Tuesday, July 31, 2018

All Over the Jack

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All the headlines touting this news today have been about Florence Pugh but leave it to me to shake it up and center us back in on the beefcake - the cast for Hereditary director Ari Aster's next film is coming together and so far it includes yes Pugh but also Will Poulter and Jack Reynor, the latter seen above. I was just talking about Reynor recently, saying I hoped he'd find a role worthy of my attraction to him, so I hope this is the one. The funny thing is...

... Poulter and Reynor both co-starred with Hereditary supernova Toni Collette in Glassland back in 2014! I still haven't gotten to see Glassland - it just sort of vanished? Have any of you seen it? I remember looking forward to it and then... nothing. I should seek it out, especially as a Collette Completeist. Anyway the most important thing about this news is that we have info on what Ari Aster's new movie is about now and it sounds very Wicker Man...

"Pugh and Reynor will play a couple that travels to Sweden to visit their friend’s rural hometown for it’s fabled mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult."

Speaking of dudes working with Florence Pugh though...
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John Krasinski Three Times

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John is on the cover of this month's issue of Men's Health and there's a chat with him you can read right here - I haven't read it but if he says anything interesting y'all can let me know... but I'm pretty sure that not saying anything interesting is part of John Krasinski's appeal. But y'all let me know! 

Thanks to that picture I was tempted to title this post "Krasi Horse" and see if anybody got it but I'm not sure I even get it. Hey I'm working on a weird sleep schedule and trying to catch back up to speed y'all, cut me some slack. We'll be clever... later. (And no I wouldn't hold my breath.) 


Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Good Afternoon, World

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I don't know about you guys, but I am back and ready to rip the towel of Bill Skarsgard some more. Hello! I am indeed back today, just like I said I would be today - it's a little later than I anticipated but, you know, life. But let's see how the rest of the day goes. While you wait for me to get my shit together if you'd like to tell me what you thought of the first three episodes of Castle Rock I'd love to hear - I know reactions have been all over the map but I'm enjoying it myself. It has been mostly world-building so far but I'm fine with that when you're building a world around world-class actors and it's got them by the ton. Not to mention sweet weird Billy boy here...


Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Say It With Garrel

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Alright y'all that's all I got for this week - like I told you this morning I'm off now through Tuesday for a wee little jaunt out of the city and away, so scan down, enjoy the fruits of my already-fruited labors, and have yourselves a good now-through-Tuesday. Oh and there's more Louis Garrel after the jump if you're super lonely...

Great Moments In Movie Shelves #159

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Georgina: Are we safe here?
 Michael: Does Albert read?
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Albert would be "The Thief" while Georgina would be "The Wife" and I guess that makes Michael "The Lover" -- I speak of Peter Greenaway's 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, in case that wasn't clear already. Georgina & Michael are on the run from her husband, a bad dude, and it's brought them to a book depository... which quickly becomes their paradise, their Eden. 

Michael first stood out to Georgina because she saw him reading at the restaurant (cue the titular "Cook" of the story) where her profane and ever hungry hungry husband goes nightly to berate everyone within berating distance while stuffing his maw...

... and before you know it they're schtupping on top of celery-beds in the back-rooms in full sight of the wait-staff. Twas books that brought them together - books and food and all that well-manicured jazz - and twas books that would eventually destroy them too, once it turns out that Albert does indeed read, at least enough to ruin everything.

But they sure were pretty delicious while they lasted.


Saddle Boys

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Jacques Audiard's The Sisters Brothers was announced as part of the line-up in Toronto yesterday (was that only yesterday?) and along with it came a brand new batch of pictures from the film with looks at Jake and Joaquin and John and Riz, oh my. Add these to the batch we posted earlier this month, and along with the film's trailer you've got plenty of well-bearded Jake in close proximity to Riz to get you through the eight or so weeks until the film's released at the end of September. Hit the jump for the rest...

Hot Summer Timmy

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Hot Summer Nights, a film that's seemingly based upon the bedrock-stiff foundation of "wanting to stare at Timothée Chalamet's neck" if the trailer is anything to go by, is out for you to watch right this second! Is it out in actual theaters this weekend though? I have no idea. Okay I do know it's out in one theater, Cinema Village, here in New York this weekend, but beyond that good luck. But you can rent the film at all the usual online places including Amazon right now. So perhaps that picture of Timmy-Tim above inspires you - who am I to judge? Go to town. I myself haven't had the chance to watch it quite yet but I'm gonna be on a bus for several hours tomorrow so you best believe it's happening.

In other news a Tumblr recently shared some pictures I'd never seen before of Tim and friends reading the Call Me By Your Name script for the first time in 2015, including that one above - click on over to see a few more. Love the sweater, Tim! Do you realize that I haven't watched CMYBN in a couple of months? Can you IMAGINE? No wonder I've had this dull throbbing ache in my brain. I need my fix!
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Jon Snow Is Coming...

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... in the first half of 2019.
Well that's kind of vague.
They're really gonna drag this 
announcement out, ain't they?


I Was a Teenage

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I haven't written my Eighth Grade review for the past two days because I've been racking my brain trying to remember what the name of the discount sneakers was that became my unkindly aimed nickname in Junior High School - as I've spelled out before I was poor as poor can be as a kid and that's the sort of thing I got ridiculed for; weirdly nobody ever gay-bashed me, even when I literally ran away from the first girl to ask me out (literally!), but my poverty? That was ripe and picked over plenty. 

Anyway I can't for the life of me remember what the sneaker brand was, I've clearly blocked it out for my sanity, but I just now realized getting hung on that detail is exactly the sort of nerdy and pointless thing that one of the nerdy characters in Eighth Grade would humiliate themselves for, proving I've hardly grown since then. But who has? And director Bo Burnham knows it. 

His film, a relentlessly incisive and anxiety-inducing dumbo drop into the worst time of our collective lives, is way sweeter and way funnier than you anticipate - it's Welcome to the Dollhouse not directed by a misanthrope. Coming from a misanthrope and a life-long staunch defender of Todd Solondz's scabrous wit this should be an insult - an Acidless Solondz - and yet here we are and Eighth Grade is probably a masterpiece. Perhaps we just need the antidote these days.

I don't mean to make the film sound like some Oprah-approved affirmational journey, not for all of the three-thousand count sheets in the world - it's the stuff that clogs pimples turned into cinema; it's stress in public, pools and misshapen kneecaps infiltrated with scabs. It's like sucking puberty through a pink crazy straw, an ice cream headache in all your teeth naked on stage in front of a crowd of all your classmates - it's awkward adolescence turned into poetry, hand-scribbled, affectionately loopy love marks above the i's. Gucci! Now somebody check on Elsie Fisher and make sure she's okay, please...
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Pics of the Day

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Quentin Tarantino is shooting his new movie (yes the Manson one) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in L.A. right now and since L.A. is, you know, a public place where magical things happen regular ol' people like you and like me have had the good fortune to watch the filming happen. Some of them even took, gasp, pictures and videos of it with their technological devices - I hope Quentin doesn't actually catch an iPhone in the background of his 1960s movie, egads - and even better DH went and gathered up a ton of those pictures from people on Twitter, you can see them all here at this link


Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... Nicholas D'Agosto's cake-boy.

(via, thanks Dennis)
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:


Arash: If there was a storm coming right now,
a big storm, from behind those mountains,
would it matter? Would it change anything?

A trio of things! First the reason for this post - a happy birthday to the director of this movie (as well as the Jason Momoa cannibal movie The Bad Batch) Ana Lily Amirpour, who turns 42 today. I was lukewarm on Batch but am still looking terribly forward to whatever she comes up with next, which appears to be called Blood Moon:

"... a mind-bending adventure set in the swampy neon-lit streets of New Orleans, and inspired by fantasy-adventure movies of the 1980s and ’90s. At its center is a girl with strange and dangerous abilities who escapes from a mental asylum and rejoins the chaos of modern-day civilization, on the hedonistic streets of the French Quarter."

Second things second we really don't talk enough 
about the hotness of Arash Marandi in this movie...

We should really talk about that more. 
And third things last...

... I saw We the Animals a second time last night and while I'm saving my proper review for when it's out the week of August 17th let me just say that between her role as the mother in that and her role as the vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night we really need to be seeing Sheila Vand getting cast in everything, everything, everything. What an actress.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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André Holland Three Times

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Tonight's the night that the Stephen King anthology show Castle Rock premiere son Hulu -- the show stars André here as Henry Deaver, a lawyer who returns to his wacko childhood hometown of the title to defend a man imprisoned (played by Bill Skarsgard). His mom is played by Sissy Spacek and his best friend is played by Melanie Lynskey and there, I'm done, you have about ten thousand excellent reasons to watch the show now thanks to those names.

I do have a question though and it's driving me nuts - isn't "Deaver" a surname that King has used before? Am I imagining things? Either I have made it up or it's so obvious your answer will shame me but I did a quick google and turned up whitless. Since this is a show mixing together all of King's Maine writings though it wouldn't be strange if "Deaver" is a reference to something... (pics via)


Won't You Not Be My Neighbor

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I've got yet another review from the Fantasia Film Festival up at The Film Experience this morning - click on over to read my thoughts on Fleuve Noir (aka Black Tide), the crime thriller starring Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris in a weird little game of cat and mouse that's actually more like... I don't know, pelican and pug, or something equally idiosyncratic. It's a queer little movie, and I don't just mean that in reference to the blowjob that happens. 
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Ciao Roma

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That right there is our first tease of a look at Roma, Alfonso Cuaron's upcoming film about a Mexican family in the 1970s that is screening as the Centerpiece at the New York Film Festival (it's alos screening in Venice and Toronto but fuck them since we don't go to them) - and yes okay okay it's just the tide washing across a tiled floor, but it sets a mood anyway. We're excited! Let us have our excitement. It's a nice font?
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Good Morning, World

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It's Jason Statham's birthday tomorrow but I'm not going to be around tomorrow so we're wishing him a happy one today! Got it? Good. I'm going to be away until Tuesday afternoon actually, so prepare yourselves for a little drought.

I'll try to get as much content out today as I possibly can to tide you over, you can feed yourselves like MNPP is one of those little kitty feeders that drop a few pellets a day or whatever (I have no idea what I'm talking about, I have never owned or taken care of a cat in my life), but to be honest I'm dragging this morning so who knows. For now just appreciate this new poster for Jason Statham's giant shark movie The Meg:


Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Fantasia 2018: Cam

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A little Lynch in the way that Denis Villenueve's Enemy was, Daniel Goldhaber's new film Cam - which premiered last week at the Fantasia Film Fest and won a couple of awards and was quickly snapped up by Netflix - tells the story of Alice and her cam-girl persona Lola, or is it the other way around, and what happens when one's online identity bleeds too much into one's life... or... is it the other way around?

It's like a sex-positive existential 21st century twist on Hitchcock's favorite story of Mistaken Identity; you could actually just throw a dozen Hitch titles in the blender (The Skin Game, Young and Innocent, Notorious, The Lady Vanishes), see what shakes out after a good and thorough shaking, and voila, there's Cam. Or go full The Woman Who Wooed Too Much if you're feeling real nutty (and lord knows I'm never above such dopy pun-based shenanigans).

Anyway the film's finest asset, besides some gorgeously rancid candy-colored cinematography, is its star Madeline Brewer, who any fan of The Handmaid's Tale will immediately recognize as the wild one-eyed Janine - Brewer shines on that show and she shines just as bright, with neon, here. Sometimes you cotton to an actor quick and I have cottoned to Brewer real quick - she feels dangerous in all the right ways, like our favorite new flavor of Juliette Lewis. She injects all the right juice into this our tale of woeful cyber self disintegration - she makes it not hard to feel her personhood fraying one pixel at a time, and still enjoy the freaky ride every step of the way.
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Tahar Rahim One Time

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The new issue of W Magazine has some great good-lookers in it - besides this shot of the ever and always welcome Tahar (via) I also posted a picture of Dominic Cooper and his super trooper ten gallon hat of hair over on the Tumblr.
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