Reach for the Schoenaerts

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Now this is some sweet news for a slow day -- our Belgian boy Matthias Schoenaerts has just signed up for a Steven Soderbergh movie! (Thx Mac) Granted it's a Steven Soderbergh movie and it's already got a huge cast announced so there will be a thousand people in it and his role will probably not be massive, but we still like the match. Specifically this is Soderbergh's film about the so-called "Panama Papers" called The Laundromat - it already stars Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, David Schwimmer (okay) and Gary Oldman. And besides Matty today James Cromwell and Jeffrey Wright and Chris Parnell and Melissa Rauch and Will Forte were all added to the sprawl. It's okay - Matty's gonna knock 'em out...

Sebastian Stan Five Times

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I don't know why this just occurred to me but please tell me that Sebastian Stan fans are called Stan-stans. I don't want to look it up and find disappointment, so I'm just going to pretend. Anyway we're clearly one of those, having just posted about him yesterday (with the Destroyer trailer) so whatever they're called that's us. Hit the jump for the rest of this brand new photo-shoot...

All of Luca's Witches

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Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria opens here in New York next weekend, although the subject of "where exactly" is still questionable - I guess it's playing at the theater in Union Square, which seems like kind of an odd choice. Anyway it opens everywhere else the week after that. If you missed my review, here it is - I am proud of that one! I'm also dying to see the film a second... third... et cetera... time. As will you too, I think! I hope. I know, dun dun dun.

Anyway I've got a couple of links to share regarding the movie - that delightful photo up top is via W Magazine, who talked to Luca about all the women in the film (thx Mac), including Rainer Werner Fassbinder's one-time wife Ingrid Caven (who's a real pip in the film, believe you me) and who's seen in the second photo. Regarding the photo up top though - if you missed the story in the New York Times about what's going on there (and you don't mind a spoiler) check it out. I won't be the one to ruin it for anybody though (although most people had figured it out already).

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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First things first yes that is a 22-year-old Peter Krause of Six Feet Under fame seen there. We'll get to him in a second. But we should do some set-up first - Peter's character is only ID'd on IMDb as "Boyfriend" although I'm pretty sure he does have a name in the film... which I am not going to bother looking up. Boyfriend works.
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He's just got done screwing around with Girlfriend, aka the film's main character Jill, and even though she's being tormented by people breaking into her house every five minutes - hey there's one running through the weeds now! - Boyfriend needs to go on a beer run. Beer Run Interruptus. He goes to investigate...

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Boyfriend's role in this film is pretty small, all things told, but they sure get a whole lot of mileage out of 22-year-old Peter Krause running around in a white t-shirt and 80s jeans.
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Oh man, Boyfriend, something tells me that sticking your big lunkhead in a strange hole like that isn't gonna go well for you. Not in a movie called Blood Harvest anyway!
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Hit the jump for the all the harvesting, crazy clowns,
and random up-shirt beaver shots that you can handle...

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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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I have to admit I'm morbidly curious about what a "Ryan Murphy Show" tackling the Cop TV Template would look like, but I haven't gotten around to watching 9-1-1 yet - not surprisingly though part of a "Ryan Murphy Show tackling the Cop TV Template" looks like Ryan Guzman's morning shirtless sweatpants routine. I said I was curious! This is why! I hope that Ryan Murphy can get Ryan Guzman to show up on AHS next season - that's where the real perversions begin. Hooray for perversions! On that note good morning (I guess it's gonna be one of those days) and hit the jump for the rest...

To Err Is Human, To Forgive, Yadda Yadda

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As you probably got thanks the depth of my Phantom Thread regard last year I love movies that can appreciate the romance in destructive relationships - if anybody asks me what the most romantic gesture I've ever seen in a film is my go-to response has long been when Elisabeth Shue gives Nicholas Cage a flask as a gift in Leaving Las Vegas. Swoon. Marielle Heller's fabulous and caustically funny new film Can You Ever Forgive Me? is nowhere near that bleak, but it's got a platonic love affair for the ages at its heart that's giddily all about two people inspiring the other to be their best awful selves, and the movie sings with sincere affection for their bad behavior, and bless it, bless it for it.

Quite sincerely, there's not a weak spot to be found in this movie. Marielle Heller, two films in (see also the nigh perfect The Diary of a Teenage Girl in 2015), has proven herself the real deal - I might be biased, seeing as how this thing's a love letter to the New York I love, the one of cluttered book-shops and diner food, of wanting to drink in the afternoon and the one of being left the fuck alone in the most crowded place on Earth, but top down CYEFM has a heart as strong as a horse pounding under its hood; it's classic film-making singing with wit and character and grace.

The fact that it also happens to be a classically made and told movie that's about two gay characters, well, that's something to sing about itself. It's so quietly true on the subject, too - just lived in and practical, not at all strenuous in its depiction. You know the hilarious bit in Hannah Gadsby's Nanette special where she says she doesn't really identify as a lesbian, but just as "tired"? This is the movie for us tired queers, and our allies.

And after the lousy year that Melissa McCarthy's had at the movies (might I remind you of Life of the Party and The Happytime Murders no, no I should not remind you of those, sorry) it's a tonic and a relief to be reminded of what a genuine presence she is on-screen. She's been good, she's been great before, but this is her best work to date. And smartly she doesn't shy away from the Melissa-McCarthy-isms that made her a movie star - just, as with the films where Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey actually try to be actors and braid their schtick up with an edgier more melancholy spin, here McCarthy (who unlike those two has always been an actor first and foremost anyway, before being a straight-forward comedian) makes us look at her in a new light. It's a good one. 

She benefits from having been given the gift of the most curious and fresh-feeling screen-partnership of the year - the friendship that she and a spectacular Richard E. Grant bring to life before us is a revelatory thing, sweet and bitter in the same bite. You've never seen two characters like this just get to hang out on a movie screen, and two hours is barely enough for me - less than twenty-four hours after watching the film I'm already desperately hoping there are hours of cut footage for the blu-ray to savor. It's not that you get the sense they're riffing a la a Judd Apatow movie or anything (the script by Nicole Holofcener, being a script be Nicole Holofcener, is blisteringly tight) - it's just that they're living. They are living so completely and totally up there on the screen together. It's electric.

Here's Looking At You, Seb

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I'm so infatuated with everything that Karyn Kusama's been directing lately (kicked off by the one-two punch of Jennifer's Body - which, fuck you, is super under-rated - and The Invitation) that I've actually been considering going back to watch Aeon Flux again, which... 

... was an excruciating experience the first time around. But maybe I misjudged? (Yeah, probably not.) Anyway I'm psyched for Destroyer, her forthcoming Nicole Kidman movie, also starring the subject of our gifs here Sebastian Stan. It's got a trailer! Watch:

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Destroyer is out in NYC and LA on Christmas Day and then expends outward from those places in January, aka one of those annoying awards-consideration mini-runs. But still. Looks good. And yes I am talking to you, Sebastian...

Who Wore It Best?

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This isn't the fairest contest since Chris Lowell (who is turning 34 today) is seen here styled really beautifully for a photo-shoot (I really covet that wooly lumberjack shirt he's wearing) while Max Irons (who is turning 33 today) was styled kind of poorly (that is a terrible mustache) for a TV mini-series called Tutankhamun in these photos of him, but you work with what ya got. And so I ask you...

image polls

City Boys & Staches

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It's a good thing we already know that Looking star Murray Bartlett can rock a mustache like nobody's business because he's just been cast as one of the patron saints of sexy gay mustaches, Michael in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. (Okay the "Michael" played by Marcus D’Amico in the second series of episodes didn't have a mustache but we choose to remember "Michael" as played by sex-god Paul Hopkins, if that's alright with you.) Netflix is, as you've no doubt heard, giving us a new round of Tales from a later book in Maupin's series. PS see more of Murray Bartlett here. We like him! Also cast in the series of note is Daniela Vega (who was tremendously good in Sebastián Lelio's tremendously good A Fantastic Woman last year) and Chicago Fire actor Charlie Barnett (see below), who will play Michael's boyfriend. I look forward to intimacies between these two...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

From Here to Eternity (1953)

 Alma: No, thanks, I don't drink. I think it's a weakness.
Angelo: I grant ya that.
Alma: You don't like weakness do you?
Prewitt: No, I don't like weakness...
but I like to drink!

Montgomery Clift was born on this day, this day right here, in the year 1920. There's really no good reason he isn't still around - 98 is a perfectly respectable age, just ask his Heiress co-star Olivia De Havilland. Looking at his filmography this morning it struck me how little he made - 18 movies over the course of a 27 year career in front of a camera, with only a single television credit (his first film, a TV movie called Hay Fever that he did at the tender age of 19); most actors have dozens and dozens of stabs in the dark, trying to make something stick, but if asked off the top of my head I could probably rattle off 80% of his credits without blinking. 

There's a lot about his choosiness in the forthcoming doc I've told you about, the one called Making Montgomery Clift that's screening at NewFest at the end of the month (speaking of I just posted some images of Monty via the film on the Tumblr yesterday) Monty was perfectly content with his work on the stage and insisted he would find the right projects to transition to the movies. Still that's our loss, here in the future - just think of all the impossibly gorgeous young Monty that's been lost to time not captured on film...

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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Has anybody watched the first two episodes of Matthew Weiner's The Romanoffs on Amazon yet? I have not gotten around to it just yet myself, and I've heard opinions varying wildly via the Twitter box, but knowing that there is Half Naked Corey Stoll waiting for me (thx Mac), well, that's putting some pressure on anyway.

Okay okay most of the pressure I am feeling is in my pants, you got me. Whatever. Whatever gets me there! Right, Weiner? Right. Anyway I guess each ep's a stand-alone, and a new one drops every week, so it's not a rush. I can stroll leisurely like I'm Corey Stoll in his boxer shorts. Just like that. Sigh. Hit the jump for more...

Quote of the Day

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"I actually feel like we could do that maybe... But I don’t know. There was a lot of pain with the ending. It’s like going into an old relationship where you’re like… let’s do something new. I may do something and work with HBO again, but I don’t know about another season of Enlightened.”

Mike White is competing on this season of Survivor -- which I want to say "weirdly enough" about but since he already starred on The Amazing Race several years ago I cannot -- and so EW was chatting with him about that and hey while they were there they got him to say the above about bringing back one of the greatest shows ever produced, Enlightened, for a third season. I was wondering why I saw a bunch of people talking about Enlightened on Twitter earlier today! Not that any day and every day isn't a good time to talk about Enlightened. (thx Mac)

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Hugged By Hunnam

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I've been so busy these past couple of weeks with NYFF bleeding into the Brooklyn Horror Fest that I've barely had time to breathe, and so I was just sitting here now thinking how my head hurts, I could use a breather, and suddenly...

... like a warm hug appeared these pictures of Charlie Hunnam vacationing at the beach in Mexico and wham whaddya know I can breathe again. Charlie, what a gentlemen, saving lives everywhere he goes. Hit the jump for the rest...

Joe Alwyn Five Times

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Fresh out of seeing Boy Erased today (more on that to come eventually, aka when it's released in two weeks) here are a couple of pictures of Joe Alwyn (a couple of them outtakes to this shoot we already posted, a couple of them not that) who has a brief but, uh, memorable role in that film. It's an awfully big autumn for him with this and The Favourite, that's for sure. (Shit that reminds me I still have to review The Favourite!) Hit the jump for the rest...