On his Instagram Tom captioned this picture "Auf der Alm, da gibt's koa Sünd'" which turns out to be the title of a German sex comedy from 1974 (also known as Bottoms Up, which is the greatest title ever) - do any of my German readers get the cultural reference a little better? Is this movie well-known? Anyway the thing is on YouTube so if anybody wants to watch some Alpine booby humor have at it!
I guess Nicholas Hoult has entered the "I only play real world authors who went by initials beginning with 'J'" phase of his career - he's just finished making a movie about JD Salinger and now he's in the lead to play JRR Tolkien, apparently. Weirdly I can kind of see how he could play the both of them, too...
See what I mean? He's not bad casting for either of them. White Men should be the subjects of everything, you guys! Aaaaaanyway the latter movie will be directed by Finnish director Dome Karukoski (I don't recognize any of his films - anybody know him?) and will focus on Tolkien's WWI experience.
As for the former, the Salinger movie calledRebel in the Rye, that's been in the can for awhile (we first told you about it right here, and we shared some pictures from its set right here) and just released its first trailer over the weekend. The movie is out in September.
.
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Shelves, shelves, suspenders, more shelves, Nicholas Hoult smoking a cigarette and banging on a typewriter, sweaters, sweater vests, shelves, Sarah Paulson, more shelves, Kevin Spacey and Victor Garber pawing at Nichols Hoult, more suspenders, more shelves, more shelves. I'm sold!
In all seriousness there are so many shelves in that trailer that I had to cap every single shot where they showed up, so if you are a person with your priorities in order you should hit the jump and stare at the luxurious and literate mid-century horniness of it all...
Stanley Kubrick was born 89 years ago today. His name's been sullied with a lot of Christopher Nolan comparisons over the past couple of weeks, but Nolan wishes - for all his purported chilliness there's more heart and horror in a single shot of Wendy Torrance standing over a typewriter than there is in the whole of Nolan's filmography. So let's remember what a wizard he wasand rank his movies!
Kubrick only made thirteen feature-length films in his 48 year career, and of those thirteen I have seen nine. I have never seen (I keep saving them for a rainy day) the first four - specifically Killer's Kiss, Fear and Desire, The Killing, and Paths of Glory. But of the nine I have seen, here's how I rank them (and please do keep in mind these are all, each and every single one of them, fantastic movies):
Dunno how I missed this in the lead up to Baywatch back at the start of the year - perhaps by that point the negative critical word about the movie had begun to leak out and/or The Rock was stroking his no doubt considerable ego with talk of running for President (I had to bail the fuck out when that happened) but hey look him and Rob "The Gronk" Gronkowski did a fun little skit about sex play with Zac Efron's speedo or something, wheeee. Watch it over here.
Anyway this is as good a time as any to mention that Baywatch is hitting digital in just a couple weeks on August 15th and then the blu-ray comes out on August 29th. It's apparently got a bunch of extras so fingers crossed for lots of Zac Efron behind the speedo scenes. Did any of you actually see the movie?
Jason Statham shared these outtakes from his recent Men's Health photoshoot himself on his Instagram over a month ago but I missed them until today when I went looking for a way to celebrate Jason's 50th birthday. Which is today. Happy 50, Jason! You give us all hope that we can be fuck machines at any and every age.
What I posted our Gratuitous Joe Keery post yesterday I mentioned the new trailer for the second season of Stranger Things, but I hadn't actually watched it. I'm still trying to navigate when to watch trailers and when not to. Anyway in the comments of that post Adam alerted us to the presence of Joe in period-appropriate short shorts and I immediately had to watch the trailer. A'duh! And there those shorts are up top. Man I miss the 80s.
That said (and I realize this is being said several days after everybody else said it, cut me some slack, jackoffs) that sure is a good trailer! Using the Vincent Price monologue from "Thriller" is probably the quickest way to make every single hair on my body stand to attention - you don't know how long I have wanted to stop a party dead in its tracks by reciting that monologue from heart. Secret dreams! Here's the trailer if you haven't yet yourself:
Well I do declare and speak of the devil - we were just foaming at the mouth about lil' Frankie Arnaud last night when he revealed himself to be THE PERFECT MAN in an interview with and a photo-shoot for Interview Magazine, and this morning, first thing I see here he be, in the pilot for the show that he was talking about in that interview that I totally skimmed past, something called Midnight Texas, all strapped up and stripped down to his shorty shorts. Whatever the hell this show is I am sold. (Anybody know what it's about? It's giving off some strong True Blood fumes just from this scene.) Hit the jump for eight more gifs...
Three things that I learned about François Arnaud in this interview with François Arnaud in Interview Magazine. One, he loves the movie Frances Ha. (He's being interviewed by his friend and Frances Ha co-star Mickey Sumner, is how that came up.) Two, he has a tattoo of an Egon Schiele drawing on his back. (Egon Schiele, also known as my favorite artist.)
And three, he worships the goddess Gina Gershon (who he'd just met before the interview, even though they both are in the movie Permission together.) (Sidenote: I reviewed Permission at Tribeca earlier this year - it is very good, and François is full-on naked in it. As is Morgan Spector. God I am so ready for that movie to properly come out already.) So there you basically have it. Me and François are married now. Bye, losers! Hit the jump for five more...
When I did one of my "Siri Says" posts for the year 1938 I made mention that the following year (meaning 1939) is notorious for being one of the greatest years in all of cinema history. It's a big damn year. Cut to today and color me surprised when Siri's actually handed me The Movies of 1939 to evaluate and in doing so has gone and made me realize that I have seen a shockingly small number of this year's classics! I mean sure, yes, I've seen the biggies, the ones everybody thinks of when you say "1939!" (AKA the ones that Victor Fleming and/or George Cukor both directed.) But the list is short, and there are many from this year I'm clueless about. Huh. So while I ruminate on my cinematic phoniness, you ruminate on my list.
We've been telling you to look forward to BBC Two's upcoming two-part miniseries Man in an Orange Shirt, which stars two of our faves - Oliver Jackson-Cohen & Julian Morris - in a multiple generation tale of forbidden love and war and family - were you listening? Are you listening NOW? That picture is of Oliver with the actor James McArdle (who can currently be seen on stage opposite Andrew Garfield and Russell Tovey in Angels in America), who plays his forbidden soldier boyfriend. (via, thanks to Jarett for the heads-up!)
There is also finally now a trailer, since the thing airs on July 31st, and the trailer gifts us with a couple of lovely Brokeback-ish embraces to boot.
The whole thing definitely feels like the prestige BBC version of Brokeback, now that I mention it, but with a flash-forward to the a happier time in the future where it seems that Julian Morris...
... is maybe making a happier gay life for himself
with David Gyasi here. Yes please. Here's the trailer:
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Not sure when or if we'll see this here in the US
yet but I'll keep you tuned in! I mean, obviously.
I really thought that Netflix was dropping the second season of Stranger Things sooner than they are - what with all the Comic-Con hullabaloo and the trailer being released I figured we were only a few weeks away from reuniting with Eleven & Co. But no, the show's not out until right before Halloween. Oh well. Actor David Harbour instagrammed a picture of him & Joe Keery (who plays adorable boy-next-door Steve on the show) getting friendly...
... and reminded me I had gathered up some pictures of Mr. Keery a couple of months ago and I'm just going to go ahead and post them now. And instead of this post leading us into the show we'll just use it as a temporary high to get us a little closer to when the show finally debuts.
Besides that Netflix phenom you should also know Joe Keery from Stephen Cone's lovely little film Henry Gamble's Birthday Party (you have seen that by now, right?) and he's also a musician - he's plays in a band called Post Animal. (You'll see some pictures of them mixed in below.) Oh and he's already lined up a role in Aaron Sorkin's upcoming movie Molly's Game with Idris Elba and Jessica Chastain. Oh and he's secretly kind of a fur-ball.
Which is kind of why we're here in the first place. Anyway do we think the second season of Stranger Things can live up to the crazy hype (and general success) of the first? Personally I'm mostly hoping that they give Winona Ryder plenty to do again, and that the Emmys take notice next time around. Fingers crossed. Until then let's all take those fingers and hit the jump for more Joe...
Blanche: Don't start to fret, George, or our waterbed
will be no fun at all tonight; as an actor, you should
know that fretting will ruin a performance.
George: You don't have to worry about my performance
tonight, honey - as a matter of fact, this very evening,
you're gonna see a standing ovation!
Barbara Harris is turning 82 today! She hasn't acted in anything since Grosse Pointe Blank in 1997 but she's still alive, bless her. Besides acting in this 1976 Hitchcock semi-classic her very first role in 1961 was in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents! I guess he saw something in her he liked.
Back in college me and my friends used to do what any and all good college students do at night, which is drop acid and break into the closest cemetery and wander around freaking each other out. My recollections of those nights consist of two main points. First, somebody would always get too freaked out after about fifteen minutes and we'd end up running the hell out of there and staring at the floor in the bus depot instead. And second, the next morning when the drugs had worn off we would be filthy. Just filthy. Like black grime under the nails gross. I could never remember what I had done to get that dirty, but it was a hallmark of the experience.
The Honor Farm, which just screened at Fantasia Fest, feels pretty true to both of those experiences. Lucy (Olivia Grace Applegate) and Annie (Katie Folger) planned for the perfect prom night, but what they got instead was one broken relationship and one barfing boyfriend and a lot of dashed hopes and dreams. So when the weird girls in the festive hearse offer them a good time getting fucked up in the woods (and to maybe go wander around the abandoned prison that gives the film its title) they take it. Why not? What have they got to lose?
Director Karen Skloss comes from a documentary background, and there's an unforced ease to the way she watches these kids in The Honor Farm's early scenes - they might look the part of Prom Princesses and Goth Girls but nobody plays it quite that broadly, and the characters all find common ground and seem to genuinely enjoy each other's company in unexpected ways. Everybody's damaged no matter their social strata, and The Honor Farm is a movie that recognizes that in the best John Hughes tradition.
Then the suburban dentist in the pink polo shirt shows up performing some sort of satanic ritual with a goat and Michelle Forbes, and shit gets weird. (Sidenote: Forbes is entirely uncredited for this film for some reason, but she was clearly cast to inject some of her True Blood hoodoo on the proceedings.) But is shit getting weird because these kids ate fistfuls of mushrooms, or is the weird honest and true?
The Honor Farm has zero - less than zero - interest in sorting that out for you. Indeed it complicates your ability to suss out any answers every chance it gets - if it's all a hallucination then why is that adorable baby goat not going anywhere? At one point one character has dream sex with the cute boy (sidenote: google Louis Hunter immediately) and in the next scene it seems he might have had the same dream?
I don't know. The film dodges back and forth across the line of frustrating and fascinating in its second half (and it just sort of... ends) but in that way that echoes my memories of actual hallucinogenic experiences. I once saw the meaning of life in a sunrise, but by the time I'd come to all I had to show for it was black caked fingernails and a hangover. . .
"I'm not sure why you're bothering. You will never - not in a million years - give the movie anything other than a negative review. It could check every single box of personal likes for you and you would hate it because it's a Christopher Nolan film. Meanwhile, you will heap praise on a piece of vacant, emotionless dreck like A Ghost Story and never once take issue with the fact that the lead actor is a rapist. Or you will spend hours praising effervescent masturbatory indulgences like the Twin Peaks reboot as high art. You are a fraud. An emotionally stunted child who has no business offering film criticism. "
--- If Michael Kirkhere was angry at me before I'd even reviewed Dunkirk then I guess he's probably none too keen on me now after I actually wrote my none too kind review. But here's to "effervescent masturbatory indulgences" though, for sure! Them's our faves!
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