my new plaid pants: May 2013

Friday, May 31, 2013

""Back on the good ol' 27th floor."

"27th floor???"

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Querelle (1982)

Narrator: And humility can only be born of humiliation,

otherwise it is nothing but vanity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who knew plenty about vanity and humiliation (humility I'm not so sure about), was born on this day in 1945. It really ought to be a holiday, if you ask me. Where we all get drunk and alternate slapping each other, making out, and falling into deep ennui.

Hannibal Got Renewed!

Hannibal got renewed!

Don't Watch The Prisoners Trailer

The trailer for Prisoners, that movie with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman that I showed you the first picture from yesterday, showed up online last night and I wish I hadn't watched it - it's one of those ones that gives away 95% of the story from start to near end - basically I feel like I know everything that happens now save the final minute. I'm not even going to link to the thing, dammit! That complaint aside the movie looks good - kind of Mystic River meets Last House on the Left. Super happy to see Viola Davis up in there.

Just Joss Whedon Again No Big Whoop

That right there is video I took last evening of Joss Whedon introducing a screening of his film Serenity at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He kept it relatively brief as you can see; earlier in the night he'd dome a repeat of the screening slash Q&A with Much Ado About Nothing for the BAM audience that he'd done the night before at Lincoln Center, which I was there for and wrote about yesterday, so I'm sure he was a little talked out. Then again with Much Ado opening next week I think he's probably nowhere near done with his promotional duties at this point...

Good Morning, Quaid

(Shelves!) Okay yeah maybe I did call the Total Recall remake one of the worst movies of last year, but none of that bad sentiment extended to anything having to do with Colin Farrell's scene in just a pair of loose low-slung sweatpants. That was movie gold! As you can see. I never did post proper caps of this scene (there are a couple shots with my review of the movie though) so here they are. It's Colin's 37th birthday today! Hit the jump for the pictures, along with a couple from Tigerland because when do I not want to look at him in Tigerland? (Answer: Never.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Finding Nemo (2003)

Marlin: Hey. Guess what?

Nemo: What?

Marlin: Sea turtles? I met one,

and he was a hundred and fifty years old.

Nemo: Hundred and fifty?

Marlin: Yup.

Nemo: Oh. 'Cause Sandy Plankton said that

they only live to be a hundred.

Marlin: Sandy Plankton? You think I would travel the

whole ocean and not know as much as Sandy Plankton?

He was a hundred and fifty, not a hundred.

And Finding Nemo as of today is ten years old. Ten!

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep...

I Love Nothing In The World...

... so well as Whedon -- is that not strange? It always seems to take a minute, when that Shakespearean dialogue starts sputtering forth, to adjust to the dusty language - the indelible hithers and thithers of it all - and with Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing there's maybe an added note of frisson on board, seeing a who's who of the Buffyverse stomping around a wine country villa tickling Bill's ivory tongue. Fred and Wesley are being so mean to each other! And I have no idea what they are saying! Slowly but surely your ears adapt - I think it was around the time that Clark Gregg showed up, waggling his tongue in a delightfully goofball (at least early on before all the woe is everything's) performance as Elder Statesman slash Daddy Dearest Leonidas, that Joss' take on the material began to feel fruitful, and from there it only snowballed.

It never quite loses the sensation of being A Very Special Episode Of A Joss Whedon Television Show From Another Dimension - the budget shows - but that's a big part of its charm. It feels like you're at one of those Merry Murder Parties where the guests are suddenly acting out their scenes right around you, only at this gathering they're a bunch of people who had a scene or two on Dollhouse back in the day. (Hey there, Reed Diamond.)

If I'm going to single out anybody for Best in Show I'm going to single out the person Joss has proven his camera and pen to be in love with time and again, and for good reason - Amy Acker absolutely wows as Beatrice; she can do a pratfall with the grace of a perfectly timed gangly disgrace, and her "Oh God, that I were a man!" speech pretty much tears the roof off. Give this woman more work, ye gods of the acting profession! But the delight performance-wise is sprinkled evenly over the whole delightful comic-tragic souffle - Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk make sturdy wit out of their huffing and puffing dimwittedness, Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz brew believable love and heartbreak out of the couple that rends marriage and death asunder, and Sean Maher's sinisterly scored asides, a ridiculous ballet of shadows and foggy sighs, is as funny and pointlessly mean as it needs to be. Really the film just works, in its incorrigibly modest way, so much that this being a one-off, a one-time Whedon-Shakespeare co-production, would be cruel and inhuman - I must now insist that the entirety of Shakespeare's plays, from Romeo to King John, get the Nothing treatment.

Oh and yes as that picture attests Joss Whedon was there at the screening last night, and he was about as Joss Whedony as you expect him to be. He knows how to vibe on a crowd of people there to hang on his every word, and hang we did. I considered taping the thing or taking extensive mental notes and then I realized that the internet lives and breathes his every word and somebody else would do the work for me - click on over here for just one of the many examples I've seen today that proved my laziness more than right. Huzzah laziness!

Junk Saver

There's a nice big gallery of new photos and concept art from Guillermo Del Toro's upcoming monster mash Pacific Rim over at Variety - there are some really cool drawings of the movie's beasties therein but maybe you don't want to have them spoiled for you so instead I bring these shots of Charlie Hunnam and his super indestructible codpiece. Them big bad monsters ain't getting nowhere near his junk. (Poor big bad monsters.)

Speaking O' Gyllenhaal...

... this first official still from ~~French~~ Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve's film Prisoners, starring Jake and Hugh Jackman, is new to my eyes. (via) This will be Monsieur Villeneuve's second film with Jake - they've already made An Enemy together, which hasn't even come out yet. I smell (b)romance!

Who Wore It Best?

The claustrophobic space jumpsuit?

poll by twiigs.com

A happy 42nd birthday to director Duncan Jones today. I'm still disappointed he and Jake didn't get caught making out at the Source Code premiere. Oh well. Jones is working with Dominic Cooper on that Ian Fleming bio-pic next so here's to hoping for future endeavors!

Pic of the Day

Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy have been spotted in their period provisions on the set of the next X-Men movie. (via) I'm biased in his favor naturally but Fassy is winning the flattering costume contest here by leaps and bounds, I'd say.

Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me...

... that Alexander Skarsgard and Joel Kinnaman are friends?

All the sweet Swedish fantasies I could've been having!

Five Frames From ?

What movie is this?

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... snuggling with Amy and Fran.

Such is the power of my love for Amy Acker that she's able to invade what's normally a moment for sexual innuendo - while wearing pink pajamas no less!

I'm especially feeling my love for these two after seeing Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing last night - I'll review that properly in a bit but I wanted to take a moment outside of the review proper to zoom in on one thing...

... specifically that Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing serves as an excellent reminder that Fran Kranz has an astonishing body underneath the nerd slash stoner schtick he always gets saddled with. This body has not been documented enough! Thankfully Joss gives him a lingering out-of-the-pool toweling off scene in Much Ado, which you best believe I will cap as soon as possible. For now, hit the jump to see some other most worthwhile shots...

Elton John Wishes

I force the image of Tom Hardy with that nappy Snape wig on his head upon us because I thought maybe a side-by-side of it with a young Elton John would do the trick in convincing me that Tom Hardy should or could play Elton John in a bio-pic, but no dice. I suppose once you got Tom under a pair of giant sunglasses and in a rainbow jumpsuit with platforms on maybe you could trick me, but I'm not sold just yet. Nor do I really need to be, since the story about this happening says it's not even been officially offered, but "producers" on the bio-pic, which is only in its infancy stages still, are "considering" Hardy. Then they go on to say that it's Elton himself producing and everything makes sense - if I were "considering" a bio-pic of myself I'd put out word to the hot pieces I wanted to see reenact my youthful excessive exploits, too. Get me Tom Hardy on the phone, dammit!

Good Morning, Gratuitous Keir Dullea

Thank heavens for Tumblr, without which we might have no proof that Keir Dullea, who's turning 77 years old today, spent a whole lot of time in movies taking his clothes off. A lot of these films are pretty obscure now, hard to find, so these obsessives are doing the Lord's work.

For instance these shots of him laying down in the shower are from something called Paperback Hero in 1973, which is about, and I quote from IMDb, "A hockey player in a small town begins to lose his grip on reality, and starts to believe that he is a gunslinger in the Old West." Indeed. Speaking of...

poll by twiigs.com

The shot on the left is Keir in costume for 1964's Mail Order Bride, and the shot on the right is him in 2001, of course... although if we're going to make it a fair contest we should post a clearer shot of how supernaturally pretty he was beneath that space-suit in 2001...

Anyway like I was saying, Tumblr was made for such things as sorting out this sort of thing for semi-forgotten stars of yesteryear, bless it. I mean where else would I have ever seen a gif like this:

Don't tell me what's really happening there, I like the way my imagination's filling in the gaps better than any truth could muster. That's from the 1961 movie Hoodlum Priest - what a great title. Moving on...

I posted several shots of Mr. Dullea back in 2009 too, click yonder for those. Also, not all but a lot of the pictures I've posted here are via this Tumblr, which is pretty thorough Keir-wise. And now, if you want nay need more, from fully dressed to significantly less so, hit the jump for them...

Daniel Craig Does Glamour Shots

Heads up! I wrote up a few thoughts about the news that Sam Mendes might be making a second James Bond movie over at The Film Experience this afternoon, go check that out here. Let's hope no matter who directs the film that they get whatever person styled the above photograph to outfit the next Bond movie - that is most definitely The Look.