Flash Me Them Puppies, Daniel Craig

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Alright that's it, another four-day summertime week behind us! I've got tomorrow off and I'm hoping to catch up on some movies I have not seen (since I've been too busy seeing amazing old science-fiction things at MoMA instead of new stuff) this weekend - stuff like Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, out tomorrow, and starring that puppy-pawing dweeb up top. Did this whole week really go by without me making my requisite "If he doesn't wear the speedo again then the Bond movie deserves to flop" comment about Daniel Craig signing on for another double-oh flick? It did, the week did go by without that. 

Anyway I also might try and catch the Annabelle sequel because somehow it seems to have actually gotten good reviews? Anyone seen it? Should I bother, like... really? The first one was so so bad. And then there's The Glass Castle, and Detroit, and Ingrid Goes West, and... dear lord how did I get this far behind??? My MoviePass card needs to get here ASAP.

Happy weekend, everybody.

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Patti Cake$ in 250 Words or Less

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While Patti Cake$ wears the badge of "crowd pleaser" proudly it maybe wears it a little too loud, like bling that's too big and quickly eats up its owner. It's got a strong central performance from Danielle Macdonald in its lead, and a load of life from its second tier characters (it's always a goddamn joy to see Cathy Moriarty on screen, and I already told you about the sneak attack of guy hotness contained therein) but you really can see every step the movie's going to make from eight miles away, and it never swerves left instead of right.

And sometimes this sort of thing is fine! Depending on your mood, depending on that day's willingness to just roll with an unchallenging script and coast on an actor's charisma, sometimes paint-by-numbers is plenty when the charisma's this thick. But I kept seeing glimmers of a more interesting movie beneath Patti's surface, and wishing it would've gone for broke.

Would it have sold for nine-plus million dollars at Sundance if it had? Ha ha, no. Not a chance. And in the long run it might not entirely matter - I can see myself being reminded of this movie a couple of years from now and feeling warm and friendly towards it, and wanting to see it again right away. But to get to that point I'll have needed to forget about the movie first, and I don't foresee that being a tough path to find myself upon.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Contender (2000)

Laine Hanson: Principles only mean something 

when you stick to them when its inconvenient. 

A happy birthday to Joan Allen on Sunday!

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

A little set-up - a bunch of bunnies have run away from home after one of them had a vision of impending doom. After days of wandering a bunny from their old home comes ambling out of the bushes, wounded and distraught, and tells them they were right to run - that horror befell their former burrow and friends. And so he tells to them the tale of what went down...

Watership Down (1978)

I wasn't lucky enough to have been scarred by Watership Down as a child, but I remember the shivering quivering dead-eyed husks of my classmates who were, and man was I jealous. Yet somehow I have never read the book by Richard Adams, nor did I see the movie until this past week. And wow wow wowee wow! What I had missed! If my childhood hadn't already been a brutal torment I'd want to go back and relive it with this movie as part!

I assume some of you had your innocent little brains bashed in by this movie though, and I'd love to hear tell of those tales. There's nothing better, really! If you have children you owe them the brutal lessons about the real world on the outside that Watership Down has to share.

By the way I finally saw the film thanks to that wonderful new service the NYC public libraries are offering that I told you about last week - the NYPL has teamed up with the online streaming service Kanopy to give free access to thousands of movies to anybody with a library card. It is literally magic.

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Skimming thru the movies the NYPL have made available for free streaming and feeling as if an angel is fellating my soul pic.twitter.com/FKGXYJqiFL

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) August 12, 2017

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And I haven't even made a dent in looking through everything they have. If you haven't signed up yet, I highly recommend it. With this and the brand new and thrilling price reduction for MoviePass (where it'll cost just $9.95 for access to a movie ticket every day of the month to most of the theaters here in the city) my obsessive entertainment habits just got slashed monetarily by a whole bunch of coin. It's a good time for movie-lovers!

For bunnies, though... maybe notsomuch.

Hit the jump for links to the Previous Ways Not To Die

Justin Theroux Seven Times

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Justin is this month's Mr. Porter fella,and mostly they talk about The Leftovers and his wife (of course, but there is a little bit about the movie he's got with Duncan Jones coming up next:

"In Mute, a dystopian neo-Noir set in futurist Berlin, Mr Theroux redeploys his comedic talent for cloaking his identity, this time, to dark and menacing effect. It sounds like a win-win situation. The Blade Runner-ish premise alone is enough to stimulate the saliva glands of the sci-fi agnostic: a mute Amish bartender (Mr Alexander Skarsgård) searching for his missing girlfriend becomes embroiled with two sinister black-market surgeons played by Mr Theroux and his old friend Mr. [Paul] Rudd. “I’m wearing a shaggy blonde wig,” says Mr Theroux. “It’s definitely not my standard look. It’s a bit of a cheap shot, I know. But I’m a very shallow actor. I’m not going to put a pebble in my shoe and limp around on set. But I do like a good prop.”

We have already seen a picture of Justin in Mute in his wig - see it right here. Oh and in the interview Justin admits his father was afraid that his becoming an actor meant his son was going to do porn, and can I just say... what a loss that not happening is. Anyway for the rest of this photo-shoot hit the jump...

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, Gratuitous McCaul Lombardi

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When I sat down for a screening of the new movie Patti Cake$ on Tuesday night I thought I knew what I was in for thanks to the trailer - an underdog rapper movie a la 8 Mile just with a big white girl as our lead. And I got that. But what I didn't expect was a cornucopia of good-looking guys surrounding her. At first I intended to do a post on Siddharth Dhananjay, who plays Patti's best friend, and who I found completely adorable. Then I realized I could also do a post on Mamoudou Athie, who plays her new friend and producer. 

But Siddharth and Mamoudou, adorable though they may be, are both relative newcomers and the pickings are sparse. That's when I remembered the third male lead in the movie - the dickhead Danny who rap-battles Patti and gets introduced rolling pizza pies in sexy slow-motion, played by a certain McCaul Lombardi. He seemed familiar, I thought. And sure enough...

... speaking of "dick heads" he played the enthusiastic flasher Corey in Andrea Arnold's brilliant and lively film American Honey last year. I remember him! He's pretty hard to forget. And then when I got to looking I realized he's done some modeling too...

... and I guess he was in a Lana Del Ray video? Anyway before I knew what was happening I had dozens upon dozens of pictures of him gathered up. And so McCaul wins for today! And seeing as how he's got several projects lined up already don't be surprised if you keep seeing him. For now though you can do just that - see him, dozens of ways - if you just hit the jump...

The Fancy Man Alain Delon

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Before I run out the door for more sci-fi goodness at MoMA let me share with you the lovely news that Criterion's announced their new titles for the month of November and one of Alain Delon's greatest films, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 masterpiece Le samouraï, is among them! (I prefer Purple Noon myself but LS is certainly up there.) I know I recently took Criterion to task for being too expensive for a poor nobody like me but it's hard not to get swept up in the fanciness all the same. Plus any excuse to look up pictures of Alain Delon is a welcome excuse. Indeed if you want to see a few more pictures I just posted a few more pictures over on the Tumblr.

Have a good night, everybody!

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Zachary Quinto & James Franco Rubbing Scruff

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Even though it's been on Netflix for awhile I still haven't sat down to watch I Am Micheal, the gay conversion therapy movie starring James Franco and Zachary Quinto yet - have any of you? The tepid reviews dulled my enthusiasm... as did the word that their on-screen three-way with Charlie Carver was apparently a dud. How do you make that be a dud? Anyway when I saw the new Out Magazine photo-shoot of James looking really very good the other week I thought maybe I should go back and give it a chance. Thoughts?

I Am Link

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--- Sasha's Fierce - I was just thinking about American Honey actress Sasha Lane earlier today (for a post you're all going to enjoy tomorrow morning, wink wink) and wondering when the heck she was going to show up in something since she was tremendous in that movie, and he we are! I have conjured greatness from the ether with my thoughts once again. Sasha is in the process of signing on to the Hellboy reboot! The one that we're excited about despite its immediate Del Toro history because of director Neil Marshall and an amazing cast that already includes David Harbour, Ian McShane, and Milla Jovovich.

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--- Vroom Vroom - This almost became a "Quote of the Day" post but then Edgar Wright kept talking and talking and the good quotes kept coming and I realized I'd have to quote the entire thing for that so instead here I will just send you over to Vulture where the Baby Driver director got asked about the movie crossing the 100 million dollar mark this week, his biggest hit ever by a whole lot, and he used the occasion to smartly celebrate original screenplays. Lord knows I wasn't a fan of Baby Driver - an anomaly among Wright's work for sure - but I'm happy for its success all the same for all the reasons he elucidates here.

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--- Scarlet Spider - Tom Holland needs to dust off his "That's a spicy meat-ahh-ball"'s because he's about to play the real-life Italian teenager Pino Lella (you have no idea how hard I am wishing his last name was "Grigio") who was forced into the German Army during WWII and used his time there saving Jews by ferrying them through the Alps. Kind of Schindler's Mountain, then. It's called Beneath a Scarlet Sky and it's based on the book by Mark Sullivan - anybody read it?

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--- Peak Peaks - I could spend all day sharing links about Twin Peaks with you because some of the best writing on the internet is happening right now thanks to David Lynch's triumphant cacophony of sound and image aka That TV Show, and because I am currently reading two books about the world (this one and this one, and I can't believe I never knew that second book has existed for 25 years until this week).

But here's just a pair -- I wish they'd formatted this better (the embedded tweets are pretty sloppy) but Birth Movies Death did an amazing round-up of the overlap between images we have seen on the new batch of episodes with images from Lynch's artwork. He's been playing with some of these his entire career. 

And second I loved this piece at the Ringer praising Kyle MacLachlan's brilliantly fractured performance as Dougie Jones and Evil Coop, and what it all means, and I just have to share the article's conclusion (slightly spoilery obviously) because this is super on-point about the entire show's purpose, i think:

"With every tic and affectation — every burst of violence from Evil Coop, every slurred pronouncement from Dougie Jones — MacLachlan further delineates the differences between the first Twin Peaks and the follow-up. At first, the tensions in this season simply seemed like a result of Lynch and Frost making the story they wanted to make, regardless of nostalgia. But heading into The Return’s final stretch, frustrated nostalgia almost seems to be the point. It’s even written into the text: The typically catatonic Dougie comes alive whenever he makes contact with iconic motifs from the original show, like coffee or cherry pie. These aren’t meta references for meta’s sake. Instead, they’re part of The Return’s larger meditation on how much or how little people, places, and things can shift over, well, almost 30 years. We see it in the diminished state of Catherine Coulson, who was dying of cancer when she filmed her last scenes as the Log Lady; we see it in Amanda Seyfried’s Becky Burnett (née Briggs) following in her mother Shelly’s footsteps by getting trapped in an abusive relationship. Most of all, though, we see it in everything MacLachlan is doing, and how well he’s doing it."

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--- Never Halt - The second best show on TV isn't quite on TV yet but it will be in a few days - Halt and Catch Fire returns for its fourth and final (sigh) season on Saturday night (smartly side-stepping the clotted Sunday night landscape) and Vulture chatted a very fine chat indeed with its breakout bleached wunderkind Mackenzie Davis, mi amor. A big chunk of the conversation is about how her character in Ridley Scott's The Martian was Korean in the book, and she has some really interesting stuff to say about the position she found herself in with that whitewashing controversy. God I love her. I can't wait to see her in Blade Runner - she (and Villenueve) are the things I'm most excited about there by leaps and bounds.

--- Gang Bang - It's the 50th anniversary of Arthur Penn's film (although just calling it a "film" seems too small a word in this instance) Bonnie & Clyde (perhaps you have heard of it) and over at The Film Experience Eric wrote up a very fine little ode to the movie and its long, deep legacy, and oh yeah its incredible white-hot movie-star pairing with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. I mean they're so hot they burned the Oscars fifty years later!

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--- Gone West - Despite all the beefcakey trailers I still haven't gotten out to see Ingrid Goes West yet (it's been a busy dang week) but there are a good pair of interviews with its cast going around - our pal Jose got to chat with Aubrey Plaza about it over at The Film Stage and the talk turned to how fucking great Bette Midler is, of all things, but why not? Aubrey says she's dying to put together a movie where they play mother and daughter and what a coincidence I am dying to see that movie. Make it happen! And second over at BuzzFeed our pal Jarett got to talk to Ingrid co-star and resident slab of hunk Billy Magnussen and Billy calls himself "a piece of ass" and my life will never be the same. I don't know how Jarett didn't just fall out of his seat. Stronger than me!

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--- Chinny Chin Chin - Bruce Campbell's second memoir came out yesterday - it's called Hail to the Chin and it shares his exploits of the past fifteen years ever since he wrote and released his first memoir, the eminently enjoyable If Chins Could Kill. I think he's a little rough on his chin. It's not that crazy a chin, Bruce. Anyway he chatted with BD about the book and says he's got a third one already in the works but we shouldn't plan on seeing that for another fifteen years. No word on what the "Chin" title will be. He also talks about Ash vs Evil Dead's upcoming third season there, I guess but I skipped that part because I didn't want spoilers. Oh and there are also a couple promo videos (for the book) starring the man right here. (thanks Mac)

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--- Twilight of the God - As if I needed more reason to fall harder head over dick for Robert Pattinson after his great streak of acting roles culminated in this month's tour de force in Good Time (here is my review) he went and talked to the LA Times (thanks Mac) about his stiff case of cinephilia, and he said he's currently been binging the movies of Ken Russell, including The Devils. I want to watch The Devils with Robert Pattinson! He calls Oliver Reed's performance therein "unreal." Oh, Rob.

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---  And Finally some TV casting news to thrill about - Barbara Hershey, whose career is lots and lots more than starring in Beaches but who will always be Hillary Whitney to me all the same, has joined the new season of The X-Files! She's playing "a powerful figure who represents a mysterious organization" and given where the last little run of episodes ended (with a kind of apocalypse breaking out) I imagine that'll be something to see. Just like Beaches!

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... turning my hose on Finn Wittrock. 

(via, click to embiggen)

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Don't Be Afraid of New Nosferatu

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I was going to save this couple-days-old news for a link round-up post but I felt like looking at a great big picture of Anya Taylor-Joy because good gravy is she a lovely young woman and so we're doing this instead. It's big enough news to warrant its own space anyway! Anya - who you should recognize from The Witch because you're a smart person who has watched The Witch ten times by now just like I have - is re-teaming with that movie's hyper-talented director Robert Eggers for his upcoming remake of Nosferatu. 

Now before you go whinging about Nosferatu not needing a remake... don't. I am perfectly fine with a new Nosferatu, and so should you be. It's a property perfectly suited to a new take every few decades, and I've heard Eggers speak at length about this specific project being a life-long dream of his, and his period-detail obsessiveness turned onto turn of the 20th century middle-of-nowhere European weirdness is the sort of thing that promises hit all my buttons hard and harder still.

Cate Blanchett is The Witch Next Door

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Well this is such an unexpected pairing that I felt the need to make that ridiculous photoshop job above - that's how ridiculous! Four minutes of my time's worth! But it's true - Cate Blanchett is about to co-star in an Eli Roth movie. Remember back in June we told you about The House With a Clock in its Walls, his upcoming adaptation of a ghoulish children's book by John Bellairs that Edward Gorey illustrated? The movie already had Jack Black attached in the adult lead (it's a kid's book so he actual leads will be kids, obviously) but today comes word that Cate is taking on the role of the next-door neighbor and maybe a witch. So basically this is her turn a la Meryl in the Lemony Snicket movie - something for her kids, but edgy (with Roth & Gorey's names up in there) enough to stay just this side of weird and interesting. I'm hoping for something a la Anjelica Huston in The Witches, personally...