Say Your Goodbyes, 2019

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A happy New Year to you all! 

See you in 2020.

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And Now the Men Take a Turn...

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I've been covering the best performances from actresses in 2019 for the past several weeks at The Film Experience, which I wrapped up last week with a Top 10 -- I hadn't intended to do anything this week as I'm in chocolate-smeared middle the much-needed laze-about, but I decided to force myself off the floor for a few minutes (lest I get floor-sores) and make up a bonus list today, so if you click on over to TFE today I've given us my 10 Favorite Horror Actor Performances of the year. At least three of them were real real easy, and I bet you can guess which three...

We're All Princes With a Minute to Midnight

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My tale of woe as a bullied put-upon gay boy in a small town is sadly scarcely rare -- cast your eyes from the purple mountains to the amber waves and we thrum in every school-yard, waiting for the moment we can escape to brighter lights within and outside ourselves. I became a terror in college the second somebody looked at me -- every repressed molecule of raging hormones exploding like a three alarm dance party. My hair was dyed every color you can imagine and I snorted and ingested every drug known to man woman and man-child at that. 

If any man with two legs -- and even that would have been negotiable had that opportunity arisen -- so much as looked at me I would abandon my new best friends before they'd blinked, tossed myself into the most dangerous pits of filth and depravity imaginable, and come to a day later smeared with who knows and no idea what county I'd crossed into. My walks of shame involved field trips, spelunking, dotted lines across antiquated maps frayed at their edges to find the buried treasure, long gone to seed, of my self-respect.

That is to say I, like many of my peers, went nuts after High School. All those years of being ignored -- or worse, looked at with disgust or pity -- sloughed off me like fireworks once those glances suddenly turned lustful, once I had an iota of cool boy cache. I milked the teat of newfound freedom, a load lightened and then some, by the fistful, squeezing it bone dry within the matter of twenty-four Mad Hatter months. I was probably often an asshole. but happily, exhaustedly, I managed to survive it, barely, enough psychosis in the rear view to know I'd rather not again, but thanks.

All of that came churning back while watching Midnight Kiss though, director Carter Smith's New Years Eve themed Slasher entry in Hulu's "Into the Dark" anthology series, which dropped on their service this week (watch the trailer here) -- those last few months of it, of dragging yourself through a week half-dead until the weekend, which seems to start earlier every week, shoots fire through your veins. Midnight Kiss focuses on a group of friends too old for it, the highlights becoming a headache, a glare in the eyes too bright, who're old enough and mature enough now to know they're just hurting each other; that their selfishness has a body count.

It might not be The Godfather Part II but as a Slasher Midnight Kiss is perfectly up to snuff, nasty-intentioned in the spirit of the genre's most classic tropes, and it's far better acted than most -- you very much buy these folks as real friends with real histories and not just an assemblage of actors who met each other a day before the camera got turned on. (The characters are also generally all kind of awful, but then isn't that too a part of the Slasher thing?)

The film's gorgeously shot by Smith & Co, including lots of appropriately horny gratuity for its gay milieu -- everybody takes a shower, or two -- and has a take-full-advantage attitude towards its hot sexy Real Estate Porn, as the Palm Springs house it's set at is car commercial prepped at every moment. Basically, it's full of nice stuff to stare at that's brutally interrupted here and there by horror movie nastiness, which is what we're even here for.

So no it's not precisely revolutionary cinema... but then it sort of is in its way. What's most important to me about Midnight Kiss is that I watched a movie that looked back at me and saw me and my experiences and shoveled them into a time-tested formula, one I enjoy, trashy or no, taking them as seriously as I've had to take the woes of awful straight kids trying to get laid since Ye Olde Time began. Getting to see ourselves, even at our worst, in every nook and cranny of entertainment, from Glossy French Lesbians In Period Costume to Pretty Boys Deep Throating Broken Champagne Bottles, is the gay rights I fight for.

Luke Evans Two Times

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Popping in to share what Luke Evans has been up to for the holidays, which is apparently Hawaii (via), and see how y'all are faring. Did your Christmas involve getting lei'd in short shorts too? I sure hope so, for celebration's sake. Nobody should ring in the New Year without a reinvigorated tan line and a boost in Insta hits. Cheers, all!

Greta Will Not Be Ignored...

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... or will she? I am sad to say I totally forgot about Isabelle Huppert's Greta when I wrote up my list of 10 Favorite Female Horror Performances for 2019 over at The Film Experience yesterday... so consider this here a gentle nod in her direction, hoping she doesn't show up at my bedside tonight with a syringe and a smile. I love you, Greta! Really! Okay the rest of you need to run over to TFE to read my piece while me and Greta work this out... RUN!

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Ho Ho Oh My

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May Alexander Ludwig & Travis Fimmel stuff your stockings, and 

then each other's stockings, and then yours again, tonight!
Happy Holidays from MNPP!

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Tom Hardy's On Fire

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I imagine y'all can fill in the blank with the dirty thoughts the sight of Tom Hardy wearing a suit while perched on a fire hydrant has already filled me with -- woof woof -- and if not... well you're probably better off. But that's the note I'm leaving y'all with before I take off for the holiday weekend either way, apparently! It's a mood. Anyway as mentioned earlier I am planning on being back in here posting a little bit between now and Christmas -- even though I have the time off from now til New Years and could if I wanted just curl into a fetal ball and stay on my living-room floor for two straight weeks! -- so don't consider yourselves rid of me just yet. Have a decent to adequate weekend, though!

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Sebastian Stan Two More Times

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Listen if they just want to keep doling out new photos from Sebastian's Men's Health photoshoot (via) every twelve hours from now until infinity I am fine with making new posts for them until then. I will grind my fingertips down to the bone, and then further, for it! Fuck fingers, they're overrated! See the previous posts here and especially here.

Bury Me in Olivia Colman's Backyard

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This post's title sounds dirty when I say it? Anyway Olivia Colman, who seems to be having a hell of a good time these days -- see above photo of her with her arm around Nicholas Hoult in a tuxedo -- and deservedly so, has got a new gig! She's going to star in an HBO series -- all Variety says is "series" they don't say "limited" or not -- called Landscapers that's being developed by no less than Citizen Ruth and Election filmmaker Alexander Payne. (Note how I ignored everything Payne has done since Election... I'm trying to be positive right now.) Landscapers will tell the true story of a "mild mannered couple" of married Brits who murder her parents and bury them in their backyard. The husband hasn't been cast yet. If I was shepherding this project -- and clearly I am not -- this sounds like a killer Ben Wheatley project to me, a la the wonderful Sightseers, but we'll see what Payne manages. Anyway Olivia playing a psycho has long been a dream of  mine, and if a Bond Villain or the below can't happen we'll take this for sure.

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I want Olivia Colman as an uber-villain in SPY 2 right fucking now pic.twitter.com/KEVzKSMbWy

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 9, 2019

Christmas Tombs & Hanukkah Tigers

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If you're looking for a last minute gift idea for the holidays for a real movie buff (i.e. yourself probably) I highly and profoundly recommend snagging a copy of the new blu-ray double-feature set of Fritz Lang's so-called "Indian Epic" which consists of two 1957 flicks that were released back to back, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. They're really just one long movie divided by a cliffhanger, and they're really and truly insane. I did a Twitter thread whilst watching them in high amusement this past weekend...

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Thinking about redecorating in 2020, open to suggestions pic.twitter.com/JnpFuIXFn9

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 15, 2019

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... which only begins to hint at the camp -- and serious filmmaking as well! -- pleasures therein. This is Fritz Lang, after all -- dude knows how to make a movie. The influences these had on the Indiana Jones series are obvious -- it sometimes feels like the artifice and technicolor of a Douglas Sirk melodrama wedded with a Saturday Afternoon Serial, with everybody slathered in brown make-up and screaming in German. There's Bava lighting in caves and sexy dances under outrageously bosomed goddess statues, snake puppets and a zombie leper colony and quicksand. I mean it is obviously a product of its time, but WHAT a product. One of a kind. Well two of a kind. And don't sleep on lead actor Paul Hubschmid either...

Stephan James One Time

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Let me take this opportunity to give y'all a heads-up that the second half of this here pre-Xmas Friday is about to get hella busy for me as I try to get all my off-line work-load completed so I can properly head into these immediate two weeks off for the holidays -- all's I'm saying is expect it to be pretty quiet here at MNPP for the rest of today. That said I don't think the site will be totally mouse silent over that entire two week span -- I'll be popping my head in here and there. Check back, is my point. Or don't! Go with gods...

Good lord Tom Holland just posted this picture to Instagram pic.twitter.com/L9NVy6f8oO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 20, 2019

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

All That Jazz (1979)

Angelique: Do you believe in love?
Joe: I believe in saying, "I love you."
It helps you concentrate.

A happy 40 to one of the musicals I actually unabashedly adore -- if you've been here at MNPP long enough you know I'm not especially a Musical Person, but if they're interesting subversions (read: dark) of the genre tropes I usually find grating (read: sunny) then I tend to be more open, more willing, and All That Jazz is a fantasia of death and drug abuse that's impossible to look away from. 

I'd be curious to re-watch it now in this post Fosse/Verdon world we live in; Bob Fosse wasn't exactly insincere with regards to his faults but that show laid them out in ways he never would've been entirely able to. Plus  you know Michelle Williams goes and gives one of the great performances of the decade in it...

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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I should have credited photographer and filmmaker Carter Smith with the holiday gift package (emphasis on package) that was Sebastian Stan in Men's Health yesterday -- he shot it, and he just shared this outtake on his Instagram today. I don't know about you but I'm craving some MEAT now. Ahem. 

Anyway as long as we're here we might as well share the just-dropped full-length trailer for Carter's New Years set gay-slasher Midnight Kiss, which is part of Hulu's Into the Dark anthology show -- read our previous posts on it right here. There's a sort of Sebastian Stan connection, at least tenuously, since it stars Scott Evans, brother of Captain America himself. Anyway Midnight Kiss drops the balls on December 27th.

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The Rise of Tight Pants

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I suppose it's antithetical to post about something when I'm avoiding something but hey, I'm just like any other man, and I just wanna look at Oscar Isaac in tight pants. (Sidenote: our pal Manuel interviewed Oscar recently and the tight pants came up... so to speak) Point being I'm not seeing the new Star Wars until Sunday and I'm neither in a huge rush nor terribly enthusiastic about it, but I'd prefer to not get it spoiled. It's just, I realized this week... do people really give a shit about any of these new characters? I like the actors obviously, but these characters -- and yes I include weepy man-baby Kylo Ren -- all read as wafer-thin to me. I recall some visuals from the last couple of movies -- Last Jedi was flat out gorgeous -- but where those characters were emotionally? That's like footnotes. I mean... I don't know what I expect. It's not like Luke & Leia & Han were exactly bastions of depth. Sorry am I murdering everybody's childhoods right now? I'll shut up and make it better:

Someone captured Oscar Isaac fixing Pedro Pascal's collar and We'll Never Be The Same pic.twitter.com/If7ICw9Qbs

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 19, 2019

The Bearable Lightness of Unbeing

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You can't talk about Ira Sachs' Frankie without talking about its beauty. Not just the seaside Portuguese town of Sintra where the film takes place, although that offers a lot of picturesque beauty... that cinematographer Rui Poças routinely ignores. Oh you'll get a shot here of characters on the beach, or a shot there of the town's rooftops twinkling against green leaves -- you can tell these people that Sachs has gathered up are in a very pretty place. But they usually stand in front of it, block and become it -- their faces and body languages are the landscapes these two are curious in capturing, and as such Frankie is a symphony of light and color, expressiveness in gesture and speech. Watch the way an afternoon ray of light cascades down Brendan Gleeson's beard, tears turned to sunshine.

It's important the filmmaking itself is saying so much, because the characters keep saying a lot without it ever being quite about what it's about. Frankie (Isabelle Huppert) has gathered all of her family in Sintra because she's about to die of a terminal cancer that's reappeared, "everywhere" as she puts it -- this will presumably be their last time all together, and everyone has their own things that keep getting in the way as the single day the film takes place over fans out, their futures branched and clotted in captivating miniature. 

Frankie's son Paul (Jérémie Renier) can't find love, so his mother's invited along a friend Ilene (Marisa Tomei) who might be able to help out on that front, only she seems to have brought her boyfriend... it's all doomed before they even meet, and that's before Paul starts vomiting out stories that will dig up the roots of possible romance on the spot. Frankie's ex (Pascal Greggory, never more appropriately of Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach) and current husband (Gleeson) have conspired to drag an unwitting Frankie to a healing spa, a suggestion she slices down to its own quick the second she catches on. So instead we listen to a tour guide tell his life's story.

A gifted golden bracelet gets tossed into the path-side jungle, and an engagement disassembles in the two-way midst of a band of oblivious tourists -- everywhere meaningful moments dissolve at the touch, at their mere recognition as such. Nobody can quite be about what they're about, even Frankie herself -- they come to this beautiful place glowing with good intentions, however half-baked and resolutely unspoken, and they remain painfully human, small and exquisitely disastrous, flitting about like fireflies -- here then gone, here then gone -- in a a just set sun. You can't see the sun. Just the dirt and light changing color. 

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... icy hot with Sebastian Stan.

I posted a little taste of this Men's Health shoot of Seb last night but HOLY SHIT I didn't see the rest of this coming. The entire interview is here, not that I've read it. With pictures like these who needs words? They say pictures are worth a thousand words but these pictures are like two thousand, maybe three thousand, apiece.

Anyway there's also a set video which I'll share,

with some gifs from it, right here after the jump...
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, Jake

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It's Jake Gyllenhaal's 39th birthday!

What are YOU doing to celebrate Jake today?

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Mexican (2001)

Jerry: It's a little hard to carry on a relationship
when I'm stuffed with straw and formaldehyde.

I was going to wish Brad Pitt a happy birthday by using his "Don't cry in front of the Mexicans" line from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but then I remembered he actually starred in a movie called The Mexican, and here we are. Happy birthday, Brad Pitt! I've never actually seen The Mexican -- it's on Prime but only through the end of the year! Should I bother?

Anyway it's looking increasingly likely that my favorite male performance of 2019 -- that'd be Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse -- isn't going to eke out a Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars this year, and if that holds true then I will be rooting for Brad in Hollywood come Oscars Day. He's terrific in a terrific movie. That's as real as a fucking doughnut.

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Sebastian Stan Two Times

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I guess these are in the new issue of Men's Health but I don't 

have a link yet -- hopefully once I do I'll 

also have a dozen more pictures to go with it!

Banging Back Through History

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I have made an UNPRECEDENTED decision to post the above magazine cover with all that aggressively distracting type splashed across Claes Bang's bared torso because that photo's too good to not share and also too good to edit down or photo-shop around the type. The type drives me nuts, but I will allow it this one time. For you! You can thank me for my sacrifice by finding me a physical copy of that 2010 magazine and mailing it to me. 

Anyway we've got news big and good enough here to distract my spazz eyes from their spazzing -- Claes, who's on the verge of being our new favorite bisexual bloodsucker, has next joined the cast of Robert Eggers next film! The Viking one! With Alexander Skarsgard! And Nicole Kidman! I told you about it here! (thx Mac) Even better Deadline accompanies that news with a picture of Claes recently seen rocking a great big beard, no doubt a preview of all the Viking Sexiness to come:

It would behoove me to add here that this means that my boy Robert Eggers -- whose last film starred no less than the Twinkle Pony Edward Cullen himself! -- will next make a movie will feature two, two wah ah ah, bisexual vampires on screen...

polls

Who Wore It Best?

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Did you see our big "James Wolk in Watchmen" post yesterday? You need to see that. Especially since this post now won't make sense without it. Anyway a couple of you made the excellent point that the "stupid panties" (as Laurie so eloquently put it) that Wolk's character rocked -- and yes comic book fanboys I know they were a nod to the ones seen in the Alan Moore's original Watchmen book...

... I am a nerd too thank you very much -- looked an awful lot similar to the metallic high-risers that Sting sauntered about in in David Lynch's Dune. Which hey yes they do! Which is something I weirdly never noticed before -- I mean, Lynch's film came out in 1984, before Moore's comic did two years later... do we think it's possible it was a reference? I just always thought of the Doctor's choice in vertiginous briefs as a Charlie Brown squiggle myself. 

Anyway now that I have given you

 so very much to mull over, our poll:

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