Raise your hand if you saw the 2018 horror film called Luz from Germany -- cut to me waving frantically, screaming "I did, I did!" And I reviewed it right here, saying "It might be a short movie (only running 70 minutes) but it digs out a ragged little mark of flesh, the sort of scar you won't forget soon -- I felt corrupted." I also shouted out Fassbinder and Cronenberg and Brecht, so you know I was smitten. Luz was the first feature from writer-director Tilman Singer but it proved one hell of a calling card, and today comes word of his next feature which will be, uhh, a big step up in the name recognition department.
His second movie will be called Cuckoo and it will star John Malkovich, Gemma Chan, Sofia Boutella, and Hunter Schafer from Euphoria. Oh and Jan Bluthardt from Luz (pictured up top) will be returning thankfully -- he made such a great creep. There's no info on what Cuckoo's about, but Tilman's set to film it in April and it's coming from the studio Neon so it'll definitely get a budget and a push. Wheeeee push it! Now go buy a copy of Luz and freak yourselves out so you can say you knew him when.
People on Twitter seem to be just now discovering the fact that former Whedonverse actor Franz Kranz -- who is now a very serious writer-director thanks to Mass, his school shooting movie that won tons of accolades at Sundance earlier this year -- is also a super hot piece. And I am not here to chide them for not having known this for many years as we have here at MNPP, where we have covered this evident truth thoroughly for a good decade. I am not here to chide -- I am here to celebrate, and so to those people I direct y'all to our Fran Kranz Archives. Enjoy, discover, relish, et cetera! Now for the rest of us, the ones who knew all that for a decade, y'all can feel free to scan back through that too, but maybe you'll just wanna head over to The Film Experience where I posted the just-dropped trailer for Mass, which is also worth a look-see. Not nearly as much chest hair, but it's got its plusses. Mass is out on October 8th.
“Maybe it’s because of my childhood background, which made me distance myself from people,” he says. “Since then, I’ve learned to find something that I really enjoy doing whilst I’m alone. Because you cannot always rely on being with people to feel happy, right?”
The legend Tony Leung was interviewed by GQ magazine this month -- because of his role in Marvel's Shang-Chi movie, and also because he's Tony fucking Leung and don't you forget it. Ever the mystery man the quotes they get from Tony seem kind of few and far between in the piece but I have to admit I found the stuff about his lonely childhood, after his father left, pretty moving and relatable, especially the bit above. Go check it out! And I've got the full photoshoot for y'all after the jump...
(click to embiggen) This spectacular photo comes at us via The Cut and I'd love more but I'll be damned if there are more or if there's an interview attached to this one -- I can't get their site to load right. Maybe you'll have better luck. I'd love to hear his thoughts on Candyman but I guess for the time being that's not to be -- I will make do with staring at that photo for an hour. Should I say his name five times, will that make it work? If I say "Colman Domingo" five times and he appears over my shoulder I will definitely be his victim, his happy victim, that much is true..
Back in 2012 Chris Evans was photographed clambering about shirtlessly on some rocks on the set of a photoshoot for what turned out to be Details magazine, and we were very excited, for obvious reasons. Then when the actual final shoot finally dropped a few weeks later it was a little bit of a disappointment, as Chris was wearing clothes in most of the photos -- what the fuck, Details? No wonder that magazine went under.
Cut to 2021 (aka yesterday) and I was looking for a photo to post alongside the news that Chris is going to star opposite his one-time Marvel co-star Scarlett Johansson in the adventure-based rom-com Ghosted from Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher, which is being billed as a modern spin on Romancing the Stone, when what should I stumble upon but a butt-load of outtakes from said 2012 Details photoshoot -- ones that look like the shoot I was originally promised! I can finally exhale, you guys. Hit the jump for over thirty shots...
... with a very important reminder that Cary Fukunaga's masterful 2015 film Beasts of No Nation, starring me, Idris Elba, is finally being released onto blu-ray tomorrow thanks to Criterion. You can buy it right here. Now let me throw it over to Jason, proprietor of MNPP, so he can scream about how much I, Idris Elba, deserved an Oscar nomination at the least for my his, I mean my... okay I have lost the thread on who's pretend talking. Point being that Idris Elba totally deserved an Oscar nomination for Beasts of No Nation! yes it's a difficult film -- child soldiers ain't easy, who knew -- but worth the effort, and I'm excited to also wade through Criterion's disc which has some stellar special features featured. Especially that interview with the film's costumer Jenny Eagan (aka the same woman who put Chris Evans in that white sweater in Knives Out); the costumes in Beasts were surprisingly vivid and memorable and I'd love to hear how she came up with some of that stuff.
Heads up on a new obsession o' mine -- if you've got Criterion Channel you need to check out Ulrike Ottinger's 1979 film Ticket of No Return, which they've got streaming this month as part of the director Richard Linklater's picks. And yes if you know about my ambivalence towards the films of Linklater then you might understand it when I say him putting this movie in front of me is the greatest thing he's ever done. Thanks, Richard! Starring frequent Ottinger collaborator Tabea Blumenschein in a nearly wordless performance the film follows a woman who goes to Berlin to do nothing but drink herself to death -- imagine Leaving Las Vegas directed by Douglas Sirk, or as I called it on Twitter, "Tati Meets Fassbinder shot by Guy Bourdin."
It is so my shit! So it will probably be your shit. This was my very first Ottinger film -- the Metrograph theater here in NYC had planned a big retrospective of her films in March 2020 where she was going to be here and everything and then, well, March 2020 happened. They did end up streaming them virtually that fall but I missed it because I have no idea, I was probably curled up in the corner of my apartment crying -- it was 2020. Anyway I'm now furious I missed out on this, especially because her movies are basically impossible to see. They aren't available on home video unless you order them from Ottinger's website (thx Ross) but I warn you they're outrageously expensive.
Which is a damned shame, given how immediately and entirely infatuated I found myself with Ticket of No Return. Oh and my Fassbinder mention above isn't just because both filmmakers are German -- there are a slew of overlapping collaborators, including Peer Raben doing the music and actors like Volker Spengler, Eddie Constantine, and Kurt Raab popping up. There's also just a vibe -- a big vibe -- that they share. Queer and depressive and fabulous all at once. I'm in love. Release a boxed-set, Criterion! I gotta get my hands on Freak Orlando ASAP. Any Ottinger fans out there?
I imagine some of you steer clear of Twitter because I have been told it is a "nightmare hellscape" to some, so perhaps you missed me tweeting this stuff out over the weekend (I personally thrive inside of most nightmare hellscapes) -- a teaser poster and a teaser trailer for Antoine Fuqua's forthcoming Netflix remake The Guilty, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, dropped. Well actually what happened was first Jake posted a phone number on his Instagram account...
... and when you called the number suddenly it was Jake's voice talking to you and, well, it was such an erotic experience I didn't hear a word of what else happened. I might have actually been unconscious for most of Saturday because of it? Anyway by the time I'd woken up there was also this teaser trailer, which uses the same audio as the recorded phone call, but adds the specter of Jake's face to the mix. This gives me more hope that the film might, like the original (which PS is streaming on Hulu right now), stay one hundered percent trained on Jake, but we'll see. The film is out on October 1st on Netflix; see some photos from the film here.
I am sure you have heard by now that Velvet Goldmine and Carol director Todd Haynes (maybe you heard of him) has gone and made a documentary about the legendary band The Velvet Underground, titled The Velvet Underground -- it premiered at Cannes and it's also playing NYFF next month (I mentioned it in my round-up preview of that fest here) and then it hits Apple+ on October 15th. Today we've got the above poster to share as well as a trailer, ta-dah! Cannot wait for this one...
Mike Brady: A gift is only a good thing when the giver has given thought to that gift. But when the gift the giver gives gives grief, then that gift should give the givee regrets.
The second Brady movie, which is by my recollection just as funny as the first one from the year before, turns 25 today! You know, if you'd like to feel absolutely ancient. Anyway, probably due to my extreme advanced age what with this movie being 25 now and all, I always have trouble distinguishing which jokes came from the first Brady Bunch Movie and which came from the second -- they've mushed up into one giant delightfully floppy-collared tapioca-colored pantsuit-wearing organism in my head. I love them. How about you?
Very glad we're finally getting Manny Jacinto into magazines -- these are for Sharp magazine and there's a little chat with him at their site. And listen I know they presumably used "mystical power" in their headline because of his role as a healer type on Nine Perfect Strangers but without that context -- one which never actually comes up explicitly in the interview -- am I nuts that the headline feels borderline racist? It'd be like calling Salma Hayek "spicy" in 2021 -- we find better descriptors now, headline-writers. Anyway hit the jump for two more photos...
If Monday mornings always feel kind of pained let's at least let Glen Powell show us how to get pained with a smile on our faces this week (via). Such an inspiration, this one...
After a delayed wait of approximately ten thousand weeks -- it felt like ten thousand weeks anyway -- the new Candyman movie is out tomorrow. And not just that -- I have already seen it! Two nights ago! And yet every time in the past two days that I have sat myself down to write something on it my head has just fallen clean right off of my body. It's not the movie's fault -- I'm not doing great, emotionally speaking this week, and haven't had the easiest time focusing to write anything. There's the cumulative effect of the August heat, the pandemic, some family stuff -- I am just very tired, and I am sure 99.44% of you share the sentiment. Anyway I'm not saying anything right now on how I felt about Candyman because I am hoping I wake up tomorrow with a clearer head and maybe I will write something tomorrow. Or over the weekend. I don't know right now -- right now all I know is I gotta go home and turn my goddamned brain off for a little bit. So please enjoy these photos of Candyman star Yahya Abdul-Mateen, and we'll see what happens, and what a grand adventure that will surely be.
I do wish that I had ultimately gotten around to reviewing more movies out of the Fantasia Film Festival this year. The fest just ended last night (here are the movies that won awards at the fest) and I saw 26 movies total across its glorious 3-week span but I only ended up reviewing 6 of those. Here are links to those:
Okay that said as documented in my preview of the fest (right here) there were a dozen or so of the anticipated titles -- things like The Feast and The Night House and Cryptozoo and Alien on Stage -- that I had already seen and reviewed before Fantasia. There's plenty of coverage in that sense. But I wish I'd covered more than a quarter of the new stuff, especially since I saw some great movies that I didn't get to. So in order to make it up to a few of those titles, here's a choice selection of the best of the rest!
The 5 Best Fantasia Movies I Didn't Review
Tombs of the Blind Dead-- This might be a little bit of a cheat since it's an old film but I feel hella stupid, having never seen any of the Blind Dead movies now that I saw the first one. It was so much fun! Slo-mo Knights Templar zombies! On horses! It creeped me the hell out and I absolutely loved it and once I have a minute to myself I plan on watching the other four films in the series. Very happy that Synapse Films did this restoration, and I hope they do the rest!
Mad God -- When I realized I wasn't going to be getting around to writing up my thoughts on this absolutely brilliant stop-motion animation from the legendary Phil Tippet I made sure to quick tweet out my opinion...
Thank you thank you to @FantasiaFest for putting Phil Tippet's surreal astonishment MAD GOD into my eyes -- frame after frame after frame after frame of every dream and every nightmare I have ever had turned into stop-motion magic. A masterpiece I will watch one thousand times pic.twitter.com/8GbKjsI3jH
... because this movie's too important not to spread the word on. Tippet has been working on it for three decades and it shows -- it's staggering achievement, and I loved every psychotic frame of it. I never use the word "masterpiece" when talking about brand new things but you gotta make exceptions when something like this comes along. (I'm using the fact that he's been working on it for three decades as my excuse to cheat at my own rule re: that word.)
Junk Head -- This movie is so close in themes and execution to Mad God that you'd think it might be weird to program the both of them into a single fest, but I thought they compliment each other well actually -- Junk Head is still plenty weird and special on its own but it's more linear in its telling than Tippet's total fever dream. They could exist in the same stop-motion universe -- Mad God could be the nightmare one of the nightmare Junk Head creatures is having.
Martyrs Lane -- A lovely and dare-I-say haunting little British ghost tale with a couple of fine child performances anchoring the thing. If you know how much I worship Bernard Rose's 1988 masterpiece Paperhouse then you'll understand what a high compliment I'm giving this when I say it reminded me of Paperhouse. Also from that same year of 1988 it's reminiscent of The Lady in White -- any fans of that film? If you know those two then you'll get the vibe this thing has, which is low-key and sad, aka exactly how a good ghost story should feel. Y'all won't have to wait too long for this -- it's hitting Shudder on September 9th! Here's the trailer:
Hellbender -- I know a lot of people loved The Deeper You Dig, the first homemade treat from the Adams Family cast of players (consisting of writer-director John Adams, his co-directing and actress wife Toby Poser, and their two actor daughters Zelda and Lulu) -- I didn't, and I thought this effort was a step up for them. It's just a great witch movie with a killer spin on the modern feminist point of view of witchery -- it feels like a logical step in how these stories are told, post-Suspiria and The Witch and Hagazussa and all them gems. I'd love to hear the Gaylords of Darkness do an episode of their podcast on this flick, which is the highest compliment I can pay anything.
I scavenged these photos of Underground Railroad and Old actor Aaron Pierre from a few differentInstagram accounts because Glass Man magazine's website is only showing off the cover -- a good cover obviously, since Aaron Pierre's got one hell of a face. But I -- and I think it's safe to say you -- need more. (He is, after all, more than a face.) And more you'll have, after the jump...
There's something sick in the world. A buzzing in the air, swallowing up the sounds of songbirds, of street noise, of everything not itself -- it's a feedback loop feeding on feedback loops and feedback loops alone, like the helix of DNA strands spinning down and down to the sewer and hell and whatever is past that too. It rains down on us from heaven, by which I mean the tops of skyscrapers, the airless aristocracy sealed off in their sky-light tombs, feebly cackling at their reflections. They can be any color and muted noise they want to be, as long as we're a sickly green leeched of life in response. Roselessness.
Mosquito State (now on Shudder, you should watch it) situates itself in the recent past, the 2007 right before a stock market snafu revealed the chaos agents behind the curtain -- the Mad Men behind the wheel. Can't blame us for not noticing as we'd been stuffed in the trunk, and in the trunk we remain but with a pin-prick of light maybe, one burned into the center of our foreheads like a curse. Never forget, never forget, a better anthem than not breathing, but the big guys will do everything to make us. Remember days without phones? Me neither. Spinning lights twinkle inside my empty sockets.
Once upon a time the world had the structure of honeybees, beautiful golden with purpose -- that's what Richard Boca (Beau Knapp, lurching it halfway to Rain Man and back) called his initial forecasting software, Honeybee, as it analyzed future numbers into the elegant and precise honeycombs of substance, of something, of many things, thrumming with mass and weight and structure. Then the sickness came, invited in by douche-bros and the happy swinging baseball bats between their legs and elsewhere, and bam, bam, like bam, baby gonna crumble.
Communion with apocalypse, mass havoc, a sequence of impossible numbers, Richard Boca goes mad trying to understand a mad future and lo, one whisper to many, in slip the mosquitos, spiraling entropy up up up to the stars, or is that its opposite given where we flail about at the bottom? An axis of two ends with nothing in between and growing more lopsided by the one millionth of a millisecond -- our overlords prick our precious flesh for sustenance leaving pale white slips where we once sniffed wine and smiled. No exit, only mellifluous quicksand, black socks. Your skin stretching to burst.
When I first read this news this morning I thought they were remaking the 1980 horror classic and I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but it ain't that -- Lakeith Stanfield is set to star in an Apple+ series based on a 2018 book by Victor LaValle called The Changeling, which sounds kinda The Omen-esque in that the birth of a son sends a married couple's lives spiraling into horror. Here is how Deadline describes the story:
"The Changeling, from Annapurna and Apple Studios, is a fairytale for grown-ups. A horror story, a parenthood fable and a perilous odyssey through a New York City you didn’t know existed. In the LaVelle’s book, when Apollo — the role that Stanfield will be playing — and Emma have their baby, Brian, it feels like both a reward and a challenge for the new dad. Apollo, the son of a single mother, had been scraping by as a bookseller who hunts estate and garage sales for rare first editions, so even the unusual circumstance of Brian’s birth (on a stalled subway train) seems like a blessing, as does the way Apollo stumbles across a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote, no less) shortly thereafter. But after some young-parent squabbles and inexplicable images on their smartphones foreshadow trouble, the story turns nightmarish."
Anybody read the book? The description on the book's Amazon page is a little different and brings up the subject of "racism" so I'm guessing Lakeith was looking for his own Get Out, just where he gets to be the star this time. Good on 'im. Lakeith should be the star more often. And in another nod towards Daniel Kaluuya, Melina Matsoukas, the director of Queen & Slim, will direct -- I didn't like Q&S much but it was plenty stylish and maybe I'll like this one more.
So has anybody started watching Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu yet? I did, I did. (I haven't seen the latest episode yet though.) It's perfectly fun so far, with some keen moments of performance, but I do feel kind of bad for it coming out right on the heels of the similarly plotted The White Lotus from the genius Mike White, by which anything -- yes even a thing starring Nicole Kidman, Michael Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Regina Hall, Bobby Cannavale, Luke Evans, and the lovely Manny Jacinto here -- would pale in comparison. It feels much more of a piece with HBO stuff like Big Little Lies or that other Reese Witherspoon show, the one where Joshua Jackson wore tighty-whities. (I never bothered finishing that one.) Serviceable but basically disposable glossy trash. We will see. For now let's enjoy this new sweater-tastic photoshoot of Manny for WWD though, right on after the jump...
"I too quit smoking (2013) AND find this type of pictures cool. Also, PSA: if you're feeling like you want to start smoking again, just remind yourself "I do not want my body and house to stink like stale horseshit", then go drink one more glass of water to entertain your hands and lips. Congrats, btw."
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