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Tell me what scary movies you're watching in the comments!
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Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Call Me By Your Jack-o-Lantern
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I hope everybody dresses as their favorite character from
Call Me By Your Name tonight! (I'm the peach, obviously.)
Halloween's Ways Not To Die
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This one gets kind of bloody so I'll spare those of you who don't want to see that stuff (wusses) by taking the rest (which includes a report from last night's MoMA screening with video!) after the jump...
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Pic of the Day
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.SOME WOUNDS NEVER HEAL— Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) October 31, 2017
Michael & I will see you all next Halloween 10/19/18#Trancasfilms #Blumhouse #Universal #Halloween #H40 pic.twitter.com/Qbj4B9UAPL
There is no amount of common sense you can fling like monkey poop in my direction, I am gonna remain excited about a new Halloween movie with Jamie Lee Curtis dammit!
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5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1963
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We had to take some time off from our "Siri Says" series - where I ask my phone to pick a number between 1 and 100 and then choose my five favorite movies from the corresponding year - because the New York Film Fest had me pretty busy and these posts are a bit of a commitment. But now we're trying to get back into the ol' routine and so here we are - today's number is "63" and so let's take a look at the Movies of 1963!
And 1963 is a great year to get on Halloween, because 1963 was a crazy busy year for Horror. As if the filmmakers could sense what was going to happen that November scares were everywhere - Alfred Hitchcock saw terror dropping out of the sky, three-name wunderkinds Hershell Gordon Lewis and Francis Ford Coppola were hacking everybody to bits in the US while Hammer hooked the UK and Bava bathed Italy in red, and Vincent Price had no fewer than six movies in theaters (most of them with Roger Corman, who had his own factory of fright going). My faves aren't entirely thrills and chills but it's a hefty percentage...
My 5 Favorite Movies of 1963
(dir. Robert Wise)
-- released on August 25th 1963 --
(dir. Stanley Donen)
-- released on December 5th 1963 --
(dir. Mario Bava)
-- released on August 23rd 1963 --
(dir. Luchino Visconti)
-- released on March 29th 1963 --
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
-- released on March 29th 1963 --
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Runners-up: 8 1/2 (dir. Fellini), Dementia 13 (dir. Francis Ford Coppola), Hud (dir. Martin Ritt), The Raven (dir. Corman), X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (dir. Corman), Jason and the Argonauts (dir. Don Chaffey), The Haunted Palace (dir. Corman), The Girl Who Knew Too Much (dir. Bava), Contempt (dir. Godard)
Never seen: The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges), Bye Bye Birdie (dir. George Sidney), Lilies of the Field (dir. Ralph Nelson), The Prize (dir. Mark Robson), Diary of a Madman (dir. Reginald Le Borg), Tom Jones (dir. Tony Richardson), Paranoiac (dir. Freddie Francis), Irma La Douce (dir. Billy Wilder), Shock Corridor (dir. Samuel Fuller), Blood Feast (dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis)
What are your favorite movies of 1963?
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...
... you can learn from:
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Prospero: Somewhere in the human mind, my dear Francesca, lies the key to our existence. My ancestors tried to find it. And to open the door that separates us from our Creator.
Francesca: But you need no doors to find God. If you believe...
Prospero: Believe? If you believe you are gullible. Can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a god who rules it? Famine, Pestilence, War, Disease and Death! They rule this world.
Francesca: There is also love and life and hope.
Prospero: Very little hope I assure you. No. If a god of love and life ever did exist... he is long since dead. Someone... something, rules in his place.
It's not Halloween without some Vincent Price.
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Good Morning, Gratuitous Dacre Montgomery
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Although they made it a little difficult to suss out underneath
all that really terrible 80s hair and denim and skeeze...
... it turns out in the grand tradition of 80s villains that the creep Billy on the second season of Stranger Things is actually played by a really hot piece who goes by the name Dacre Montgomery. Yesterday when I posted all those shots from his homoerotic shower scene with Joe Keery in the fourth episode of the show I really should've paid more attention to Dacre - this is my mea culpa.
Follow him on Instagram here. Dacre's biggest role before Stranger Things was actually pretty big, as far as big roles go - he played the Red Ranger in the Power Rangers movie that came out earlier this year, which did I do believe actually pretty well at the box office. Still it seems like he's getting more attention from this turn, and we welcome him.
We welcome him with about a hundred pictures,
which y'all can see right here after the jump...
Monday, October 30, 2017
Hopper Hearts Twist
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Never Forget David Harbour Played Jack Twist’s Side Piece pic.twitter.com/qr72sLPyV0— Jason X Adams (@JAMNPP) October 30, 2017
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Sorry folks for the relative quiet here today - I don't know if you noticed but there's been a lot going on in the world and I have been having trouble focusing. Whatever. I'm gonna go watch Basket Case at the Museum of Modern Art and turn my brain off for a bit. Let's all promise to do better tomorrow, okay? Okay.
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He's It
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What with tomorrow being Halloween I knew this week's "Beauty vs Beast" should go to a horror movie, and hey why not go with the brand new biggest horror movie (box office wise) of all time? Click on over to The Film Experience to pick sides between that guy above (you know, with a little make-up on top) or a buncha nerds. I'm not at all trying to sway your votes, or anything.
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Good Morning, World
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Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything of substance with regards to Stranger Things. I couldn't really even if I wanted to since I only made it four episodes in over the weekend myself. But thankfully for us all I made it just far in enough to get to Joe Keery's good-time high school gym experience (with actor Dacre Montgomery playing the creep Billy) so I can share that with you this morning. (See lots more of Joe right here btw.)
Don't answer this question but are they actually going anywhere with all the homoeroticism they're injecting into this story-line, or is this all just a nod towards the 80s source material (which usually had some homoerotic subtext like this) that they're always nodding towards? Anyway if the show was nothing but Joe Keery basketball scenes and David Harbour trying to lift a telekinetically immovable television set I'd be so down with that.
Did David Harbour bribe the camera operator to get his butt into every shot this season? MONEY WELL SPENT— Jason X Adams (@JAMNPP) October 30, 2017
Friday, October 27, 2017
Give Me Your Clothes & I'll Give You Mine
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Once you see the gay romance God's Own Country - which is out this weekend in NYC & LA and which you should very much see; here's my review from earlier today - you'll look at that attractive red sweater that GOC star Alec Secareanu is seen wearing there as more than just a lovely piece of knitwear draped over a lovely piece of man. The movie imbues it with a talismanic power - it comes to symbolize the intimacy between the two men. (There's a scene where it's the only piece of clothing that can be seen on-screen even though both actors are there, if you catch my wink wink. You won't miss it, believe me.)
Anyway there's also a similar trick played with an item of clothing in Call Me By Your Name - there's a blue shirt that Armie Hammer's Oliver gifts to Timothee Chalamet's Elio that bridges the gap between the two men when they're separated, and which, on all four times that I have watched CMBYN, has immediately (and I think on purpose) given me flashbacks to the now iconic final scene of Brokeback Mountain, with the layered shirts of Ennis & Jack forever hung beside the closet.
I suppose that there is something about this that is specific to queer relationships, this swapping of clothing - this slipping into your beloved's skin in this precise symbolic way - and I love the way these stories are echoing each other here. When I first reviewed CMBYN I told that story about the first guy I hooked up with and made mention of how he stole shirts from me, so clearly I relate.
Anyway it feels like we're developing our own cinematic language, one with its own history and weight, after not having had our stories told on-screen for so long. God's Own Country and Call Me By Your Name, while emotionally taxing at times, bear little of the imposed-from-the-outside tragedy that Brokeback did, but they both owe that film a cultural debt all the same. We can now get our love stories told our own ways, layered over one another like those shirts of Jack & Ennis. It just feels right somehow. It, dare I say, fits.
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Anyway it feels like we're developing our own cinematic language, one with its own history and weight, after not having had our stories told on-screen for so long. God's Own Country and Call Me By Your Name, while emotionally taxing at times, bear little of the imposed-from-the-outside tragedy that Brokeback did, but they both owe that film a cultural debt all the same. We can now get our love stories told our own ways, layered over one another like those shirts of Jack & Ennis. It just feels right somehow. It, dare I say, fits.
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Matthias Schoenaerts Is Horse Hung Up
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The movie will co-star Josh Stewart, which brings up an interesting old question -- Stewart was also supposed to co-star with Schoenaerts in HBO's Lewis & Clark miniseries with Casey Affleck, and what the heck is the deal with that thing? It started shooting in the summer of 2015 (here are some surprisingly beefcakey pics from the set) but got shut down due to bad weather, and then it was getting re-worked the following February, but I haven't heard anything about it since. Is it dead?
Pics of the Day
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Call Me By Your Name is out in the UK today (you know I thought about just going to the airport and flying to London this morning) and with it comes these promotional pictures of Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet posing for photographer Alessio Bolzoni (via his Instagram). I believe it's Bolzoni who also shot the already iconic poster image; the below two pictures we've seen before, but the above - the above! Love! (click to embiggen)
The Gods Are Alright
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Two men walk through a literal hellscape - the grass is on fire around them. The sky is bleak, slate gray as a slab of concrete turned up and hoisted in place of the stars. Muck coats everything beneath the knees. One man turns to the other man and he says, all of a sudden, "I think this place is beautiful."
And suddenly it is beautiful. Like that. Yellow tablecloths and flowers appear, the sun peeks around the bare tree branches. What was sullen and ashy-flavored finds its heartbeat, a thrum - mud becomes earth, warm with possibility and life.
It's impossible, what love can do to us - an invisible shift in the architecture of everything, like somebody found a switch and turned all the atoms on at once. We might short-circuit for a minute, not sure what to do with all of that energy - it's the finding of new muscles inside of ourselves, and we wobble like newborn lambs looking for footing at first.
God's Own Country - a masterpiece of tactility, rough hands rubbing soft underbellies - captures all of this. Johnny (Josh O'Connor) is just a closed-off cow-runner chasing himself off a cliff before Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a miracle man out of no less than Transylvania itself, appears - who knows where they come from, flung out of space. When they're there, sudden human flesh in your hands, you lose sight of the before and the after - now, ripe and flush-faced, available for touching, that is our everything. That is enough, for now.
And so magic blooms in unexpected places, on a granite hilltop against an overcast sky, seeding the scattered patches of dirt. It isn't easy living, but is can be easier. And goodness, kindness, spreads like a spring breeze up from the valleys, warming even the most insistent hardscrabble spells. Watch what grows when you dig your fingertips into the soil and give it a real good old-fashioned go. You will surprise even yourself.
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Who Wore It Best?
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