame (or infamy I suppose depending on your level of vitriol towards the latter, ya nerds) has spent this very day tweeting out character posters for the movie -- a lot of the time with one movie releasing twenty character posters you're like "Who cares" but...
... with Knives Out you've got a cast worth caring over,
and it just keeps going.
All that tweed and all that shelving,
it's a lot for me to take in at once.
Knives Out isn't out until Thanksgiving which seems like ages away but at the same time seems like the exactly the right time to release a family-based murder mystery -- when else are people going to want to fantasize about slashing their relatives to ribbons then when they've been forced to have an extremely long meal with all of them at once? I relate. .
Just kidding, I'm not really here! I'm at NYFF screenings again this morning, although it's a little less bombastic a schedule today than it was yesterday so I'll be back in here sooner and more substantially this afternoon than I managed yesterday. But until I do drag my ass around enjoy there shots of Russell Tovey and his dogs, reunited now that he seems to be officially back with his momentary ex Steve Brockman. It's always important to have somebody appreciative around to Insta document your hotness, I think. Love wins! (click to embiggen)
Since the first film I'll be seeing for NYFF on Monday morning will be Synonyms -- starring Tom Mercier here in a performance that even I've heard the buzz for from my perch in no place special -- I figured I'd share these shots of the actor off his Instagram tonight where they'll stay tops until I return Monday afternoon, having by then seen the film. It also makes a sweet echo since I posted the trailer for the movie exactly one week ago, watch it right here.
If you're wondering what I think you personally should watch this weekend there's actually quite a lot! Here is my review of Hustlers with Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez, which is a whole lot of fun and way better made than it probably needed to be. Here is my review of One Cut of the Dead, the feel good Japanese zombie movie of all time. It's not a review but earlier today I told you that The Sound of Silence with Peter Sarsgaard is well worth a listen.
Oh and Larry Fessenden's Frankenstein movie Depraved is out now too, and it's a pretty interesting lo-fi Brooklynite spin on that well-trod tale (with slight hints of queerness here and there) that you should seek out if Mary Shelley's your jam. In a funny bit of timing the dude who plays Fessenden's monster, actor Alex Breaux, also plays one of the stockbrokers who gets ripped off in Hustlers -- in fact I'm pretty sure it's him that we see in his altogether in Hustlers -- so really it's his big weekend if it's anybody's...
Well I think it's safe to say that the long international nightmare that was our Michael Fassbender drought can be safely set behind us with this news -- he's in talks to star as the soccer coach in that Taika Waititi Samoan soccer team movie we told you about last month. It's called Next Goal Wins and it's a fictional re-telling of a 2014 documentary that told the same story -- or I guess you could just say it's the fictional telling of the same story, whatever. I'm needlessly complicating sentences in my Fassy Fever. Just think of all of the photos we're going to get of Michael and Taika hanging on each other on red carpets!
Anyway I brought up the casting of this role in that earlier post but Fassy didn't occur to me since he's a little on the young side for the role? Still who cares, Fassy swanning around a locker-room full of soccer players, my heart and so forth skips a beat. I couldn't find any pictures of Michael in a soccer uniform (which is kind of weird for an actor out of the UK) so here's my favorite photo of his X-Men co-star and handsy good friend James McAvoy taking up his slack:
I feel like I'm dropping a shit-ton of stuff on y'all today posting-wise, but that's probably for the best given how I've got NYFF screenings starting Monday -- take your time reading today's posts, as it's gonna be real hit and miss for the next two weeks after that. Anyway first thing up is our very first look at the second season of Hulu's Stephen King sorta-anthology series Castle Rock, which as we've been shrieking about for months now has gifted us with the terrifically exciting casting of Lizzy Caplan as Misery's number one fan Annie Wilkes. Read more about it here.
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Castle Rock is back on October 23rd! Next we've got a new look at HBO's Watchmen series -- I've been terribly derelict in my reporting on this show, but they've been kind of annoying with how small the dollops of new information have been at a time, to be honest. I just wanted some damn footage already, and this is what that is finally -- some damned footage.
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Lots of Regina King and Jean Smart and we straight up swoon as that duo. And oh right Jeremy Irons on a horse. That duo swoons too. (via thx Mac) Watchmen premieres on October 20th! .
Netflix has released the first disorienting poster (above) and the first image (below) from Vincenzo Natali's forthcoming horror flick In the Tall Grass, which is adapted from a short story by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. And they're also letting us know the movie will hit Netflix on October 4th -- that's only 21 damn days from now, holy crap! And we've been posting about this one forever -- well since 2015 anyway, which is "forever" now. The film is about two little kids who get lured into a field by the sound of a crying boy, which turns out to be a trap of some sort. I never read the story, but somebody in this will be played by Patrick Wilson so I'm there.
Netflix is doing us all a big scary favor this holiday season though -- they're releasing a brand new horror flick every single week in October! They're calling it "Netflix and Chills" and ITTG is just the first thing on the menu -- October 11th will bring us Fractured with Sam Worthington and Lily Rabe as parents who take their injured daughter to an emergency room that turns into a nightmare. Most excitingly Fractured was directed by Brad Anderson, the great director of Session 9 and The Machinist.
Then October 18th brings us Eli, the latest scare flick from Citadel and Sinister 2 director Ciarán Foy starring Max Martini and Kelly Reilly as the parents of a dying child who put their faith in a doctor (played by Lili Taylor) with an experimental program that leads to, well, happenings. And finally come October 25th we get Rattlesnake, which stars the always welcome Carmen Egojo as a mother whose kid is bitten by that thing in the title and who's then forced to make a deal with the devil (not sure if that's literal or not!) to save her. Anyway here's a trailer for the whole shebang which gives us first glimpses of every one of those titles:
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Kinda funny how every one of those is about putting kids
in danger, right? Not really "funny ha ha," though. Just... funny.
I very much wish I could've found time to re-see The Sound of Silence before it properly hit theaters today -- I saw the movie, which has Peter Sarsgaard playing a man who tunes urban sounds for agitated city folk a la feng shui, at BAM's annual CinemaFest series in June and I liked it a whole lot. I specifically recall there being a moment of absolute transcendance in the last act, something that felt like a gift to anyone who loves this city of New York that I so love. Here's the trailer:
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Anyway for whatever reason I didn't write a real review of the movie when I did see it then, and now it's too distant in my memory to do it the sort of justice I'd like to. But the feeling of vague positivity that greets me thinking upon the film seems like enough of a recommendation, I think -- we should all see the movie now, this weekend, is what I'm saying. And now I will share with you some photos and video of star Peter Sarsgaard with the film's writer and director at BAM all those months ago:
Remaking some of the greatest pieces of cinema ever created is always a most risky business, which is why I think we've seen a lot of these projects swerve out of the direct path of our protests by turning themselves into several part miniseries that they claim to be more faithful adaptations of the source novels. So it goes with the BBC's forthcoming Black Narcissus, which will turn Rumer Godden's 1939 tale of overheated nuns in the Himalayas into "a three-part event series" that will star Gemma Arterton & Alessandro Nivola.
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Hey @SandroNivola if you're listening -- you really must insist on wearing David Farrar's short shorts at some point in your BLACK NARCISSUS re-do, they are NON-NEGOTIABLE pic.twitter.com/FRKOP7YMNe
Even though the 1947 film from Powell & Pressburger with Deborah Kerr is one of my favorite movies of all time, perfect in every lustful technicolor sense, I'm not averse to this re-do happening -- as I've gone over a few times in the past few years I'm no longer upset by remakes. If there's an original version that we adore the original version that we adore will still be there after this new one comes and goes. Plus Gemma Aterton is tremendously underrated, and...
... Alessandro Nivola is really great casting for the David Farrar role of Mr. Dean, the "dissolute English colonial and First World War veteran whose combative relationship with the head sister of the order awakens hidden longings in both." I want to watch these two do those things!
The series is also being entirely shepherded by women, which might add a thoughtful spin on this inherently feminine tale -- it's written by Amanda Coe and it'll be directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen, the DP for The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen and the gorgeous Far From the Madding Crowd remake -- she knew how to shoot the hell out of Matthias Schoenaerts in that so I have faith she'll know how to shoot the hell out of Alessandro now.
I used to be much more excited by the name Alexander Payne than I am these days -- it's been twenty full years since he made a movie (Election) that I love unreservedly (that said I do like Nebraska). Mostly the incisive snark of his early career, the stuff that I fell for circa Citizen Ruth, has morphed into maudlin smarm with time -- I mean The Descendants is entirely my kryptonite. But he keeps getting great actors to work for him and pulling me back, and so it goes with his newly announced project, which will apparently star no less than Hannibal Lecter himself Mr. Mads Mikkelsen.
It's to be a road movie called My Saga that's based on the true story of a Norwegian journalist who traced the Vikings trek across the Northern United States for an article -- it sounds like they've already started smarming the story up as the script for Payne's version has the writer road-tripping with his teenaged daughter, and not the photographer that was actually his traveling partner in real life. I can see the quote unquote big feels coming already, sigh. But I'll be there for Mads, dammit.
Caracticus Potts: You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious.
Did you know that the author Roald Dahl -- who was born on this day in the year 1916 -- co-wrote the screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, adapting the book by James Bond author Ian Fleming? I actually don't think that I previous to today knew any of this, which is probably why I have never seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I know, I know! But at this point it feels like one of those movies I needed to see as a kid or I won't get the appeal. Am I wrong? Vote in this poll and tell me if I'm wrong or not:
Although I haven't bothered watching the 2009 Friday the 13th remake since that one time in the theater ten years ago -- ugh -- I can only speak to my recollection, but my recollection is that this movie was filled with awful people and yet this here Donnie (Kyle Davis) guy was among the grossest. He violated every single rule in a two minute span, and even made up some new ones along the way. You flew too close to the sun, Donnie.
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Did you know there are theories out there that the Jason Voorhees of this film is a marijuana farmer? As I said above I've only seen it once but a couple of ideas have passed around -- I do like the one that he maintains the fields of doobage in order to better lure druggie teenagers to his murder oasis, but picturing Jason Voorhees farming anything gets real goofy real quick, unless you picture heads sticking out of the ground a la Motel Hell.
Now that I'm thinking about it a remake of Motel Hell set on a marijuana farm is a hysterical idea -- I've found my millions, y'all! But I actually have a whole 'nother cross-over thought process going on today -- I brought bring up the subject of weed alongside the Friday the 13th movies (which have a long storied stoner history, working its way through every single one of the movies basically) because besides being Friday the 13th today it's also the 50th anniversary of that ultimate ganja gateway experience Scooby Doo!
Holy Scooby Snacks, Jason! How people could be clamoring for years for a nonsensical fight between Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees and nary a peep about sending Fred and Daphne and Velma and the gang to Crystal Lake I'll never know. There are suspicious characters -- Crazy Ralph, anyone? -- and masks to be yanked off; there are Jinkies most abundant. And it's pretty easy to cast it with past characters from Friday movies...
I mean now that I think about it the entire cast of the third Friday the 13th movie (which is my favorite for some weird reason I've never been able to really explain -- perhaps it's the disco music theme song) are basically Scooby Doo in human form.
Hit the jump for links to all of the previous Ways Not To Die...
"If not my favorite of that year - and it may be - it's at a minimum in the top 3 or so. And Jake should absolutely have been up for the Oscar that year, and maybe won (although I'd have been good with Keaton). While it has a look or style that relates to an older Los Angeles, the heart of it is as timely as can be, sadly."
--- For its 5th anniversary I gave some love to Dan Gilroy's film Nightcrawler for besides being awesome also seeing our awful present in advance, and here reader Scott agrees.
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