Friday, February 27, 2015

Jack You Dog You

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Jack O'Connell's new movie '71, about a soldier trapped in the wrong part of town during the Northern Ireland conflicts, is out this weekend and it is really a fantastic film, you should try to see it if it's playing at a theater near you. Here's what I wrote up about it from the New York Film Festival last fall. Crackerjack!

Me, I'm going to see the documentary about Nicolas Winding Refn called My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Nic and his wife Liv Corfixen, who directed the film, will be there for a Q&A), and I'm going to make one last stab at getting my ass out to see Jupiter Ascending before it vanishes. Also I will probably get drunk. I feel like getting drunk.

Have a great weekend, everybody.
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Quote of the Day

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"Henry’s a sweetheart."

--- In an interview at EW when talk turns to the eventual filming of Justice League and his role as Aquaman Jason Momoa reveals the little cartoon hearts he has in his eyes upon the subject of his super man Henry Cavill. He calls Ben Affleck a "bad-ass" but Henry? He's a sweetheart. Awwwww. When y'all go read the interview make sure to play this song in the background while you do it:
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But Can Ya Blame Ben Whishaw?

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That is the first picture of Ben Whishaw in the upcoming BBC series London Spy, about a young homosexual who falls for a dude only to have said dude subsequently go missing, which gets our Ben (he'll be playing the young homosexual) summarily sucked into a world of espionage and intrigue. Sounds, dare I say, INTRIGUING. (Sorry.) Apparently there was some kerfuffle in the fall because the BBC loudly proclaimed that they were looking for "an immensely talented non-Caucasian actor" to play the role of the prospective boyfriend of Ben's only to end up casting a non-non-Caucasion in the form of  Edward Holcroft, who is very very white.

But he's also terribly hot! It's a conundrum! I just actually took a mental note of Mr. Holcroft two nights ago while watching Kingsman: The Secret Service...

...  that this dude is definitely going places, and whaddya know, here he is. He could suck me into intrigue any day of the week. Insist on lots of kissing scenes before he disappears, Ben. So I gathered up a few more pictures (including shots of him with his Kingsman co-star Taron Egerton as well as with his good friend Douglas Booth) and you can hit the jump for them...


Oh Henry Cavill We Love You Get Up

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"And her cape got yanked and she just went
BOOM right down the stairs! Like this!" (via)
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Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sequels

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Dropped suddenly down onto Twitter last night amid the bizarre stories of llama chases and frock distortions was a great big bomb of movie news - the director Denis Villeneuve is going to direct the sequel to Blade Runner. We've been hearing about a sequel to Blade Runner for awhile now... actually I don't know the answer to this: was there talk of a Blade Runner sequel back when Blade Runner actually came out, or is this just a recent thing piggy-backed upon Ridley Scott's revisiting of the Alien franchise with Prometheus?

Anyway Denis Villeneuve has made a name for himself in the US over the past couple of years by making Jake Gyllenhaal movies, so obviously Denis Villeneueve has been mentioned here at MNPP quite a bit over the past couple of years. He directed both Prisoners (my review) and Enemy (my review) - I far far far prefer the latter film, which will become evident once/if I get around to our awards for last year, but Prisoners was a fine film too.

The question really is, then, do we need a Blade Runner sequel? And as many opinions as you're gonna see flung about, the basic truth remains - nobody has that answer until we actually see, with our eyes and not our fevered imaginations, a Blade Runner sequel. I will say though that I'm more excited about the prospect of a Blade Runner sequel with Velleneuve attached than I would be with Ridley Scott attached, and that comes from somebody who thought Prometheus was yes very dumb but also astonishingly gorgeous to look at and also a lot of fun. It's on TV often enough that I've watched it several times now and I will get sucked into it every single time and I never feel guilty about it.

That said, Scott's best days are probably behind him, while Denis Villeneuve is right in the prime of his best days if you ask me. Enemy... I really cannot gush enough about Enemy. I want to roll around in Enemy. Maybe it would be better if Denis Villenueve went off and continued developing his own projects, sure. But he apparently wants to do this. And I am willing to give him the benefit. Harrison Ford, who is indeed returning to the role of Rick Deckard, has already praised the sequel's script to the skies and back. Let's just hope that the studio let's Villeneuve put his own stamp on it, and go where the material takes him. And by all of this what I mean is: Jake Gyllenhaal should clearly co-star!

What do you guys think?
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:


Dr. David Kibner: We came here from a dying world. We drift through the universe, from planet to planet, pushed on by the solar winds. We adapt and we survive. The function of life is survival. 

Rest in peace Leonard Nimoy.
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I Am Link

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--- Queens Scream - I've been especially scattered this week with my brains bouncing from one thing not to the next but the next next (I think I've been fighting off, so far successfully, a bit of a cold, and that's where my energies have all been aiming themselves, honestly) but if I was on ym death-bed that still wouldn't be a valid excuse for me not to link to Interview Magazine's conversation between Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis because oh my god Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis!!! Let's pretend they never made that shitty Kristen Bell movie together that one time, though. (thanks Mac)

--- Hinx Off - A lot of these links are actually a couple of days old though, so you've probably already seen Empire magazine's cover with Daniel Craig for the new Bond movie, and you've probably already seen the picture inside the magazine of Dave Bautista as the movie's bad guy (called Hinx), but I'm still gonna link over to it because Dave looks hot.

--- Rock Hard - And I believe these pictures are from the same magazine - some new shots of the new Fantastic Four were released, and Jamie Bell, pre-Thingening, looks typically adorable. I'm so sad he'll be covered up by CG rock for most of that movie. What a waste! In related news I saw the FF trailer on a big screen earlier this week and weirdly it played worse than it did watching it on my computer. The effects were more noticeably shabby, I guess.

--- Killer Doll - This is such a bizarre story, if true - apparently the Terminator in the new Terminator movie will have a Ken-doll like crotch-mound where his man-parts would normally be. It's how they're getting away with the franchise-usual teleported nudity scene and keeping the movie family-friendly. because a Terminator movie should be family-friendly! I believe they're just talking about the CG Arnold robot though? There had best not be a shot of a dickless Jai Courtney. We know he fills out his briefs.

--- Proper Lady - A trio of new pictures of Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' Carol have popped up and sure enough, Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' Carol is to die to die to die for. Carol is Haynes' take on Patricia Highsmith's book The Price of Salt, an adaptation we've been crowing about for probably a decade or so now. We are looking forward to it very much!

--- The Next One - It's not much info but in an interview with Jonny Greenwood he talks a little bit about where he and the Radiohead gang are right now with regards to working on their next album; he says they've played stuff through once, and next they'll start going back through and re-working it, but that they're in a really good spot right now. Good! 

--- Small Screen Big Talent - The next great actress of a certain age being forced to turn to TV for an interesting role is the great Joan Allen - she's going to make an as-of-yet untitled thriller for ABC about a politician's son who returns ten years after having been presumed murdered, and the fall out from all that drama. I hope it is good enough for Joan. The adorable (and ample-bummed) Zach Gilford is playing the son.

--- Pretty Girl - The first picture of Eddie Redmayne as The Danish Girl is online and shocking nobody Eddie looks just fine in female accoutrement. The Danish Girl is about Lili Eibe, who got sex reassignment surgery in Germany in the 1930s, and the fall-out from that. I'm curious to see how Eddie walks the transgender tightrope later this year, after Jared Leto pissed so many people off; seeing as Eddie's about a billion times more sincere-seeming, I think he'll probably do a better job.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... putting it on the shelf with Matt McGorry.

I've said it once and I will say it again - mix together my two favorite things (bookshelves and hot guys) and you will get a shout-out here at MNPP, even if I don't watch your show. I do not watch How To Get Away With Murder, but out of nowhere my own particular sort of Spider-Sense tingled last night...

... and I knew to get to work. I am already familiar with McGorry and his skillz from Orange is the New Black, which I do watch... oh and also from the last time he made my own particular sort of Spider-Sense tingle, back in the fall...


Guten Morgen, Gratuitous Alexander Fehling

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I contemplated connecting the dots on what got me onto an Alexander Fehling kick yesterday but it's not really very interesting - let's just say it started with his fellow countryman Ronald Zehrfeld, who stars in a movie that's playing the Film Comment Selects program here in NYC this weekend, and leave it at that. (And yes, we will be doing one of these posts for Zehrfeld at some point too.) Anyway eventually I was staring at Alexander, and here we are.

If he seems familiar to you and you're not German then it's probably from Inglourious Basterds - he was the Nazi in the basement scene that was drunkenly celebrating the birth of his child. Although it wasn't that that I was recognizing him from at first - it was this post at The Film Experience from last fall's Toronto Film Festival, where Nathaniel named Fehling's performance in the WWII thriller Labyrinth of Lies one of the fest's best.

I remember stowing his name and face (and yes, bosom) away for future reference, and, to bear repeating myself, here we are. Does he look like a blonde Jeremy Northam to anybody else? Anyway I have a ton of pictures of him to share, so hit the jump, and they will be shared.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Adam Driver Four Times

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See more here.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:


Eli: You have to invite me in. 
Oskar: What happens if I don't? 
What happens if you walk in anyway? 
Is there something in the way? 
I'm trying not to think about the fact that I effed up on getting tickets to see the stage version of this movie that's been playing here in New York for a few months; by the time I'd heard enough good stuff about it it was too late, too late for me, alas. I blame the musical version of Fun Home for ruining me - I didn't like the musical, nope not at all, even though I adored Alison Bechdel's book and even though it too got raves. So when Let the Right One In rolled around, I let my skepticism take hold. Oh well. I'll always have the movie! Speaking of, it's crazy cheap on blu-ray right now. Seeing as how it's one of the most beautiful movies of the past decade you could do far worse.

There's a scene in It Follows (which I just reviewed) that reminded me of the pool scene in Let the Right One In, by the way. They've got some similarities, these two flicks, tonally, thematically. And of course they're all referring back to the grand-daddy of all horror-movie pool scenes dripping with strange sexuality - Jacques Tourneur's Cat People


He Put His Disease In Me

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It Follows hit me with the full force of a nightmare - I mean an honest-to-goodness actual nightmare, a recurring one that I had when I was little that I hadn't thought of in years and which this movie brought back with full sweeping horrific force, so much so that I had a desperate time of it falling asleep last night. I'm a zombie today thanks to It Follows, and that's the most I can ask for out of my horror movies. 

Listening to people recount their dreams is usually fairly boring but I love listening to people recount their nightmares, at least in the vague sense, so here's the image this movie drudged up from the depths of my subconscious - a horrible apparition in red, tattered, floating at the end of the unlit wood-paneled hallway that extended from my own bedroom down to my mother's room. That's all it did. Floated there. And to this day that floating, that waiting, sends shivers down my spine.

It Follows digs its fingers into the meat of those childhood fears and shakes us around, around, around. It is awash in unease, with its slow zooms seeming to miss the characters in frame entirely, more interested in the endlessly outstretched background behind them - how this movie makes so much open space seem so endlessly claustrophobic will be written about for years.

But as the camera purposefully hovers three inches to the side of the characters, the script refuses to - these are good kids, we like these kids, and we're all the worse off for it. No matter how closely they huddle their bodies - for warmth and camaraderie, for a human connection - the damn camera keeps finding the spaces in between and explotiing them, and letting things, horrible horrible things, float down into the cracks. From inside, the rot spreads. It's such a searing yet delicate decay, this living thing.
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Which is Hotter?

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Some pictures from our forever daisy Kristin Chenoweth's new Broadway show On the Twentieth Century were unloaded online today and the above shot of KC straddling a very fine very mustachio'd and very vintage Andy Karl made us realize there was a question that needed asking...

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When I saw Rocky on Broadway last year Andy Karl was out for the night and I'm still getting over that, but I suppose I can stare at the video of him performing with The Skivvies in his skivvies and find some way to move on...


Say Hello To Joe

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Refusing to be outdone in the Twink Department by Bryan Singer, Ang Lee has found his own, and Ang's is so fresh he doesn't even have an IMDb page yet! Joe Alwyn, seen above, will star in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which we first told you about back in September - it's an adaptation of a book by Ben Fountain about an Army-slash-Football hero and is described as "a razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, [that] explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad." Apparently there's a second male leading role in the story, which Garrett Hedlund is very close to nabbing.Anyway Joe might not have an IMDb page yet but he has got Twitter and he has got Facebook and his page from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama at the University of London tells us he's 6'1", which is one of the most important facts we might ever learn about him.

Shorn Cox

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I'd like to be more excited about this new batch of pictures of Charlie Cox in Netflix's Daredevil show, I really would, but reminding me that they've shorn his natural fuzziness bare isn't really the way to go. I can't believe I'm telling them to cover Charlie Cox up, but honestly he looks better to me in the shots where he's in his skin-tight costume...

... and I can pretend that he's still himself under that thing. 
I don't know who that hairless person up top even is! 
He sure isn't my Charlie Cox!


Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Well ya got your wish, Hadley!
You wanted to see a Merman.
You got to see a Merman.

Sitterson: Oh, man, I'm sorry. 
Hadley: He had the conch in his hands! 
Sitterson: I know. In a couple more minutes, 
who knows what might have happened. Yes. 
Hadley: I am never gonna see a merman. Ever. 
Sitterson: Dude, be thankful. Those things are terrifying. 
And the cleanup on them is a nightmare. 
I offer up that bit of dialogue to you for two reasons. First reason: Shit's funny. Second reason: It's writer/director Drew Goddard's 40th birthday today! Happy birthday, Drew! Drew worked on Buffy, Drew worked on Angel, Drew worked on Alias and Lost, Drew wrote the scripts for Cloverfield and World War Z and Ridley Scott's upcoming movie The Martian with Matt Damon. Basically Drew is awesome. We're sad about the trouble with Sony's Spider-Man projects just cuz Drew was set to make The Sinister Six and we had hopes he could make it work. Well we look forward to the next thing!

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