Spend Your Weekend Immersed In the Law

.

Since there's nothing really big and new in theaters this weekend that looks much worth seeing -- that La Larona horror flick looks racist as shit to me, and don't get me started on that Christian garbage -- I'm going to spend my three-day weekend getting my own shit together for the 2019 edition of the Tribeca Film Fest, which officially kicks off on Wednesday and which I'll be reviewing films for once again for The Film Experience. I've already seen a dozen or so movies, a number which will more than double in the coming two weeks whee what a time to be alive. Anyway none of this has anything to do with that picture of Jude Law but who doesn't want to stare at Jude Law? Nobody, that's who. (He could've brought along his white speedo but perhaps it's under those jeans.) In summation, uhh, bye until Monday y'all.

.

Hey look at this picture of Callum Turner & Eddie Redmayne & Jude Law & Ezra Miller, how about that, huh pic.twitter.com/MvPEaUUBOa

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 18, 2019

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

.

Before we begin I should make it clear that our eventual giallo victim Sofia here (played by Rossella Falk) is one of those vague invalids you used to get in the movies -- anyway for some unexplained reason she's confined to a wheelchair, so when she hears a noise she wants to investigate, and her dumb cat...

... pushes her wheelchair away, she's forced to crawl around. 

Hence all the crawling.

There is a lot of crawling, actually. You know how giallos like to draw this shit out. She crawls and she crawls and we wait and we wait for the inevitably gloved killer to strike...

Sofia makes it too easy for the killer, really -- if you're a vague movie invalid you really shouldn't crawl up to the edge of a staircase, ya know? 

 See?!?!

.

Yes, she's dead. You can see her dead. 

But this is a giallo, so we must really really see she's dead.

And so we get...

... to see her dead from multiple gorgeously lit angles.

The Fifth Cord (1971)

I've been on a renewed giallo kick over the past couple of weeks, but I've seen so many of the big ones at this point -- I put in The Fitfh Cord not expecting greatness, only expecting...

... a lot of Franco Nero with a mustache. But The Fifth Cord delivered on both counts! It's both terrific and has a lot of Nero-stache. Ya can't go wrong. The film was lensed by famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro -- he actually shot this right in between The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and it shows. 

And not just in shots of the camera zooming in 

on Franco Nero's Mustache Answering A Red Telephone either!

Here are five randomly chosen frames from the film:

I mean it's an absolute all-time stunner. Oh and the music's by Ennio Morricone too! Blessedly Arrow Films just put The Fifth Cord out onto blu-ray with a bunch of extra features, I highly recommend you check this one out if you're a fan of giallo, or of pretty things, or of Franco Nero... and obviously these things are not mutually exclusive.

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

They're Coming For Mommy Again

.

The last time that co-directos Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz made a movie about the familial rift between a woman and her children taking shape in an isolated house we got the tremendously unsettling 2014 film Goodnight Mommy, one of MNPP's faves. (Read my review here.) In that film a pair of creepy (duh) twins become convinced that the woman under bandages who's come home from surgery to recuperate is not their mother, yadda yadda, horror movie.

Well now they've gone and made The Lodge, their US debut, which stars the great Riley Keough (I feel no qualms calling her "great" at this point, and neither should you) as a woman left in a snowy middle-of-nowhere cabin with her fiance's two kids and, well, yadda yadda horror movie. The Lodge got fantastic raves at Sundance and it's set to hit screens this summer, so here's its trailer...

.

.

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... sweating it out with Garrett Hedlund.

(pics via)

.

Gay Just Got Like, Way Gayer

.

A big year for Gay Pride (Stonewall is celebrating its 50th anniversary at the end of June) just got even bigger for a certain subset of us gays and likeminded camp movie lovers -- Shout Factory! is releasing four particular glittery extravaganzas onto blu-ray for their very first time including yes indeed the tremendous and psychotic Village People musical Can't Stop the Music, which has been basically out of print for decades. This is a real thrill -- the film's been tough to see for far too long. I'd seen shitty quality copies previously, but then I got to see it in the theater a few years back and holy hell you have to see this thing cleaned up, it's something. SO MUCH SOMETHINGS. 

The other three films they're dropping are the terrific 1995 rom-com Jeffrey with Steven Weber and Michael T. Weiss (and a fabulous cameo from Sigourney Weaver) and the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar, also from 1995 (Beth Grant forever!), and then there's Boom!, the explosively hilariously awful Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton film from 1968 that is truly a camp spectacle to behold.

That and Wong Foo hit first on May 28th, while the other two hit June 11th. While I go see if anybody has any hot pants I can borrow, y'all should hit the jump to see all of the special features included on these discs...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The World's End (2013)

The Network: At this point your planet is t
he least civilized in the entire galaxy.
Gary: What did he say?
Andrew: He said we are a bunch of fuck ups.
Gary: Hey it is our basic human right to be fuck ups.
This civilization was founded on fuck ups
and you know what? That makes me proud!

A happy 45 to Edgar Wright today!

.

Oh Franz, You Devil

.

German actor Franz Rogowski is trying to kill me! I'd just mentioned the Transit star earlier this morning, as he's part of the stellar cast for Terrence Malick's new film that's about to take Cannes by storm, and as if summoning up sex from the very earth itself this picture presented itself to me mere minutes later, via Franz's Instagram. His caption to this photo reads, "Heute Abend wieder No Sex in München #20uhr30Kammer1" so ya know, if you're in Munich, get your ass over to Franz's place, folks. (And insert a joke about his movie Happy End with Michael Haneke here.)
.

Five Frames From ?

.

What movie is this?

.

The Beach Boys

.

Put on your big man boots a la Matthias and sidle up close -- you hear me, Matthias? I said CLOSE -- the Cannes line-up has been announced and it's a ten inch dick of gay goodness. I don't entirely know what that sentence meant but just roll with me, it's early and I'm trying to distract myself with nonsense from all the political bullshit happening in my country this morning. So Cannes. Terrence Malick's film Radegund starring our boy Matthias has apparently been renamed to A Hidden Life and it's playing Cannes. See our previous posts about it here. It's about Austrian objectors during WWII and it also stars the incredible international cast of Michael Nyqvist and Jürgen Prochnow and Bruno Ganz and August Diehl and Franz Rogowski and Alexander Fehling, among many. Phew!

But that's not all! (Imagine if it was all. "Oh sorry everybody, Cannes is just one movie this year. Malick's movie is five thousand hours long so we had to go with just that.") Pedro Almodovar's Pain & Glory, which we just talked about earlier this week (it's already out in Spain) it playing, as is Ira Sachs new film Frankie with Marisa Tomei and Isabelle Huppert (Cannes is legally bound to accept your film into competition if it stars Isabelle Huppert, don't you know), as is Xavier Dolan's Matthias and Maxime, his gay romance partially inspired by Call Me By Your Name.

And then there's Parasite, Bong Joon-ho's latest, which we just showed you the poster for last week as well. Add on the Dardennes and Desplechins and the like and you've got a very Cannes-y Cannes line-up indeed. You can check out the entire thing right at this link.

.

Good Morning, World

.

I keep forgetting to mention that I won't be blogging tomorrow, I've got the day off and plan on making use of it, so this gif of Sauvage star Félix Maritaud (see lots more of him here), exuding easy laze-about-ness, feels about correct as an expression of my immediate future self (even if I ought to save that gif for our not-far-off annual "Quit Smoking" post). Thanks, Félix! Have y'all been able to see Sauvage yet? As I said in my review it's certainly worth seeing. In related Félix was photographed for the latest issue of L'Officiel Hommes and I've got those shots right here after the jump...

This Picture of Paul Rudd Amid Shelves...

.

... is an attack.

.

Nicky Forever Amen

.

I suppose we need to cherish it while we have it, given Game of Thrones is ending in a few weeks, but as much as I love looking at these dues I'm still feeling a little bit burned out posting photoshoots of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Kit Harington and Joe Dempsie right now -- where's the magazine cover for Jacob Anderson? I want more Grey Worm dammit. Well for now here's another Nicky shoot, a good one but like the sixth good one in the past month, after the jump...
.

Treadaway in Space

.

I haven't been paying a ton of attention to the Star Trek: The Next Generation spin-off about Captain Picard that's being made because I couldn't really by any metric be considered a Trekkie but I did grow up alongside TNG so it's the one I know the best of them all and I could probably be convinced to watch it pretty easily. Hiring Harry Treadaway of Penny Dreadful fame (PS I recommend clicking through our Treadaway Twins archives, I do) as well as Allison Pill of Scott Pilgrim and Snowpiercer et cetera fame? I'm that amount of easy. I'm in! DH isn't entirely sure who they're playing but think the character description of "a positronic brain specialist terrified of space travel" fits Harry and I can see it. He's positively positronic!

Which is Hotter?

.

Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings and Derek Jarman regular and a million billion other things actor Sean Bean is turning 60 today, and we've celebrated him several times here on the blog but weirdly never asked the following question so let's...

online survey