Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Xavier Dolan Is Going To Make Love For Us

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Quebecois Wunkerkind Xavier Dolan announced his next next movie yesterday - after he puts his finishing touches on The Death and Life of John F Donovan (that's his starry English-language debut with deep breath Kit Harington, Jessica Chastain, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Thandie Newton, Susan Sarandon, Chris Zylka, and Kathy Bates) he is returning home to Quebec to make a gay love story! All the details are at THR but he says he was inspired by last year's Call Me By Your Name and God's Own Country (and this year's Boy Erased, which he co-stars in) to finally make a straightforward gay movie. 

"I have been confronted with such mature material... and that gave me the desire to talk about homosexuality from an adult — and not a post-adolescent — point of view, and to talk about my generation and my friends and friendships. It made me want to write about two best friends falling in love who had never realized they could have a preference for men. I want to talk about true friendship and true love."

The movie is called Matt & Max and he's going to star in it (this will be the first time he's done that since his best movie 2013's Tom at the Farm) and his mother will be played by his main muse Anne Dorval, who's acted in four of his previous movies. Speaking of Tom at the Farm Dolan says we should expect this new movie to resemble that one "aesthetically" but to expect its "energy and spirit" to be more like his movie Mommy, and I think that's his way of saying it will be rectangular but there will be lots of screaming and dancing.
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My First Dorians

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Guess who's been admitted into GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, you guys? If you guessed anyone other than me... well, you're really, really terrible at guessing games if you did that. I mean, really. But yes that's right, it's me, and I'm pleased as rainbow punch that they're having me. 
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Anyway my membership is super fresh but I managed to squeak on in just in time to vote for their 9th annual Dorian Awards, wherein the membership chooses their picks for the Best of the Year, and I'd like to pretend that my votes were the ones that turned this list into the top-tier batch of winners that it turned out to be. We did good!

Like I think you guys are safe in assuming that I'm pretty pleased that the "Film of the Year" and the "LGBTQ Film of the Year" prizes both went to Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name, while Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor went to Timothée & Michael Stuhlbarg. Meanwhile Greta Gerwig won Best Director for Lady Bird and Laurie Metcalf won for Best Supporting Actress! And Sally Hawkins won Best Actress for The Shape of Water! I cosign every bit.
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I was also pretty happy to see God's Own Country get a prize - it won the "Unsung Film of the Year" award. I know lots of fans of GOC (of which I am certainly one) have been irritable about how CMBYN has sucked all of the awards oxygen out of the room so it's snazzy we made room for that, as well as B.P.M. which won Foreign Film. 2017 was such a banner year for exceptional queer cinema -- spreading the love is highly agreeable.

GALECA also awards television's best - give it up for a prizes for both Twin Peaks and American Gods! - and so if you'd like to see all of our quite wonderful winners you can see them after the jump...
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Nick Jonas Four Times

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:


Mrs. Trefoile: We use not condiments of any kind in this house, Patricia! God's food should be eaten unadorned. We are vegetarian. For instance, this meat loaf is synthetic, compounded of bread, oatmeal, and wheat germ.

Tallulah Bankhead was born on this day in 
the year 1902. Bow down, you're not worthy.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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41 DAYS

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Hey everybody I forgot to mention I've got a screening this morning (finally seeing the new Ozon, huzzah) and so MNPP will be quiet til this afternoon. But hey look Amazon updated their bare-bones page for the Call Me By Your Name blu-ray with a picture of the disc, a new price (it dropped down to $21.99 from the thirty-something bucks it was a day or two ago), as well as official confirmation that the thing will be in our hot little peach-sticky hands on March 13th. And now that I've got a clicking timer in front of me don't be surprised if I run out and see the movie at least one more time in the theater before it's gone, adding to the 13 times I have seen it already... I mean that's an unlucky number after all...
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Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Joe Alwyn Twelve Times

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Well there's that! (click to embiggen) Anyway I just wished Olivia Colman a happy birthday a bit ago and mentioned her next film is The Favourite from Greek Genius Yorgos Lanthimos and as I did I learned something myself - namely that Joe here is also in the movie, news which had somehow passed me by before now. Joe has a really big year this year - besides that he's got Joel Edgerton's gay conversion drama Boy Erased (see our previous post)...

... and he's got Mary Queen of Scots, the big royalty bio-pic starring current Best Actress nominees Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie. I did not like Ang Lee's film Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which introduced Joe to the world, but he wasn't really my problem with that movie - I said of him that he has "a fascinatingly strange face and head" and I stand by that. I do. Anyway you can see more of Joe and all his head after the jump...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Lobster (2015)

Hotel Manager: If you encounter any problems
you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be
assigned children, that usually helps.

There are several choices from recent years which I could use to wish Olivia Colman a happy birthday today, but when it comes down to it... I just gotta go with The Lobster, man. I suppose this scene doubles for our "The Moment I Fell For" series because yeah, twas love immediate. I was so annoyed when I watched the Murder on the Orient Express remake this week and she was totally wasted...

Anyway one of the things keeping me going these days is knowing that Yorgos Lanthimos' next movie called The Favourite stars Miss Colman in its leading role, opposite Rachel Weisz again, as well as Emma Stone and Nicholas Hoult and Joe Alwyn. Read our previous posts on that movie here. No word on an exact release date but it'll be sometime in 2018.
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Which is Hotter?

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I find it kind of strange that Domhnall Gleeson has been forced to abdicate his signature characteristic - that being his ginger magnificence, of course - for the two Children's Book adjacent projects he's acted in over the past 12 months. He went blonde for Goodbye Christopher Robin, in which he played Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, and for next week's Peter Rabbit (based upon the classic series by Beatrix Potter although it looks "based upon" her books in the same way that a head laying in a ditch is "based upon" a neck) he's devilishly dark, as befits his character's nefarious bunny-mutilating intentions. Obviously the correct answer to this is neither, Ginger Only Please, but if I forced you to answer (which I guess is what I am doing)...

survey solutions

I ♥ Mister Bates

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Since remodeling last year the Quad Cinema here in NYC has just been killing it with their retrospectives and series -- they've been so consistently amazing that I get overwhelmed, like somehow I forgot to mention their upcoming series called "Crimes of Passion" focusing on the so called "Erotic Thrillers" mainly of the 80s and 90s like Basic Instinct and Body Double and Bound and Black Widow and even ones that don't begin with the letter "B." That series is ongoing from February 4th through 17th but now they've gone and given me yet another reason to clot their hallways that month with my presence - they're just announced that they're devoting a couple of weeks to the films of my beloved Alan Bates too!

The series hinges on a brand new 4K restoration of Philippe de Broca's 1966 goofy anti-war allegory King of Hearts (which I've never seen) - they're screening that for three whole weeks starting on February 16th, but alongside it they'll be showing a cornucopia of work from both the director, including the delightfully wacky That Man From Rio starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, which we've posted about before...

... and they'll be showing about a dozen of Alan Bates' most important films - Georgy Girl? Check! Far From the Madding Crowd? Check! Women in Love? Check! Zorba the Greek?

Check check! You can see the entire schedule right here. And you can probably also plot out right where I will be for the month of February too, in case you want to stalk or murder me or whatever.


I Refuse To Stay Silent

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The highlight of the trailer for Duncan Jones' upcoming Netflix film Mute, which hits the streamer on February 23rd, is clearly the above shot of Alexander Skarsgard wearing well-tailored trousers and suspenders and sitting on a bed - those are some haunches - but that's about as close to sexy as Alex gets the whole trailer...

... and meanwile Justin Theroux and Paul Rudd are all goofed-up in wig / stache paraphernalia... consider me officially discouraged. I know Alex is an Award Winning Actor now, la di dah, but let's not forget our roots, buddy. And come on, Duncan! With a cast like this (see also Sam Rockwell), well, his heterosexuality is showing. His father would've sexed this up so much.
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How Long Can You Last?

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That there is the trailer for Hereditary, the Toni Collette Horror Movie that screened at Sundance last week to gasps and shat pants galore - a movie that's not out until June 8th that we haven't seen ourselves that this is still somehow our third post on. That there is its just released this morning trailer, and this here is me typing lots of words furiously as a distraction from watching it. I don't want to watch it! I want to go into the theater in 129 days and not have seen anything. I don't know if I can do it though, guys. The urge to click play is strong with this one. Have you watched the trailer already? Is it spoilery? Maybe it's just a minute and a half of Toni Collette sipping tea and then at the end she says, in the faintest voice, "Boo." I could watch it if it was just that...
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Laurie Strode Returns

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As happened when the news was first announced that Jamie Lee Curtis was returning (again) to the role that made her Jamie Lee Curtis, aka Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise, this time (and most enticingly) for director David Gordon Green, well just like happened that first time with that first news my spine has once again just exploded into happy sparking fireworks upon seeing the above first shot of JLC on set in character, standing alongside her director. How perfect is that look for Laurie! That's Laurie's hair! Ahhh!!! I can't take it. This is too much. We don't deserve it. Also that is apparently the original clapboard too! Oh man please be good, please be good, please be good...


Good Morning, Gratuitous John Ireland

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I didn't think I was going to be able to scrounge up anything "Good Morning" related for the actor John Ireland, who was born on this day in the year 1914, so I was rather pleased with myself when I dug up that delightful little shot in the 1948 flick Open Secret (you can watch the entire thing on YouTube) which is about Ireland and his wife accidentally uncovering, and I quote, "a secret band of anti-Semitic thugs masquerading as a patriotic organization." Well that sounds dark. Anybody seen it? I only skimmed through it.

Anyway when I googled Mr. Ireland at first to see if I could do a post on him wanna know what the first thing I read was? The first thing I read was a quote from Bette Davis asking, "Why is it always the homely ones," in reference to John Ireland being hung like a horse.

That is the first thing I read. The internet is magical. But the internet doesn't lie in this case - as you can see from those shots it does appear John gave the studio seamstresses something to gossip about. Supposedly that wanton woman Joan Crawford...

... seen here with a stunned "I just got hammered by a horse cock" hundred yard glare (oh, I know it well), well supposedly Joan couldn't get enough of Ireland. Of course she couldn't. Take that, Bette. (And where were these scenes in Bette & Joan I ask you? You didn't do the right research, Ryan Murphy.) But I'm with Joan - Ireland wasn't "homely." Maybe he wasn't beautiful like Montgomery Clift but he certainly wasn't anything to sneeze at...

But speaking of Monty this intimate knowledge of Ireland makes me rethink the scene I always think of when I think of Ireland, which is his infamous pistol-swapping scene with Clift in Red River, aka the gayest thing ever put on-screen. We've posted about that scene before (I mean obviously we have) but now I know why Monty...

... seemed so delighted during it. I'd smile too, Monty. So TCM was just playing All the King's Men (which also stars Ireland) the other night and I watched a little bit - I'd never seen it before. I have to admit that I didn't pay much attention to him while watching it though - I was hypnotized by Mercedes McCambridge's surprisingly nasty performance in it. She was never afraid to go dark, was she?

I wish I'd watched the whole thing; maybe now with Ireland on my mind I'll go back and watch it properly and pay more attention to John (and his trousers) while I'm at it. Okay, so if you have a favorite John Ireland Movie that I didn't mention... like perhaps 1955's The Fast and the Furious...

.... opposite the sadly just-passed Dorothy Malone (who was ALSO born on this day, just ten years after John in 1924)... well if you have a favorite go ahead and share your other John Ireland Faves in the comments. John had a big, long...

... uh, career, I was going to say career! And he doesn't get talked about all that much anymore, it seems. It was actually kind of difficult to wrangle up a ton of pictures of him but I'll share what I did find after the jump...

Monday, January 29, 2018

Timmy From The Future

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When I shared the new pictures of Armie Hammer & Timothee Chalamet on the set of Call Me By Your Name this weekend I shared a link to a website in the Netherlands that had the blu-ray for pre-sale, but ignore that! Because the disc is available for pre-sale here in the U.S. now! You can pre-order your copy at Amazon right here, although they don't mention a release date yet. (ETA The Film Stage is reporting the release date is March 13th.)

If you're in the UK you can pre-order it here and they do have a date - they're dropping the disc on March 5th. The movie opened in the UK a month before it was released (in extremely limited release) here in the US so I'm supposing they will also get their discs first... but who knows, especially with the movie not doing as well as it should've here at the box office.

In other stuff this week's "Beauty vs Beast" contest at The Film Experience is pitting Timmy as Elio against his Best Actor Oscar competition (slash probable winner - don't get your hopes up, folks) Gary Oldman playing Churchill in Joe Wright's film Darkest Hour (a film I reviewed right here). This contest has gotten kind of nasty out in the wilds of Film Twitter but I'm pretty sure I know which way this poll will go... anyway click on over to vote!
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Pics of the Day

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Well here's something to look forward to! Jai Courtney and Finn Wittrock are co-starring in a thriller called Semper Fi - along with Beau Knapp and Arturo Castro, also seen there - about a group of Marine friends who try to break one of their brothers out of prison after coming back from Afghanistan. The film was just announced over the weekend...

... but the boys are already out filming, or at least bonding, in the wilds of Louisiana - Jai's been Instagraming from the set a bunch (for instance it appears he just got all his hair buzzed off this morning). The film's the first feature-length fiction project from director Henry-Alex Rubin, who made the documentary Murderball back in 2005. Anyway let's hope that Jai keeps up to his usual bad-boy set habits and we get to see him streaking around Finn at some point...