Friday, September 28, 2018

Gay Boys Forever

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Man that photo of Ben (via, thx Mac) is capturing my mood, which is really hitting a wall today - it's been a long day in a long week and I'm ready for a pair of days off, I am. Next week is another big week of NYFF stuff - I'll be seeing the new Claire Denis, the new Coen Bros, the new Alfonso Cuarón. Oh you know what else next week is? 

It's the one-year anniversary of me seeing Call Me By Your Name for the first time! Don't be surprised if I might have stuff to say about that! But that's next week. For now, I collapse. If you're looking for something to see this weekend yourselves though I do have a recommendation for you...
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Pics of the Day

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The New York Film Festival officially opens this evening with Yorgos Lanthimos' film The Favourite, which I've just seen this morning (more on that soon enough) -- as you see above (and make sure tos croll through, there is video at the end) most of the cast was there (save Rachel Weisz who just had another baby, congrats to her and Daniel Craig!) for a press conference today, meaning I got to stare intently at Nicky Hoult & Joe Alwyn hoping that they might rub thighs or some such. (They didn't, the bastards.) 
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Long Days

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Hey everybody - popping my head out from in between movie screenings to send you over to The Film Experience for my latest review! This one's for Bi Gan's film Long Day's Journey Into Night, already renowned for the technological achievement of its second half which contains an hour-long single shot sequence in 3D. What did I think? Well you'll have to click over there to find that out, duh.
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Thursday, September 27, 2018

Franz Rogowski Was Here

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I have officially reached saturation point where I am losing track of what I have just seen and what I am about to see, here in the middle of the New York Film Festival press screening season, but I just looked it up and I am now headed off to see the new film from German director Christian Petzold, who made the smashingly good back-to-back pair of Nina Hoss starrers Barbara and Phoenix - this new one's called Transit and it doesn't have Nina (boo) but it does have Franz Rogowski here, who caught my eye in Michael Haneke's Happy End last year. He's the eye-catching type...

He was also in the very good single-take Victoria back in 2015. Anyway tomorrow's kind of a long day in screenings again - I'm seeing Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite, huzzah! - but I'll try to pop in by the end of the day. Make due with the two reviews I posted earlier (scroll down for them) and then I'll probably have another one to share with you over at The Film Experience at some point tomorrow too. Until then hit the jump if you want more Franz...

The Wolf in His Hurry Swallowed Her Alive

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I suppose it would have been too on the nose to have named anybody Peter in Hold the Dark, even though once you think of it it's hard to think of anything but "Peter and the Wolf" while you're watching it. Like that this is a fable about living beside wild things and trying to out-smart them only to discover that heart, not smarts, are where it's at. Saving everybody's got a real mean price.

Jeffrey Wright plays Russell, an author who told his haunting tale of his encounter hunting a female wolf one time, and that tale now comes back to bite him in the you-know-where when a young woman named Medora (Riley Keough) in rural Alaska beckons him to come find the wolf that carried away her son. Medora says she doesn't expect her son to be alive singing in the wolf's belly or anything - she wants revenge. A mother's right. It's when Papa (Alexander Skarsgard) comes home from the war that the other shoes, make that the snow-boots, start dropping.

The strange tale that director Jeremy Saulnier and writer Macon Blair (the duo behind Green Room and Blue Ruin) unspool from that set-up is indeed strange, and in fits and starts as good as anything Saulnier's done before, which is to say very. There's a mid-film show-down that gooses to Saulnier's strengths, an act of boxed-in riot and violence beautifully and savagely set in bright-day wide-open-spaces that are nonetheless not bright or wide enough. And there's an especially unsettling little scene that stars Blair himself - he went and wrote himself the best scene! 

But there's also a lot of mystical whatsits and hullabaloo that the film never really gets a hold on - the land of the midnight sun, weaving its starry-eyed spell of ancient superstitions and native creatures, turns a bit to mush. Skarsgard, all thirty feet of Scandinavian meat of him, skulks well, but all the self-serious skulking him and Jeffrey Wright do at each other begins to at times feel a goof, especially slapped up against the ill-explained mythologizing. It's a lot of hot air making a puddle in the end. 

Hold the Dark drops on Netflix tomorrow.
Here's the trailer again:
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Lose Your Blues, Everybody Cut, Everybody Cut

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"Why is everyone so ready to believe the worst is over?" 

If that isn’t a question that speaks to our current moment more than any other I’m not sure I could come up with a better – every morning I wake up and ask myself, “Is this the day the world ends?” So when that question slips from the lips of Suzy Bannion (Dakota Johnson) three-quarters of the way through Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, that’s when what Luca is up to here really snapped into place. 

And make no mistake about it, what he is up to here is so far removed from what Dario Argento was up to with his 1977 version of Suspiria that it might too take you some effort to truly shake off your expectations and settle in to what’s happening here yourself. For all its odd flashes of masks and bedevilry this is a Luca Guadagnino Film, through and through. To use the word "remake" is near nigh impossible. Luca’s film has the bones of Argento’s – that is the plot is shaped around the same stuff. Suzy is an American Girl who travels to Berlin to dance at the school of Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and the shadowy headmistress Helena Markos. She makes friends with a girl named Sara (a very good Mia Goth) and takes the room of the runaway student Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz). 

And yet none of those things really feel like anything that they felt before. Everything underneath, guts and stuff, is eviscerated and reshaped – at one point in the film we see a witchy hand run across a wound to heal it and this movie is something like that; you don’t see the Frankenstein stiches, it’s far deeper, meatier, than that. From the feet up. Even further – as Madame Blanc says at one point, from the space beneath the feet. That’s what counts. 

Where Argento gave us a technicolor fever dream wholly divorced from the real world Guadagnino takes great pains to insert his story into a very specific time and place - the year is 1977, the year I was born and the year the original film came out, as Berlin was a city terrorized by the Baader-Meinhof bombings. It's the German Autumn of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this more than anybody - you can feel Fassbinder’s touch in the hard ugly fabrics, the sickly plastic shells of yellow telephones and smoker's teeth. 

That Germany was facing down the devils of its past, feeling and fearing that somewhere under the surface the rot had kept hold and seeped into the present - Fassbinder and his contemporaries were rummaging around in the fact that their parents’ generation was responsible for the unspeakable horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust of course, and they had a very real and recent reason to mistrust authority. What do you do if your parents quite literally dragged the entire world into hell itself? 

I don’t know about you but that sense of generational betrayal, that sense of something stinking from high up, it informs my day to day these days, watching my country, one of many, walking off another cliff. And every day the helplessness, the panic, the madness takes hold. Bad dreams, the ceiling is leaking, there are bees. We all snap at each other on the subway more. 

Luca’s Suspiria is here to feed off our bad dreams. To tell us that the worst is still happening, still coming, a force unreckonable in the basement, creeping up. There’s a scene of such broken-boned cruelty in this film I nearly crawled backwards over my seat – this is our fortune now; shaped by forces beyond our control, wrenched and snapped and squeezed and carted away like deer carcass, a stinky soil in our wake. 

Or is it? The film’s actually far weirder than that, and not in the same sense as Argento’s dreamy strangeness either – this is, in the words of Rosemary, no dream this is really happening. (And I think it's no mistake that the film I thought of more than any other was Ken Russell's The Devils, which tells you plenty about the fences Luca is swinging for here.) There is an intellectual and emotional rigor; it’s even at times kind, romantic. There are charts and maps and the star-figures of monstrous motherhood, the dry skin surface of concrete architecture, all bound up in a six-part psycho requiem for our souls. Nightmares abound but the flesh, the flesh is where they’re based. Where they’re scratched in. 

In this grand new world of complications amid complications there’s nothing so safe and sound as Suzy’s original hero’s journey into Hell and back again – the “they” of the “other” isn’t quite that plain. We’re all others now, unknown to ourselves and made of unfamiliar building materials – raised on the blood-red plains of no place and instilled with unspeakable artifacts of who knows what histories. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to tell everybody about yourself, not with the loud whistling of apocalypse in our ears. 


Where My Men At

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Into my inbox yesterday was delivered a grand statement of some sort on the state of Modern Masculinity in the form of two posters for two very very different movies, and I figured this is just the kind of thing I am here to share, gaze upon, discuss. Above is the poster for Creed II, with Michael B. Jordan (but not director Ryan Coogler) returning to his hit Rocky spin-off franchise. The trailer was also dropped yesterday and here's that:
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I find it fascinating how hard they're selling this franchise via the strength of MBJ's well-oiled pecs - I suppose the same stuff was done with Sly back in the 80s (he was a big star because of his Reagan-era action-hero frame) but somehow it seemed then like it came with less of a leer? Anyway even if the Creed folks are leering they've got nothing on the folks behind the queer cotton-candy-colored Portuguese soccer fantasia called Diamantino, which premiered at Cannes to lots of, "Whaaat"'s and is playing NYFF as part of their "Projections" series next week...

That is, how they say, you sell a movie. The film won the Critic's Week Grand Prize at Cannes so it's got some heft to it, just like those drawers seen on the actor Carloto Cotta seem to, I'd say. Heft. Anyway I'm seeing Diamantino tomorrow so stay tuned for what I have to say on that soon but for now here's the trailer from when it screened at TIFF earlier this month (where it was reviewed by our pal Chris at TFE, read that here)...
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Sebastian Stan Six Times

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Karyn Kusama's Destroyer isn't out until Christmas and the adaptation of Shirley Jackson's spooky story We Have Always Lived in the Castle that he co-stars in just played at the LA Film Fest this week (here's Variety's take on it) so I have no idea when we'll get that, so we'll have to make due for now, Sebastian Stan wise I mean, with these pictures of the actor (via, thanks Mac). They'll do! Hit the jump for the rest...

These Precious Things, Let Them Bleed

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The third of my NYFF reviews went up last night over at The Film Experience - head on over to read what I had to say about Elisabeth Moss in Alex Ross Perry's film Her Smell, which has the Handmaid herself grabbing a guitar and going full psycho grunge. Spoiler alert - the best actress of her generation is very good.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Good Morning, World

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Way back in February I shared a photograph of the German actors slash exhibitionists Florian David Fitz and Matthias Schweighöfer...

... showing off their luxurious communal goods on the set of their latest bad-boy goof called 100 Dinge (aka 100 Things) - well the film's out in December in Germany and they just dropped the trailer and holy hell it's basically being sold on the strength of their butt-cheeks alone. And those are some strong butt-cheeks.

The thing is two trailers were released - as seen above a censored one that's on YouTube (which I'll share below) and then an uncensored one on Facebook (thanks Tony) - the only problem is the FB one is square cropped and so shots like above become...

... as you can see, both of these releases have their plusses and their minuses. But I will not complain! I'm just glad we live in an international world now so I even know Florian David Fitz and Matthias Schweighöfer are making these movies in the first place since it'll probably never get a release here in the US, unfortunately. Here's the trailer:
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And for now we'll make due, 
hit the jump for a couple dozen gifs...

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

The Truth Is Right Here

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Now that I've noticed Guillaume Canet's resemblance to Patrick Dempsey (see this tweet from last week) I'm never going to un-notice it, and I'm never gonna not feel dumb for not having noticed it sooner. For serious! It's kind of crazy. Anyway it's especially prominent in Olivier Assayas' latest film Non-Fiction, which has Guillaume acting opposite Juliette Binoche in an existential comedy set against the collapsing publishing world, and which I just reviewed over at The Film Experience before its premiere at the New York Film Festival next week. Go read my words, even if my denseness regarding this whole Canet / Dempsey situation can be seen from outer space.


Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... at one with Armie's fruity drink.

Although he's enough of a steady Instagram presence that I already know he's on a plane and out of Italy, Armie Hammer had been vacationing at Lake Garda (aka the same spot in the scene where him and the two Perlman fellas go nightswimming in CMBYN) this week, as evidenced by these two photos and that one we posted on Monday. How many times do you think he said "Later!"?


Good Morning, World

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he's giving us little shows like this on his own, and 
for that reason, Parker Young, you're our Person of the Day.
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Tuesday, September 25, 2018

But By Broken Minds

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I got a lot less done this afternoon in between movies than I was 
anticipating getting done but I think we all know the culprit for that...
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Anyway I am taking Jonathan Tucker's lederhosen Instagram photo as a good omen - there is a scene in the original Suspiria set at a tavern (it's right before the blind piano player gets murdered) with a full lederhosen dance routine, of course. It all means something! All of the witches, et cetera. Anyway I'll see y'all on the other side of my most anticipated movie of the year...


It's NYFF I'm in Love

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The 56th annual New York Film Festival officially opens this Friday (with Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite) and runs for just over two weeks, through October 14th. I did a preview of the festival, meaning what I personally was and am most looking forward to, right here. One of those films listed was Christophe Honoré's gay romance (of sorts) called Sorry Angel, which stars Vincent Lacoste (above) and Pierre Deladonchamps (from Stranger by the Lake), and that film is the very first one I have reviewed from this year's fest -- head on over to The Film Experience for my take, which is quite ecstatic indeed. J'adore, as the French go.
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Buster Makes Ya Feel Good

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Alright folks, I'm off for a few hours for the previously mentioned NYFF screening - I'll be back this afternoon though. For a quick minute, anyway. Take a nap with Buster and we'll talk later.
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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