I was terrified for a second that the video Armie Hammer just posted on his Instagram was of his chest being waxed but the hair doesn't seem to be going anywhere so perhaps he's just getting his tit massaged? (Recall he broke his tit last year from working out too hard... or so he said.) Anyway because I thought his chest was being waxed I had already alerted the authorities about an ongoing Hate Crime in progress, so just don't answer the door, Armie. At least not until I get there to continue the whole massaging process, anyway...
“I've dated men. I've dated women... I don't know why anyone would care. I'm an actor and I play roles. To be honest, I don't know what to say—I find your question intrusive.”
Well that's Lee Pace sort of coming out in the pages of W Magazine in possibly the most hostile fashion I've ever seen anyone sort of come out in awhile. (Scratch that - there's always his Hobbit co-star Luke Evans, I guess.) Lee, I love you, I have been following your career for fourteen years ever since Wonderfalls, so please, please, from a longtime fan, you got to do this shit better. You're the one sitting down for a barn-side chat to discuss a Pulitzer-Prize-winning piece of Gay History - I can go spend my time reading an interview with Tony Kushner if you don't have anything to say. And don't snap at me, asshole. Nobody dragged you into the pages of W Magazine by your hair. I suppose you can channel some of that self-loathing into your Joe Pitt though - good luck with that.
Like a mathematical formula sprung out of the dirt, something between a circus tent and the Pythagorean theorem, the scientists return to their plastic white cave set in the center of a field in the middle of no place. All around them the Natural World burns bright sharp greens, ombre sunsets, but inside their little sterile laboratory they are measured grays. They seem wholly unnatural there.
The mystery of just what our heroes Keith (William Jackson Harper) and Jessica (Rebecca Henderson) are doing there, sore thumbs out in a strange place, astronauts on Earth, is what occupies the thrust of Philip Gelatt's film They Remain - we watch them measure and quantify and chat, we watch Keith wander the woods placing cameras about, but we have no idea what they're looking for, or at.
But slowly a hallucinatory weirdness creeps in. First through their subconscious - their dreams and drunken imaginings. Stories of sex cults and holes in the ground seep into conversation - they unearth piles of bones, clumps of bees, monster bits, and the door to their pristine white science-space gets left open and the bugs start climbing in. Nature reclaims what is its every time.
They Remain is a strange and slow little creation, an insect pinned to graph paper, last gasps - if I was going to compare it to anything I'd say it brought to mind Ben Wheatley's similarly isolated and strange A Field in England? Similarly if you've got the patience They Remain will reward it - Harper and Henderson have a fine rapport, which is vital since the film is basically nothing but that, disintegrating and mutating over the course of two hours.
And the cinematography from Sean Kirby (who made the documentary Zoo such an unforgettable experience back in 2007) is often absolutely breathtaking - figures burnished in relentless tree-scapes cross-cut with eyelashes in extreme close-up; pretty pretty somethings abound. I wish I had seen it on a big screen myself!
If you actually read the interview with Oscar Isaac in GQ last week - and didn't just stare dumbly at the lovely photo-shoot attached to it, I mean - then you learned a couple of things about Oscar. One: you learned that he got married and had a kid last year, and if you'd like to hear his wife Elvira Lind's side of that you can click here; she's a documentary filmmaker and apparently shot a doc about their crazy year that she says she might never release. The above picture is from it (so, uhh, I sure do hope she releases it).
The other thing I learned from Oscar's GQ profile is that they live in Brooklyn, which came in as handy knowledge when I needed to confirm a rather odd star-sighting my boyfriend had just yesterday...
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Boyfriend just called me to let me know that Oscar Isaac just jogged past him wearing jeans. Like... full on exercise jogging. Wearing jeans. So if you're in Greenpoint keep your eyes peeled for a small sweaty man!
The Oscars are this weekend and even though they're one of my least favorite things about the experience of being a psycho-obsessive movie-lover - they swallow up so much of the year's conversation on things I personally couldn't care less about (oh my god the statistics will be the death of me) when we could be talking about the actual art of the movies themselves - I still watch them like religion every year because 1) I love beautiful talented glamorous movie stars wearing outrageously expensive clothes, and 2) sometimes good shit slips through that a general audience would otherwise never hear of, like all of the Documentary & Foreign Film noms.
Anyway in the spirit of psyching myself up and being positive (you know, eventually positive) here's a list of my five favorite picks that the Academy actually got right for Best Picture. You can see a list of all the winners right here. (To be less positive this was a shockingly easy list to assemble - there were entire decades I groaned at the winners from and skipped right on past.)
Two stories about Boyd Holbrook in one week! It's almost like gorgeous and talented white men do well in the movie world - who'd have thought such a thing even possible? Maybe every Tuesday can bring with it a news-story about this handsome blond vixen - I just hope he starts dropping some new photo-shoots along with it because I kinda shot that load when I posted a thousand pictures in our gratuitous post on him back in 2015. Anyway last Tuesday came word that Boyd is going to star in Jim Mickle's next movie called In the Shadow of the Moon for Netflix, and today (Tuesday) comes word that Boyd himself is writing a movie called The Thirst... which will be a bio-pic about me watching Boyd Holbrook movies. Or it's a sci-fi thriller about a future without water. You decide!
BillBill: I was nearly in State Government. Four million votes I needed. No one knew who won for three days 'till the postal vote came in. For three days I was almost there... You reap what you sow. You'd think I'd learn that growing up on a farm. You reap what you sow.
The Aussie legend Bill Hunter was born on this day in the year 1940 (he passed away in 2011) -- 1994, the year that Muriel's Wedding came out, was a big year for him in America, what with the also success of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, hitting; he was like the John C. Reilly slash Michael Stuhlbarg of Flamboyant Mid-90s Down Under Comedies.
While yes we already pre-ordered our Call Me By Your Name blu-ray - which we'll get in two weeks on March 13th! - we remain tempted to order the movie on iTunes because it's out on iTunes to-damn-day!!! And there are Extras, and we sure like Extras! iTunes says they have, among others, a behind-the-scenes featurette + the commentary track from Timothée & Stuhlbarg. Out Magazine actually has a little clip of conversation with Armie Hammer from those Extras, and I will share that right here...
There are bookshelves in the very first shot of Wes Craven's Scream, you guys! They're not in the very first frame - the camera starts on the telephone (natch) and then pans up to Casey (Drew Barrymore) answering the phone, but what should she be surrounded by? Shelves and shelves of books!
The bookshelves actually frame her for much of this rightly celebrated opening sequence - I've made reference before to the fact that I wrote a sixty-page paper on this film (and Freud, ha!) in college as my final thesis, and it's been a long time since I looked at that (I'm sure it's cringeworthy now) but I remember making mention to Casey hiding behind the television screen in this scene; I don't remember that I ever said anything about the bookshelves though!
So let's! This scene is about testing Casey's knowledge right? Do we think it's a mistake that Craven - who let's not forget was an actual English Professor before becoming a film-maker! - literally situates her smack-dab between a television screen and stacks of books at this moment? She tries to defend herself with a letter opener, for god's sake.
You might've stayed safe wedged there in your knowledge nook, Casey, but no you had to run out the door. Dumb-dumb. Anyway after that point shelves pop up sporadically over the course of the film -- tellingly for a movie so pointed (heh) in its dissection (hehehe) of High School Movie Tropes there's no typical scene in the school library - that scene is replaced by a scene at the Video Store!
This is where we get our knowledge from now, folks.
Look at the bookshelves at Billy's house
during the big party turned bloodbath:
Hardly any books at all - just stereo-equipment and CDs.
Don't ask ME to look up how many times they've worked together in the past, it's too early for that, but two of our favorite Deutscher Twunks are reuniting for a new movie -- Matthias Schweighöfer posted this shot on his Instagram (click to embiggen; thanks Tony!) with Florian David Fitz this morning on the set of 100 Things, which... is something, I guess. It doesn't have a page on IMDb. This is why I said don't ask me to look up how many times they've worked together before - IMDB gets confusing for foreign movies. Anyway among the many gratuitous posts I have done on these two actors over the years - see here for Matthias and click here for Florian - we've posted many a picture of them together so my assumption is they're Germany's much sexier answer to Seth Rogen & James Franco. Lots of dumb-seeming broad comedies together. We look forward to more! Here's a bonus shot of Florian from his Insta:
There's been a lot of talk lately about "What happened to the Rom-coms?" Even just a decade ago the genre was still offering up at least one or two annual sacrifices to the Volcano God of Meet-Cutes. But then somebody pushed Kate Hudson off a cliff, and Sarah Jessica Parker behind her, and Jennifer Aniston behind her, and on and on, and as hard as the adorable smirking white ladies tried to hold onto each other's dangling Louboutins the self-tanner was too slick and down down down they tumbled, dragging all the McFillInTheBlanks with them. (Here Patrick Dempsey was born, and here he died - twas only a moment for you, you took no notice.)
There is delight to be had in the formula of these movies. When it's right it sings. The aforementioned Meet Cute, the tangle of spiky circumstances and obstacles that get in the lovers way, and the triumphant kissy-kissy on the surface of the Moon or Mars or the Empire State Building at the end - this is a most holy quest, one that feeds a ravenous emotional monster flailing around in our bellies. We need it like hamburgers.
But Rom-coms forgot us. They forgot that beast stews in our very real, human juices - if you prick us do we not bleed, Garry Marshall? They got so hung up on their impossible genre trappings, each story taking us further and farther removed from recognizable human behavior - it's not that we need realism from these stories. We want Fantasy. But those obstacles separating the lovers, they need to remain relatable - they can't function only as the MacGuffins raining down upon a deranged nonsense-scape, living and breathing only through their own self-imposed psycho rules. The hoops these movies had their characters jumping through to get to one another were on fire, twenty feet apart, over beds of brain-damaged alligators that hadn't eaten in months. It was romance by way of Bond Villain.
And we wonder why men and women have been staring each other down awkwardly across the sofa cushions lately. Listen. There are surely still perfectly good ways to tell love stories about a white straight man and a white straight woman falling in love. They do it every day in the real world, and it totally works. You get the right stars with the right chemistry and that movie will sing just by showing them bat their pretty little eyelashes at each other. (Yes I am totally looking at you, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.)
But perhaps, as we take this breath, this moment, it might be something if we try to work our way through this jungle we've lost ourselves in by forging different paths. And that's where something like The Big Sick came in last year, enlivening the genre with a true story of cross-cultural coma romance - how about instead of the story of a magazine editor who has it all finding ways to choose between three different but entirely identical men who just won't settle down we instead put ourselves in the shoes of the millions and millions of people whose parents want them to marry somebody who looks just like them and worships (or doesn't) just like them? Novel, I know. You'd think it insane, and yet somehow it clicked.
And now here we have Love, Simon. It stars Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel as a married couple who oh wait this story isn't about the stars of 13 Going on 30 and Life As We Know It meeting cute at an artisanal coffee klatsch at all -- this story is about their gay son, and it's about him falling in love.
Like The Big Sick before it, Love Simon's not at all afraid of the genre trappings - it could really be set down as a sequel to Life As We Know It + 13 Going on 30 and be a part of their car-commercial world. The big suburban houses stacked with Martha Stewart Livings, the just colorful enough cast of supporting characters, the flashy bee-boppy soundtrack of Starbucks Playlist friendly tunes. It just shows that those trappings needed more than a fresh coat of paint slapped over them - they needed some reworking under the hood.
Love, Simon opens with Simon (Nick Robinson) monologuing about his own perfectly appointed normalcy despite his, you know, Great Big Gay Secret, and in a total flip of my expectations the film doesn't spend its runtime telling him to embrace otherness - no instead... Normal comes to him instead. The world of the movie, aka the world of the Rom-com itself, opens itself up, making space for Simon and all the Simons in the audience.
Okay so nobody's ever going to mistake director Greg Berlanti for Greg Araki - Love Simon's queerness isn't beaming in from a gaudy outer space sex-planet with a high body count. It ain't keeping anybody or anywhere weird. Simon tries on a tighter t-shirt one time, but nahh. Not for him.
And yet the part of me that wanted to scoff and side-eye this movie's puppy-eyed mainstream sincerity at times was at times shoved right out of the way by this sort of Alternate Universe Me - a me that grew up with Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel as my parents in a great big Martha Stewart appointed house where my friends and I drove to get coffee every morning before school and wait just a second isn't this what these movies have been doing for generations of Straight People? Is that what this feeling is? Is this... the thing... called Wish Fulfillment?
This Alternate Universe Me, he went through a lot of the same things the normal me went through. Both of our female best friends in High School were in love with us, which we purposefully, at times cruelly, ignored. Coming out to our families at Christmastime, hooray, that was an experience. That feeling of a small town, of the graduation countdown, the narrative possibilites of our New College Selves erasing our previous selves... me and this other me found plenty in common. And yet this simpler me, this Simple Simon, he sorta sorted through the real life chaos that I remember. He took my true story, my own, and he shined it up a little bit. He rubbed his elbow in, and he made a movie out of it.
And a sweet, funny movie, at that. Where The Big Sick was smart about turning Kumail Nanjiani's feeling of "otherness" in that romance into a literal desertion, an isolation from his object of affection via her coma - he was stranded among a sea of gawkers left to scramble and explain his damn self over and over again - Love, Simon plays a similar smart trick, upending the genre's trappings to its benefit and in a way that speaks directly to the heart of its specific gay love story. Love, Simon is a romance of secrets.
The conceit of the film is that Simon and "Blue," as he's called for most of the film, find each other via an anonymous online confessional board. They bond with each other anonymously, hiding their true selves away beneath pseudonyms. It's a very queer idea of romance - entirely entangled with secrets and lies and the cover-up. The closet. The film becomes about the their quest to push aside and through all of that - they find strength through each other, daring the other further and further out of their closets. But Love, Simon also knows that vacuums open up in the wake of these revelations, that those lies have seeped poison into our lives, and that process - even for all the pretty people we're watching do it in finely appointed houses - is never neat. It's like a murder mystery, but that's no lead-pipe in Professor Plum's hand...
Anyway Love Simon, in its own way and through its own means, makes some sense of it. It rubs its elbow in, and shines up the chaos just that little bit, bless its pretty, well-meaning heart. And in so doing, it shines up the rom-com too - the genre's not dead, you guys. It just needs a little love and affection, a tender little knock around under the hood now and again to sort out its priorities. May we be blessed with more love stories like Love Simon.
While Timothee Chalamet got the U.S. cover of GQ this month his partner-in-peaches Armie Hammer took it below the border for GQ Mexico - I posted one of the cover images on our Tumblr but now that I've got what I think is the entire shoot, I will share that. I totally will! After the jump we go...
Michelle Pfeiffer should have been nominated for an Oscar for this scene in mother! alone - the smirking insinuations! - but them schmucks lack imagination and so it will just have to go down in history, eventually, as one of the greatest performances of the year. It has good company among the AMPAS ignored, that's for sure. On that note today's "Beauty vs Beast" at The Film Experience is picking up the mother! slack from the Academy and giving Aronofsky's batshit-classic some love today - head over to vote between this legend here and the film's also terrific leading lady, who's got a new movie out this weekend that I'm very much looking forward to and yadda yadda let's just think about Michelle some more, clink clink...
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