... or so the ads for Once Upon a Time would have me believe ("The Number One New Drama!"), so can't we get some good gratuitous photo-shoots of him, please? I've already posted pretty much everything there is of him, and am in need of more. A constant undying need of more. (Preferably shots like this one.)
"It would be wrong of me to say that I don’t get seduced by certain things. That things don’t become tempting..."
That's Michael Fassbender talking about what it's like to be The Big Man now, in the new issue of Esquire. The whole interview isn't online, there are just a couple of snippets, plus these lovely pictures. And yes, he's obviously talking about that time he and I were in the same room together, when our feet touched. Call me, Michael! I'm discreet, and I will haunt your dreams.
Damn I wish I'd known that CBS Sunday Morning was doing a piece on Joss Whedon yesterday! I totally would have watched it. Well I suppose that's what the internet's for - catching us up on shit we missed. And porn. Anyway here's the piece (via) and it's got the first footage from his stocked up with Whedon-regulars Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing that anybody not named Joss Whedon and/or who's not starring in it and/or who's not working on it that the world has seen! (I really should rewrite that sentence to make it somewhat coherent but you get the gist.)
In Joss-related news, has anybody seen this fantastic right-up-our-alley promotional art-work by a person called Fro (there should be a movie called A Person Called Fro, and it should star Pam Grier) for The Cabin in the Woods? Everybody loves charts, and there's a Ways Not To Die shout-out, kind of! (click to embiggen)
(click 'em to embiggen) That series that Raoul played a swimming coach for on Italian television really is the gift that keeps on giving, and giving, and giving. We've posted pictures from it before - see them here and here and here. I suppose it's only appropriate that the series be so giving, since it took away all of his luscious body hair...
... in exchange for the gratuitous speedo action. (Not that he'd been shy about speedos before this - see here and here) Still, it's really quite very impossible to complain under such bountiful circumstances. I stumbled upon a bunch of pictures I hadn't seen before (most via here) last week, some from that series, most from other stuff, and so it's sharing time. Hit the jump for forty more!
(via) I haven't watched the latest trailer for Prometheus and I really think I won't be watching it at all, if I can manage - I am so hyped up for the film already I don't need to see a single speck more footage to be conviced. At this point all watching it will do is steal my first look at more footage from the movie away from that time in several week's when I'll be sitting in the theater watching Prometheus at last. No need!
Still it does give me the chance to spotlight Logan here, which I don't mind - hopefully we'll get lots more pictures of this sort from him now that he's in such a big buzzy project, since he has yet to be photographed enough for the good and proper gratuitous post his comeliness deserves. We've been rooting for that ever since his lips were the only thing on-screen worth rooting for in M. Night Syamalan's Devil. Marisa Tomei is a lucky gal.
It's director and professional provocateur Lars von Trier's 56th birthday today. Happy birthday, Lars! You may recall that we called his film Melancholiaour favorite of 2011. point being, we like and admire him quite a bunch. (The Hitler thing was a clusterfuck of misunderstandings and purposeful obnoxiousness, to be sure, but we think we know what he was getting at after reading this.)
Just last week we heard that his next film Nymphomaniac - following as he puts it "the erotic life of one woman from the age of zero to the age of 50" - is going to be two movies... meaning that the first film will presumably be entirely about the sexual shenanigans of a child... that ought to go entirely unremarked upon, right? It will star Charlotte Gainsbourg, his current muse-of-sorts - really she just seems to be the one who can handle working with him over and over again.
Anyway it being his birthday we wanted to do something (especially since he's sworn off doing press ever again so we're sure we won't be hearing from him, at least until he sees fit to admit he didn't mean that), so here's a totally random list of the first five things we think of when we think of Lars Von Trier movies. We'll start with the end...
... of everything in Melancholia
The "I've Seen It All" sequence from Dancer in the Dark - This was always my favorite number from the soundtrack, but I'm obviously biased towards it since it's Thom Yorke on the recorded version (it's Peter Stormare in the film). But the sound of the train running through it is so good.
The orgy of The Idiots
The arrival of Udo in The Kingdom
And of course, 'Chaos reigns!!!" from Antichrist
I could have gone with a list of the subtler shadings and character work that make his movies more than provocations, that make them masterpieces - watching Emily Watson struggle to be a good wife to a broken man in Breaking the Waves, Siobhan Fallon crying with Bjork before the gallows, Nicole Kidman getting into her father's car at the end of Dogville... but that list would have been such a downer, man. Now we've had fun instead! Whee! Mutant babies and people making fun of the handicapped! Fun! What are your favorite Lars Von Trier movie moments? .
Things have been a little nutso in MNPP-land (behind the curtain, that is) so movie-wise I've fallen horribly behind. The last time I was in a theater was for Cabin in the Woods two weeks back (and I want to see it a second time so bad but I have no idea when I'll be able to) and before that there were a random smattering of preview screenings (Vamps and Damsels in Distress) but basically I've fallen far far behind my normal binge viewing habits. I'm running out of new things to say! I can only quote lines from Muriel's Wedding so many times!
Anyway I did get out to see a couple bands this weekend, so that's something. And I was the obnoxious guy holding up his camera recording half the shows, too! So I figured I'd share some, in case anybody wanted to feel like you were there with me, retrospectively. I know that's your dream!
First up, here's The Shins performing "Simple Song"
at Terminal 5 here in NYC last evening:
.
I also recorded "Phantom Limb" which you can watch here.
The night before I saw Death Cab For Cutie at the Beacon performing with a small orchestral section and I recorded a ton since I had a fantastic seat (third row center!). Here they performing one of my very favorite old songs of theirs, "Bend to Squares":
And here they are doing my number one favorite song of theirs,
"Transatlanticism," which they closed the show with:
You can also see them perform "A Movie Script Ending," "Underneath the Sycamore, "Crooked Teeth," "Stay Young Go Dancing," "I WIll Follow You Into the Dark," and "Tiny Vessels" (tolda I recorded a lot) over here at this link. Great shows! .
A little vintage Adrian Pasdar on Heroes this morning in honor of his 47th birthday today. Odd how I try to play off something as "vintage" that only aired like three or four years ago. I'm being ridiculous. Anyway see more Adrian here. It's worth it for this NSFW shot alone. Or this one! I miss his incestuous vibe with Milo.
(via, click to embiggen) There's something kind of Cruising meets Kenneth Anger about these shots, right? How terribly appropriate.
Noted whateverasexual Luke Evans has a new movie out, you guys! It's called The Raven and it looks terrible and I don't think I could have less interest in seeing it. I'll just go read some Poe stories and that will be plenty, I think. I don't need to see him running in slow-motion away from explosions, but thanks.
Still, it does represent another opportunity to bitch about Luke's continued silence regarding the gay stuff, and we'll always tap that. Much like he loves to tap man ass, left right and center. Oh, Luke. I would so like to lust for you unreservedly, why can't you just be a doll and straighten so to speak all this nonsense out?
I can't take credit for thinking up this side-by-side (via), and I hope everyone instinctively knows there's really one answer to this question, but I'm asking it anyway because I can't believe it had never occurred to me before. But yeah, Nicholaj Coster-Waldau wins by like a billion miles. I mean, come on.
James Franco's movie about the poet Hart Crane called The Broken Towerwas just one of fifty gayish bookish bio-picish things that he said he was going to make over the past couple of years, so you'd be forgiven for forgetting its existence. Naturally I kept an intent ear to the ground about it though, since the first thing we heard was there was going to be a scene of some sort of lovemaking between James and his co-star Michael Shannon, and the second thing we heard was there was also a scene of James giving an explicit blowjob (albeit on a fake penis). These are things that capture our attention!
Well the movie's out in theaters today (James is even going to be at some screenings here in NYC over the weekend) and sure enough, both of these things come to pass. See, here's a couple shots of James and Michael going at it:
And even though it's so dark you practically need to wear night-vision goggles to get anything from it if you hit the jump I've got the other something to see, that is to say, what is supposed to be the NSFW sight of James Franco putting a large fake penis back and forth inside of his mouth. Hit it.
There ya go, I boiled down the entire two minute trailer for Judd Apatow's sorta-sequel to Knocked Up called This is 40 to the twelve most vital frames and put it on repeat; that's all you need to know as to whether this is something you want to see on a big screen or not. Obviously my answer is, "All of my belongings will be on EBay by the end of the day so I can afford to buy tickets for six straight months of screenings." Obviously.
(via) What's going on with Bryan Greenberg? Anybody? Seems like he was everywhere for a skinny minute and then "everywhere" turned out to be "a steady string of nowheres." Oh well. At least I'll always have that time he made love to a Q-tip, and my heart.
(via) This post's title is the obvious go-to for a caption to this photograph of Dwayne Johnson barbecuing what appears to be a human hand on the set of Michael Bay's Pain and Gain, and I swiped it from the pic's source anyway, but I feel like there's got to be an even better caption out there. Thoughts? And never did I think I'd ever squeeze so many posts out of a Michael Bay movie, but this thing's been bizarrely fruitful. I still won't see it, I long ago decided that avoiding Michael Bay movies like the Bubonic is best for my sanity, but it's a curious thing anyway.
"He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care — he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid."
-- That's comics legend Grant Morrison talking to Playboy about the swishy Caped Crusader's utter fabulousness. Paging Joel Schumacher! (via, via)
So... we're really doing this, huh? Okay. A couple of weeks ago Time Out compiled a list of what they called "The 100 Best Horror Films." (Thanks to Nat at TFE for bringing it to my attention.) I was super proud of myself when I went through the list and realized that I'd seen all but six of the movies on their list, because this obviously made me the cool kid on the playground. Eat my shorts, high school bullies!
Anyway from there I decided to try and cross off the remaining six and get a perfect score, and within twenty-four hours I had watched two of the six. The first was Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon, which was beautifully shot and a solid watch (as seen above, when the demon's seen in the distance it's still a powerfully creepy image), but mostly remarkable for how apparent it became halfway through it that Sam Raimi had essentially remade it with his 2009 fun-as-heck fright-festDrag Me To Hell, which for all my love of that film is something I did not know.
And the second movie of the six that I watched is called Society. I had never heard of Society. And glancing through the film's credits, one would not expect to be seeing Society end up on anybody's "best of" lists for anything, except perhaps "the best on-set drug dealer." A 1989 movie starring Baywatch's Billy Warlock from the writer of Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show? Really?
Really! I would come to learn what a fool I was being right quick. Besides all of his work with the "Honey! I Did Awful Things To Our Children!" franchise, director Brian Yuzna also produced the Re-Animator movies and wrote From Beyond for Stuart Gordon, so he knew his way around this kind of silly mind-breaking insanity.
The film is famous - well, infamous is more appropriate, and only among those who seek out such oddities at that - for its ending, which is what we're getting to, but from the start it's so bizarre and... just so so bizarre...
...that it's hypnotic. And it just gets stranger and stranger, like a snowball made out of silly putty rolling down a hill made out of a stash of old EC Comics and sticky Victoria Secret catalogues and transcripts of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episodes.
It tells the story of a boy named Bill...
... who doesn't quite fit in with his super rich family and friends, and what he uncovers about the habits behind the curtain of the One Percent. It is weird, man. From every angle.
Which brings us to the ending. I had only the faintest idea beforehand of what was coming, and lest I spoil it for any of you who might want to seek the movie out I'm putting it after the jump. I mean I'm also putting it after the jump because nobody should have to look at such things without having made the choice to, which you can do by clicking in past the jump. But you've been warned. What lay beyond is not for the faint of heart or mind or stomach or soul. BEWARE.
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