No Really Hooray For Hollywood

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There's a nice chat with Hollywood star Jeremy Pope up at Interview Magazine that accompanies this photograph, click here for that -- and if that ain't enough I recommend this big ol' "Gratuitous Jeremy Pope" post I did back when Hollywood got announced. Anyway now that the embargo's lifted I can admit I've already watched all the episodes of Hollywood myself, I been done with it for weeks now, and well...

Just watched the premiere of [redacted] and [redacted] is so [redacted] I [redacted] in my tighty-whities

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 7, 2020

... let's just admit that that tweet was about this show. It's Tighty-Whities-riffic! I'm sure by the time I get up tomorrow morning at 8 or 9 or whatever is time anymore o'clock some diligent internet person will have already put all of the gratuitous scenes in the series onto this here 'net, but hot damn there are a few moments of the gratuitous sort to be excited about. Pope and David Corenswet...

... are absolute stars in the heavens in the making. I've only skimmed a few of the reviews about and they seemed fairly negative but they also seemed, to me, to mainly miss the point -- you can't criticize a show this purposefully cornball for being cornball. Cornball is the point! It's as broad as any Busby Berkeley "We're gonna put on a show!" cheese-fest, and in these dire times and dark days that we're in the midst of this here cheese and corn platter really hit the spot.

It was impossible, for me anyway, not to get swept up in its yee-haw vim and vigor -- when they made this show they can't have known they'd be dropping it smack-dab straight into a new Great Depression, but it feels exactly of that old-fashioned ilk anyway; if there'd been chapter breaks where Shirley Temple came out and did a lil' number it would've fit right in. Sure that gee-whiz-whillikers tone makes for an occasionally awkward smash up against the Sexism and Homophobia and Racism and Sexual Abuse that it's addressing but I think that's what makes the show interesting and funny and surprising. It's super duper silly, but it's big and openhearted and I, goddamnit all, was thoroughly entertained.

Fringed For His Pleasure

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It begins with the kernel of an idea. Like literally let us say for our argument's sake an actual kernel. A popcorn kernel. What if, instead of paper and metal, we used popcorn kernels for currency? Would they be worth more popped or un-popped? Would movie theaters then become our banking institutions? Picture foiled Jiffy Pop containers piled up like gold bars in Fort Knox, high to the ceilings of the local multiplex. Is butter change? Salt cubes doubloons? Anything's possible in this brave new popcorn kernel world.

That's the sort of childlike imaginarium you feel steeped in whenever you step into one of the films of French director Quentin Dupieux -- a place where car-tires hunt people for sport and TV sets use radio waves to explode us from the inside, just because he thought that first kernel up and went step by outlandish step from there. And now, thanks to his latest miniature wonder of a movie called Deerskin, we will enter a place where Oscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin becomes fixated on stealing all of the jackets in the world so that his own jacket, made of yeah you guessed it, becomes the only most fabulous coat in all of the land. Watch out, Joseph -- The Artist is coming for all of your Technicolor Dreams!

I know it's a bit of an easy gag, perhaps not a friendly, on the face anyway, one either, to say that one of your favorite things about a movie was its runtime was short. But I also feel like, at this point, Dupieux knows where Iright 'm coming from -- all of his movies introduce their central goofy conceit, play it out to its absurd illogical and always delightful conclusion, and never once overstay their welcome. Deerskin gives us 75 straight minutes of exquisite ridiculousness, and then exits stage left leaving me wanting just enough more, and not a whit less.

Dujardin plays Georges, a man who's just lost his wife and who seems to be having, uhh, a midlife crisis of sorts. We meet him driving into a mountain village where he flushes his (it must be said absolutely beautiful) old corduroy jacket down a gas station toilet; he then immediately spends every penny he has on him on the fringed deerskin coat that will come to define him... or really the absence of a Him now -- like a calfskin succubi the coat begins telling Georges things that would've made Richard Berkowitz's dog blush.

As Georges meets the people of this little mountain village -- including a totally up to the challenge Adèle Haenel, matching Dujardin eye-bug for eye-bug, as the local barkeeper -- he and his coat begin hatching their scheme: they will direct a movie as a ruse to steal people's coats from them. I would say this makes sense in context but it's nonsense there too, most delicious nonsense, and I adored every nonsensical frame of it. By the time Georges was dragging a ceiling fan down a darkened street and decapitating people with it I was, mais oui,  entirely enraptured -- wrap me up in this sweet warm Deerskin, it's some toasty nonsense I now call home.

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Deerskin will be begin screening online at virtual theaters around the country (including my beloved FLC here in New York) tomorrow -- you can click here and see if it's playing at one of the virtual cinemas near you. Here's the trailer:

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Grace Becomes Your Great Wisdom

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This won't surprise any longtime readers of this site but I was literally just thinking yesterday that my forever favorite band Radiohead owed us a little something entertaining -- or you know terrifying and somber, given we're talking about Radiohead here -- during these terrifying times to help pass the days. That is, beyond the live shows they've been uploading every week on their YouTube channel, which granted, are plenty already. But since I'm Violet from Willy Wonka I always want some more -- I mean in the alternate timeline where this virus didn't take over everything I'd have seen Thom Yorke perform live twice, two times, otherwise. Anyway blessedly more we have been given. Thom performed a brand new song, just him and a piano, on Jimmy Fallon's show last night called "Plasticine Figures" and it can be seen above. (thx Mac) It's lovely. Of course it's lovely!

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes (1989)

If only, instead of sunlight -- because that's ridiculous -- our President had suggested that we all expose ourselves to the warm glow of a possessed floor-lamp in order to stave off the sickness of Coronavirus. Now that, that would've made some sense! Followed a logic that we're all already intimately familiar with, thanks to the 1989 Patty Duke classic Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes, which -- I'm sure I don't need to tell any of you the plot, I'm sure you've all seen this movie dozens of times, but just in case Donald Trump or somebody equal garbage is reading -- has the sentient demon spooge shot down a power line and straight into the belly of prettiest darn lamp you ever done seen.

Who wouldn't want the spawn of Jack's beanstalk and Lumière from Beauty and the Beast as the main design feature in their staid family home? The Evil Escapes is the fourth film in the Amityville franchise (including remakes there have been I think nine total), and the first in a new quadrilogy of films (all of which were inexplicably gathered into a glorious top-dollar 4K boxed-set recently thanks to Vinegar Syndrome) that focus on cursed objects leaving the Amityville house -- first a lamp, then a clock, then a mirror, and finally a dollhouse in the delightfully titled 1996 fil Amityville Dollhouse. 

It's kind of like the Friday the 13th TV series that had a lot of people buying cursed objects and very little (read: none) of Jason Voorhees murdering people. Anyway what can I really tell you about The Evil Escapes that you shouldn't experience for your own damn self? Besides that you should go read our pal Stacie Ponder's review at Final Girl, as we've got her to thank for bringing this ridonkulous glory into our lives. But nothing else! I have told you enough. It's Patty Duke fighting a possessed floor lamp, for god's sake! What else do you need???

Hit the jump for links to all of the Ways Not To Die...

Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?
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Good Morning, World

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A little show called Hollywood that I've been telling you about (watch the trailer here) is hitting Netflix at midnight tonight, and so what better way to start this day than with a little old-fashion exploitation of the show's leading man, another noun I have been talking about an awful lot, David Corenswet. Looking back to his pre-Ryan-Murphy salad days he doesn't have a ton of credits to his name at this point (that's about to change, I think) but these gifs are from a 2018 movie called Affairs of State that I know nothing about except that you should hit the jump for the rest of them, really...

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... giving Armie his hole in one.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Gattaca (1997)

Vincent: A year is a long time. 

Irene: Not so long. Just once around the sun. 

This quote from Gattaca feels meaningful to me this morning for three reasons. One, I was just struck a few days ago with a real strong urge to re-watch Gattaca, right around the time I re-watched David Cronenberg's film eXistenZ -- Jude Law and sci-fi gibberish of the late 90s, I suppose. Anyway I haven't re-watched Gattaca just yet but the time is nigh, real nigh, I think. 

I ♥️ David Cronenberg pic.twitter.com/qBaxJ5oiBx

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 21, 2020

The second reason this quote from Gattaca feels meaningful to me this morning is its relativity towards the concept of "Time" fits right in giving the quarantined state of existence we're all currently living under -- I find myself waking up every day from dreams full of vague crowds milling about, going nowhere, and then spend my days leashed to my couch watching the arc of the sun across the boards of my apartment floor. What is a year anyway?

The third and most important reason -- at least as far as this post's reason for being -- that this quote from Gattaca feels meaningful to me this morning is today is Uma Thurman's 50th birthday. And in case you didn't realize it since she's only worked sporadically over the last decade, Uma Thurman fucking rules. Here are my faves...

My 5 Favorite Uma Thurman Performances

Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Beatrix Kiddo, Kill Bill 1 & 2

Poison Ivy, Batman & Robin

(And yes, I am being serious)

Cécile de Volanges, Dangerous Liaisons

Mrs. H, Nymphomaniac

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What are your favorite Uma Thurman performances?

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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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There is probably very little reason to remember the 1988 erotic-thriller Masquerade that starred Rob Lowe, Meg Tilly, Kim Catrall and Doug Savant here, besides the fact that that might be the most 1988 cast ever typed. (Sidenote: I always forget Kim Catrall did a lot of movies in the 80s -- I re-watched the first Police Academy movie last week on Netflix, for The Gute natch, and there she was!) And yet here I am remembering Masquerade. As it turns out...

... there are a couple of reasons to remember the movie, and they are (unsurprisingly, given the person typing these words you are reading) Rob Lowe and Doug Savant. Lowe in the 80s is a given (and I've posted a couple of shots of him in this movie here & here) but Savant, Savant I only really knew as the homosexual Matt Fielding on Melrose Place, and I spent the entire run of that show wishing another actor had been given the gay role. (Also that they'd had a clue what to do with a gay, which they never did.) But now...

... looking back at Doug strutting around in his tighty-whities as Rob Lowe watches with, it must be said, a great deal of interest, well now I think I shall entirely blame the people making Melrose Place for not knowing what to do with Doug Savant. Because he clearly could've brought something if he'd been allowed to. See more of that something right on after the jump...

Daniel Radcliffe Six Times

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Taking comfort in small things today, and speaking of, hey Daniel Radcliffe. These photos are for something called Sharp magazine where they also chatted with him (and it's a post shut-down interview at that so it doesn't seem like it's totally coming from some other planet), plus...

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... there's one minute and four seconds of your afternoon spent.
You're welcome. Hit the jump for the remainder of these photos...
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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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