Putting the Sin in Assassin

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If you're keeping track (and there's no need, that's what I am here for) this is the third promotional image from Michael Fassbender's Assassin's Creed film that is simply a picture of Michael Fassbender without his shirt on (see the previous ones here and here). That's not including all the time he spends in the trailer without a shirt on, of course. But this is easily the best one. And are those gloves giving anybody else flashbacks to Brad Pitt's rubber gloves in Fight Club?

Now that's a "Who Wore It Best?" trial for the ages...

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Anyway in other Michael Fassbender news (if you can still see straight after those pictures) Michael's spoken a little bit more (thx Mac) about the upcoming Prometheus slash Alien sequel slash prequel called Covenant and it turns out we'll be getting inappropriate android bulges coming at us from every direction:

“I am allowed to say I am playing two robots – Walter and David. I think what’s great about it is that Ridley has gone back to the DNA of Alien, the horror element of that. But it also has the scope and the scale of Prometheus. Ridley has cut it already. He is a machine. He is an incredible human being and he was in such good form. He is such an imaginative and mischievous figure.” 

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La Idris Bonita

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Thank goodness for Madonna's reliable thirstiness - if she hadn't been openly ogling Idris Elba in his kickboxing debut we'd not have had any pictures or footage of it, it seems! (At least until his TV series documenting his new past-time comes out, at least.) The singer posted a video on her Instagram and I won't even swipe it to post here because of the invaluable public service she's accomplished - I will make you go over and watch the full video on her Instagram. Okay okay I will make a gif from a bit of it because duh....

It's Frightfully Romantic

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I have a couple of reasons for using Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures for today's edition of "Beauty vs Beast," all of which I get into over at The Film Experience before I ask you to vote, but the biggest most important reason of all I don't even need to say, but what the heck - it's a stone-cold masterpiece, and that's plenty.

GO VOTE.

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Michiel Huisman Two Times

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Both of these shots are via Michiel's Instagram, because Michiel knows how to please his fans. (And I am sure that Michel knows his fans would love to please him in return. So, so, so very much.) Anyway he came up on Twitter this morning and it's not like I can resist an excuse for more Huisman. A very Huisman Halloween!

There's a new Jake Ryan in our Lives

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Did anybody else think that Ryan Reynolds & Jake Gyllenhaal were going to to start making out against the window separating them at the end of the trailer for Life? Just me? Well I like the way my brain works, so there. Anyway that is the climactic moment in the US trailer for Life, which stars Jake & Ryan & Rebecca Ferguson and several other recognizable faces as the crew of a spaceship that stumbles upon a foreign life-form and stop me if this sounds familiar. Here's that!

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I specified that the shot of Ryan & Jake putting their love on the glass up top comes from the US trailer because there is also a slightly different International Trailer, and that one only includes half the shot, but it also has some different footage so if you're feeling complete-ist have at it...

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I had no idea this movie had even filmed yet! We'd posted that it was being made way back when, but I guess since the whole thing was done on sound-stages and green-screens they were able to sneak the shoot in under our radar. Anyway the movie is out on Memorial Day 2017 so clearly they're gunning for some big dollars with it. I think it looks fun! Kind of redundant ("kind of" is me being nice) but fun.

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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A happy 34th birthday to Justin Chatwin, of Shameless fame - you can see lots more of him in the archives. I post more of him than I ever see of him anywhere else; I've actually never even seen a single episode of Shameless. I know JC from War of the Worlds way back when. You can follow him on Instagram right here - don't expect a lot of duck-lipped selfies though. He seems to like motorcycles a lot! Anyway hit the jump for a couple more gifs from this scene...

Happy All Hallows, Boys & Ghouls

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Put the lotion on its skin!

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be... 

... hanging loose with Liam!

Sweet mother of frothy goodness, these pictures. Thanks to JJ for sharing them (and thanks to Jeffrey for passing along the link!) -- we was just thinking about Liam (more specifically his long, lean abdominal muscles) after Nat shared his thoughts on The Dressmaker earlier today at The Film Experience, so these pictures here are definitely what the doctor ordered. Check please! Hit the jump for a couple dozen more...

Great Moments in Movie Shelves #83

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I have been skimming through James Wan's sequel The Conjuring 2 today for some reason (read my review from when it came out right here) and saw this scene and chuckled.

Little girl, there is no reason to be afraid of bookshelves! 

Bookshelves are your friend!

Anyway in my review of the film I made reference to something spoilery from the movie, and I'm going to get into it some more now that the film is out on blu-ray and presumably any of you who might care have seen it - and yes, it is shelf-related too! - so let's do that after the jump...

I Believe in the Right to Bare Arms

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Chris Hemsworth's Instagram account as of late
has been a real HOTBED of political activism,
and I want to climb right into this hotbed with him.

Quote of the Day

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"In 2007, “Diary of the Dead” all of a sudden made money. I was blind-sighted by that. One of the producers said, “Let’s make another one quick.” I didn’t know what else I could talk about. “Diary of the Dead” talked about how social media is haunting us today. I didn’t have anything else to talk about. So I decided to go back to the original premise of misunderstanding and people not being able to see each other’s point of view. I said I’ll do this one as a western and the next one as a noir. So did the western, nobody liked it, and the other one fell away. Then, all of a sudden, here came “The Walking Dead.” So you couldn’t [make] a zombie film that had any sort of substance. It had to be a zombie film with just zombies wreaking havoc. That’s not what I’m about."

--- That's George Romero deservedly sticking the knife into The Walking Dead in an interview with IndieWire while complaining about the fact that he can't get his own zombie movie made. Can you imagine? I mean CAN YOU IMAGINE? People are not giving money to George fucking Romero to make a zombie movie. I hate this world. Fuck all you people with money. Anybody that has money, fuck you, I hope a zombie horde eats your entire family.

Aaaaanyway Romero's being interviewed and talked about right now (there's also an article about him in the Times today)  because Night of the Living Dead has gotten restored up to 4K standards by MoMA and they're screening the film next week with Romero there to talk about it. You better believe I got tickets! That's my Halloween this year -- November 5th. A bit of a delay, but it'll be better than yours.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

The Monster: Alone - bad. 

Friend - good! 

I'd love to wish the great Elsa Lanchester a happy birthday via one of her many many other roles that she played in her long and storied career, but I can't help it she went and got herself born a couple of days before Halloween -- if I am writing a post about Elsa Lanchester on October 28th you better believe I'm in the mood for some Bride! 

That said it is of course impossible to quote the Bride in the film because she does nothing but hiss (hiss spectacularly, but hiss all the same) so we'll quote her being talked about instead. We should all want to talk about Elsa Lanchester anyway. And that should be easy once you all go and read her magnificent autobiography, as I've told you to do about fifty times now. Well have you?

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Today's Mood

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Eric Bana Will Murder You

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Eric Bana is going to play an imprisoned murderer looking for redemption from Desmond Tutu (played not by the real-world Desmond Tutu unfortunately, but rather by Forest Whitaker) in a new film called The Forgiven, which will be directed by The Killing Fields' Roland Joffé. (Bana is replacing Vince Vaughn in the role.)

I was going to say something here about how I don't really understand how Joffé is still getting to make movies - he's had a very long but spotty as fuck career - and how it's that old White Male Privilege thing at work... but then I realized that Eric Bana (who I love, mind you) keeps getting work even though he's been less than successful and, hmm, I wonder what the reason for that is. And yet here I am. So hip hip hooray for White Male Privilege, I guess.

And I can't even write Bana's continued employment off as more justified than Joffé's because of Bana's hotness, because as we discovered just a few weeks ago Roland Joffé was totally hot himself. So I guess it's Hot White Male Privilege then. Hip hip for hot white men! They really don't get the credit they deserve in this world, after all.

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Alden Ehrenreich Five Times

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Every damn time I post a picture of Alden (and I have been posting them for longer than anybody! Look back through our archives and see for yourself!) I post about wanting, nay needing, more. The last time I posted a picture of Alden, just a few weeks ago, I said, and I quote, "hope this is just the first trickle of the flood of new Alden pictures as his Han Solo movie approaches." 

Wish granted! Okay it's not quite a flood, but this photo-shoot by Steven Klein for Interview Magazine makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity because HOT DAMN.

He looks sleazy and hot in that specific Steven Klein way, and he works sleazy and hot much better than Tom Hiddleston did in his Steven Klein photo-shoot for Interview Magazine last month.

And you had better believe that I am taking all 

of the Plaid Pants as a shout-out right at MNPP.

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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I always forget that Finn Wittrock played the gay hustler on the first season of Masters of Sex -- it was pre-American Horror Story so he was not yet Mister Finn as he is now. Anyway that forgetfulness means I've never giffed up his gay sex scene (although "sex" is stretching it since all it's got is some making out) with Bobby Campo under Michael Sheen's watchful eye, so today for Mister Finn's 32nd birthday we're doing just that. Hit the jump for it...

Quote of the Day

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"... after I made Oldboy, I realized that the only character who is not privy to the entire truth in that film was the female character; she was the only female character in the film, and she was excluded from the truth. That made me so uncomfortable in such a big way that is spurred me on to developing Lady Vengeance. That was the genesis from which I went on to make other films with strong female characters. So to simplify things, I said it like that, that Oldboy was the moment when I turned into a big feminist." 

Even though I probably should've sooner, given Lady Vengeance and Thirst and Stoker, I'd never really thought about Park Chan-wook's relationship to feminism until a recent one-two punch - number one being his new film The Handmaiden of course, which (in my opinion, although I know people's reactions vary) walks a very fine line between being all Male-Gaze-y and subverting that gaze. I think it does the latter ultimately, even though it is yes shot by a man and therefore literally of the Male Gaze, by centralizing and mythologizing the romance of its leading ladies over all of its most feeble menfolk. Sisters, selves, do it.

The second part of that one-two punch was recently seeing Park's 1997 (that's pre-Oldboy) film Trio for the first time thanks to the fine folks at Metrograph - Trio tells the story three blasphemous criminals on the run, two men and one woman, that heaps so much misogyny of the female character that my not-so-dainty sensibilities were nevertheless left a little battered and bruised themselves. It is pointed and purposeful misogyny, most often, but punching and slapping the lady is still played as a punchline (bad pun, bad pun) way too often, and it got me thinking about Park's relationship to his female characters.

It is not always perfect. But the quote up top from his new interview with Interview Magazine shows that it's something he's actively been wrestling with, and it shows, clearly, over the arc of his career.