Shell in 150 Words or Less

Like so many people places and thing-like things this 2024 body horror movie about the beauty industry got fully stampeded and ground to dust by Monstro Elisasue and the ladies of the other, better 2024 body horror movie about the beauty industry, The Substance. And Shell ain't no The Substance. But it's perfectly fun and 100% worth circling back to now that the shadow of Margaret Qualley yanking a chicken leg out of her bellybutton doesn't loom quite so large. Consider it the Ugly Betty to Demi's Veronica. Director Max Minghella and screenwriter Jack Stanley don't have anything up their sleeve as daring as Coralie Fargeat did, but when a movie basically reenacts the last scene of John Waters' Multiple Maniancs with what must have been millions more dollars I still have to hand it some slow clap. Moss & Hudson both having a hoot.

13 Bunnies of Halloween #2

Today's second entry in our "13 Bunnies of Halloween" series takes us to Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us, which is positively hoppin' with lil' cotton-tailed creatures, literally from its opening credits  on. 

In the practical sense, we find out the rabbits are there as food for the tethered folks who all live down below (if you have no idea what I am talking about because you haven't seen the movie, just go watch the movie; I am not explaining this complicated movie right now) -- and yes they eat the rabbits raw, and yes that is hella gross. But why bunnies? Just what the hell do all of those bunnies mean? There are a couple of answers, straight from the mouth of Peele himself. Here is one explanation (via):

"They symbolize a lot of different things... The main connection to me was Easter. This story is a dark Easter of sorts." Red, the doppelgänger to Lupita Nyong'o's Adelaide, "is The Messiah," the writer-director explains, "who's rising from the hole [from] which she was left for dead." As for the larger meaning behind those bunnies: "The animals in my story represent this battle between science and religion," Peele says. "I tend to like to explore the gray area where religion and magic and the unexplainable meet science. Between the two you have an abomination, a metaphor for humanity."

But as profound a reasoning as all of that sounds, Peele also lets on to one other bit of reasoning -- he just finds rabbits fucking creepy. As he told the Guardian: "They’re adorable but they terrify me at the same time... and they got those scissor-like ears that creep me out.” Did somebody say scissors?

We really are blessed to be living in the time of Jordan Peele making horror movies y'all. His ability to whittle things down to some rich yet bizarre iconography is absolutely peerless at the moment, and I say that as a person who found Get Out a little bit overrated at the time of its release. Three movies in now and a better, fuller sense of his voice feels clear to me, and... yeah, we're blessed. Bring on the next one!

"Rabbits... they have the brain like a sociopath." @JordanPeele explains how nature's cuddly creatures are the most terrifying animals around. #UsMovie pic.twitter.com/94FYwPRjvF

— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) March 21, 2019

Getting the Gigolos Back Together

What's that, you say? An opportunity to use an image of Richard Gere in American Gigolo? Yes, I will bite. And it didn't need to be this good of news but it did anyway -- writer-director Paul Schrader is going to reunite with Gere on his next movie! They haven't worked together since that 1980 film, so this is a reunion four plus decades in the making -- it's apparently an adaptation of Russell Banks' 2021 book Foregone, which Amazon describes thusly:

"At the center of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

Imaginatively structured around Fife’s secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past."

Sounds like something Schrader could make a real meal of, and it'd be swell for Gere to have a meaty role -- he's been doing terrific work for the past decade or so in movies that have flown under the radar but maybe this one, with this specific reunion, will make some noise. Also in that original link is word that Schrader wrote a script for Elisabeth Moss to star in and direct -- no word on what it's about but Moss has proven a solid director on The Handmaid's Tale and we of course (her awful religion aside) think she's one of the greatest actresses working today. So we'll follow this news too!

Pics of the Day

EW has some official photos of Michael Fassbender in Taika Waititi's long-long-long delayed soccer film Next Goal Wins (thx Mac), as well as a brief chat with Taika on the movie, which hits theaters in April. The long delay happened because of the one-two punch of the pandemic and the whole Armie Hammer thing -- Armie had filmed his role in the film (remember that time him and Michael Fassbender and Taika all hung out at a gay bar while shooting?) but then all... that... happened, and so they re-shot his role with Will Arnett in it. None of this is mentioned at EW, but I'll bring it up if they're not willing! There are a couple more photos at that link though, so check them out if you're so inclined. Where you really wanna click is right here though, for the shirtless shots of Michael on set.

Take a Bite Outta Nicky

Universal might have embarrassed themselves a few years back with their original concept of a so-called "shared Monsters universe" after Tom Cruise's Mummy movie bit the big one, but after the success of Elisabeth Moss and The Invisible Man movie they've been working at rebooting the concept -- Leigh Whannell, who helmed that Invisible Man, is currently working on a Wolfman film with Ryan Gosling, and the great Karyn Kusama is making yet another Dracula flick. (Also Paul Feig has talked about a Bride idea!) Well today comes word that the character of Renfield from Dracula is getting his very own film, and it will star the gorgeous and perfect Nicholas Hoult in the lead. This ain't yo momma's Tom Waits!

It's been a very long time since I've read Bram Stoker's book so I don't remember how Renfield, the man driven mad with obsequience to his vampire master, is described therein, but it's not like anybody has paid any attention to "the text" in a century as far as this particular tale goes... point being sure, make Renfield a hot piece, why not? I just hope they follow through on the homoerotic implications here -- that Count Dracula choosing a slave boy as beautiful as Nicky has... connotations, ones that would be best followed through here in the year of our Dark Lord 2021. That said the super straight crew making this project -- Chris McKay of the Lego movies, from a story by Walking Dead comics-creator Robert Kirkman -- doesn't give me a lotta hope on that front Dammit, Renfield should be kinda gay. Or really really gay. Like, really. I mean give this movie to Xavier Dolan -- I wanna see that.

5 Off My Head: Cinematic Spooge

Inspired by the medieval money shot that graces a more poetical (not to mention horny) moment in David Lowery's gorgeous new Arthurian epic The Green Knight, now in theaters (I reviewed it here) -- a scene which has already spurred on some superior semen contemplation around ye internet across the course the past week (see here for my favorite example) -- well I gots cum on my mind! And you know what happens when that happens...

It does indeed burn, Miss Coco Peru. And so it's best to do something about it fast, before the burning becomes an itching and the itching becomes a rash and the rash needs a cream and isn't that what got us into this sticky situation in the first place? And so I decided to do what I do best, which is slap together a list of the first five cum scenes from mainstream movies that popped (off) into my head. 

And yes "mainstream" means I'm refraining from the legitimately pornographic ones, so my apologies to Karl Glusman's 3D Love geyser for Gaspar Noé or the self-suck sensation at the start of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (and yes those links are NSFW so don't yell at me if you clicked them in front of your boss like a dummy!!). With no further ado let's edge this list right on over to completion...

5 Fave Slick Flick Spunk Shots

Call Me By Your Name -- The Peach Scene

Oh you knew I'd have to include this one. And oh you knew it was the first one I thought of. And no, this is not me giving y'all an opportunity to screech about how the peach should have been completely eaten like it was in the book, I so do not care. 

The Silence of the Lambs -- Multiple Miggs 

Listen I didn't say they would all be sexy-time fun and games. The name of the game is I name the first five that I think of, not my favorites, and it's hard -- excuse me, difficult -- to block this horrific moment from this scary movie from one's mind once it's wedged its way in there. The thing is I don't think I even knew what happened the first time I saw this movie? In related news I was definitely too young to see this movie the first time I saw this movie. It was some time later when I was in film school and we were studying Demme's perfect construction of this scene -- of Clarice Starling's descent into this basement hell -- that I got what we were seeing happen to her.

There's Something About Mary -- Hair Gel

Even here almost 25 years on this still remains probably the most famous jizz moment in the movies, right? I know at the least that it's got to be the first time that man-spunk registered onscreen for me as what it was, and as a thing I had most certainly never seen represented on-screen before. (When I was a kid we didn't have porn access, kiddos! Imagine that!) 

But this definitely raises the question -- what was the first time that semen was sprayed across the screen in a mainstream non-pornographic piece of entertainment? Or just shown? What's the earliest example of spermatozoid representation y'all can think of?  

The Square -- Claes' Condom Caper

I was surprised that this scene popped up in my brain so quickly, as I haven't seen Ruben Östlund's terrific arthouse smash The Square since it came out in 2017 -- and holy shit is it possible that movie's very nearly five already? Anyway I probably just wanted to think about Claes Bang's bang-bag a bit, knowing me. But this scene really is so wildly well-played and funny -- as much praise as she gets for suffering well on The Handmaids Tale Elisabeth Moss always delivers a full comedy load too. You can watch the entire scene here.  

And finally.......

Look Who's Talking -- The Opening Credits

Classic cum comedy for the whole family!

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So what are some of your favorite big screen load blows?

One Shining Bell

Now this sounds like a TV show! Apple is putting together a series based on Lauren Beukes' 2013 novel The Shining Girls -- it sounds like they're dropping the "The" for the series' title -- which will star Elisabeth Moss, Wagner Moura (we like him), and our boy Jamie Bell. I hesitate to use the cliche of "That's it, that's the post," but come on, what else do you need? That's a cast and a half. The story's about a woman (Moss) hunting the man who assaulted her (Bell) and the journalist (Moura) on the trail of a copycat case -- anybody read the book? It sounds very standard potboiler and yes this will be Lizzy once again playing a victimized woman, but I'd watch those three watch dry-wall dry. The series is being show-run by the woman who did Strange Angel last year, which I know gave us some quality mustachioed Jack Reynor content but which I never got around to properly watching.

Some MaddAddam Mmommentumm

I think you'll all forgive me for using that photo of Alexander Skarsgard in Park Chan-wook's miniseries The Little Drummer Girl a few years back -- and excuse me for a moment while I go check Amazon to see if that series ever got put out onto blu-ray... oh it got a UK release, on DVD at least, I might have to buy that since that series rocks -- even though that is only tangentially related to the news I am sharing. I mean I suppose I could've posted a photo of Margaret Atwood or one of her book covers but I know what grabs your eyeballs! 

So the news is that one of the producers of The Little Drummer Girl (by the name of Mike Lesslie) has just attached himself to the long-gestating adaptation of Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy of books! We've been posting about the possibility of this series as long as we've been posting about anything on this website; we fell in love with the first book Oryx & Crake the minute it was released in 2003 and wanted a movie of that, but then several years later came the second and third books, and talk of a series for Hulu, and Darren Aronofsky was even attached for a second. It's been a journey. I mean it looks like we'll be getting a Y: The Last Man series before this, which is the other long long long delayed property I've been following. 

In case you don't know what the trilogy's about here, I will steal Deadline's plot description:

"At the center of the trilogy are the events leading up to the near destruction of mankind and civilization by a malicious bioengineered pandemic. The catalyst for it all is Crake, a brilliant and complicated young man so disturbed by the injustices of the world that he spends his young life developing a virus that will wipe out humans and replace us with a new species of hominid. The series not only looks at the events that lead up to that big moment, referred to in the books as the “waterless flood,” but also what happens after — including who and what shall inherit the earth."

Anyway Hulu's been yapping about making this for awhile, we'll see if anything happens. The annoying thing is is that Atwood was clearly ahead of her time fifteen years ago, but now by the time Hollywood gets around to it our times are catching up with her prognosticating. Pretty similar to how she put The Handmaid's Tale out in 1985 and then twenty years later the TV series felt like Current Events. On that note this article also mentioned the news that The Handmaid's Tale will have a fifth season; for some reason I thought the upcoming fourth season (premiering on April 28th!) was the show's last. But they're gonna plug on. I like the last season more than most people seemed to but I do sort of wonder if they might not be pushing their luck. Will the show still feel so vital without a Trump in the White House? 

Married to the Mob Movie Producer

If I had known that Robert Evans was married to the actress Ali MacGraw during the making of The Godfather then I would have known to be waiting to hear who was playing Ali MacGraw in the movie about the making of The Godfather, which has Jake Gyllenhaal playing producer Robert Evans (and Oscar Isaac playing Francis Ford Coppola). I didn't know that until today though, when Elle Fanning was cast in the role. Ya know how they say you learn something new every day? Today it happened! First time in my life. Anyway I talk this news up plus more over at The Film Experience so click your ass on over right now please. I mean click with your finger. Unless your ass has talents. I don't know your ass. Maybe your ass can do that, in which case I say congratu-fuckin-lations!

The Godmother

We just got a little update on last September's news that Jake Gyllenhaal & Oscar Isaac are going to star in a movie about the making of The Godfather (with Jake playing famed producer Robert Evans and Oscar playing Francis Ford Coppola) -- looks like there's a role for a girl in there, because Elisabeth Moss has signed on to play Eleanor Coppola, FF's wife (and more importantly, mother to Sofia). And apologies for the assumption but I feel like our Lizzy wouldn't just take a "wife" role at this point in her career -- there's gotta be some meat to Eleanor's role in the script, right?

I know very little about the making of The Godfather -- I recognize it as a terrific movie but it's never really inflamed my personal passions enough to care -- so if Eleanor had a big role in its making forgive me for not knowing. I just want Moss to have something to act. Although I could see "getting to make out with Oscar Isaac" as reason enough to take a role, so there's that!

And he'll get to have the beard for this role too! Bonus! Anyway that's exciting -- hopefully we'll hear more casting news soon. Moving on to something else though, related by the  Gyllen-factor -- I've only paid marginal attention to Jake shooting his new movie Ambulance over the past few weeks because the fact that he's starring in a Michael Bay movie confuses and pains me on my insides. I did post a couple photos of him and his biceps on the set once. And he's been spotted again, and I gotta post these ones -- he's all covered in filth and wielding a gun and it's too hot to ignore, I am sorry. I gathered up a batch of them, after the jump...

Sterling! Cooper! Draper! Pryce!

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I apparently finished binge-watching Mad Men exactly one month ago, on May 31st -- it was my first time watching the show (or about 98% of the show anyway, I'd seen a couple stray episodes here and there over the years) and it was, to put it mildly, a treat. I loved every second of it. I linked to this when I was still in the middle of it but here's the Twitter thread I kept as I did the entire series:

I'm watching the first episode of Mad Men -- a show I have never watched (I know, I know) -- and I'm surprised at how young Jon Hamm already looks (compared to today I mean) pic.twitter.com/JpiJJ10FG8

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 15, 2020

Like I said it's been one month since I finished watching all seven seasons, ninety-two episodes, of the series, which I plowed through over the span of just about two weeks -- it was a lot! But somehow as soon as I was done my first thought was still I WOULD TOTALLY DO THAT AGAIN. For real! I would! The thing was I binged the show because Netflix was taking all of the episodes off of their platform in early June -- I only had enough time for the one viewing.

pic.twitter.com/ZcmHPmWkgy

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 29, 2020

Well color me Peggy because Amazon has just announced they've snapped up the rights for their Prime streaming service, and they're all dropping for free on there on July 15th -- my birthday! A gift to me from the Weiner Gods above, halle-fuckin-lujah!

This episode's a hoot pic.twitter.com/TDoXuVtyPz

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 29, 2020

Under Our Eyes

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The fourth and I believe final season of The Handmaid's Tale was going to come out this year but Ye Olde Plague occurred and interrupted their ongoing shoot, so this week they announced that the season will be moved into 2021. One wonders, one really hopes for the best, that the show will feel in 2021 like a pointed footnote to (a pointed heel smooshing down on) this horrible Trump Era. A thing we will happily watch once the sanity of a Democratic President has been reinstalled, come January. A goodbye to grotesquerie. One hopes such a thing with every fiber of their being! (There are no words simply for how much of an understatement that statement is.) Anyway as I said they did do some shooting on the fourth season of Handmaid, and so today they dropped a trailer with some new footage to whet our appetites towards this hopefully optimistic time called 2021...

Hangman, Hangman, Slack Your Rope Awhile

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"I read your story. It made me feel thrillingly horrible." That's what Rose (Odessa Young) says when she first meets the writer Shirley Jackson (our queen Elisabeth Moss) at a party, and that is also what I would say if I met writer, director, and hard-edged genius Josephine Decker about this, her latest phenomenal film called, plain and simply as an unflattering flower blouse rimmed with ink stains around its edges, Shirley. Everybody does get that "thrillingly horrible" is high praise, right? This is a movie that demands of its audience first and foremost an understanding of that fact. 

This is a movie that actually demands a lot from its audience -- patience, a nose in the dirt, an ear for insect thrumming. A cursory knowledge of Shirley Jackson herself would most definitely help -- the caustic recluse author of The Haunting of Hill House and the short story The Lottery, among many a tale of odd girls out, is seen here working on her 1951 book called Hangsaman (that title's a reference to an old folk song about a spoilt woman trying to bribe her executioner) which itself aims to tell the real-life story of a local girl who had recently mysteriously disappeared. As much as the movie Shirley is anything -- a biopic, a showcase for Elisabeth Moss again doing her ever astonishing thing -- it's also a whiff of a detective story, as Jackson sniffs out her spin on the girl's story, and why she's personally drawn to it. And you get the sense, skirt high, that Decker is there looking over Shirley's shoulder, doing the same hard inspections down upon these, her own frosty unknowable folks.

And that's where and how our Rose, innocent as the shallow grave caked under her nails, comes in. At the start of the story, literally -- she and her husband Fred (Logan Lerman) arrive at that party at Jackson's house, the one where she lives with her professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), as guests that Stanley's invited to stay til they find their own place. Oh and maybe do some cooking, some cleaning, and some managing of his mad wife while's they at it. Fred's a professor incoming at the local college where Stanley also profs, and yes if this hard-drinking partner-swapping literary four-way has you thinking of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? that can hardly, at any moment, be considered a fraudulent claim.

Shirley takes one rough look at Rose, with her "thrillingly horrible"'d self, sizes her up, and with a barely-perceived smirk sees for herself a fine challenge -- she also perceptively sniffs out a baby, rightly, calling Rose with child on the spot. And so from there our dual tale spins forth of two married women, one flush with youth and sex (did I mention how reading about a woman getting stoned in The Lottery led Rose's hand right into hubby Logan Lerman's hot little lap?) and one with a little less of both but lots more of lots else -- each woman giving their own slow, pained births a show, a dance, a shimmy. Rose to a baby that seems to gladly spill a smidge of her sanity out with it, and Shirley to her book, the birthing of which seems to, alternately, straighten her out. One goes up, one comes down, they meet crashing knees in the center.

Each woman rubs off on the other, in their little big ways, but Moss' Shirley is a heftier vampire, stocky with practice and scotch -- watch the way she snaps her fangs at the Dean's wife and tuck away promising party-tricks for your own future. Meanwhile the linoleum creaks and the plaster gives up any and all its ghosts -- weather stains the ceiling while heavy curtains pop emphatic with dust, hot air, the searching paws of drunken over-educated men. You can smell the red wine soaked into every cushion, and Decker's camera skiffs on the motes overhead, in and out of focus. Shirley says things like "worms as fat as fingers" and the ladies discuss Freud, strangling, the breadth of the world's many killer mushrooms.

On that note many a "killer mushroom" movie's graced the past decade and Shirley slides in nicely alongside them -- alongside Phantom Thread, which its generous allowances for brilliant mean artists, and alongside Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled, with its creaky moss-piled house full of madwomen in the rafters, howling, smashing menfolk around. I'd also drop Shirley in alongside the best of Small College Town Academia Greats -- it'd make a helluva two-fer with my Wonder Boys, long beloved, as well as the aforementioned Virginia Woolf. People hold their liquor pooling in the beds of their fangs, their incisive wits and opinions.

The film's criss-crossing pathways for women in this world, the creative processes with which they put out living objects, be they breathing or book, is its bread and butter, for Decker and for her girls -- her commiseration with and inspiration at the hands of the aggressive and off-putting, with women whose heads are so full of thoughts they melt the paint off with their breath, is fire and ice and religion to me. The man's song starts and over it the soundtrack fills with scratching, barking dogs, crowds of insects and owls, the inside of an exhausted happy woman's mouth as she smiles and pictures the abyss flush with morning.

You can find a list of "virtual cinemas"
that are screening Shirley as of today at this link.
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Wolfman With Highlights

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As perhaps you have heard by now Ryan Gosling has been cast in the lead of a new Wolf Man movie -- or is it Wolfman, one word? Either way this is meant to be part of Universal's momentarily stalled reboot of their Monsters franchise, which got good and goosed with Elizabeth Moss' terrific Invisible Man flick earlier this year. Anyway here's the thing, I'm not really an expert on werewolf movies. There are several I enjoy, sure -- the original 1941 Wolf Man, An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers, Ginger Snaps all pop right to mind -- but for some reason I never retain much memory of them. Like I know I've seen The Howling more than once but who the hell ever remembers a frame of what happens in it? It's one of those movies that I go into it every time asking myself if I've even see it and then I watch it and I remember oh it's fine, whatever. Hey Dee Wallace!

I mention The Howling purposefully there because that's all my self-defense presage to what might be a dumb-ass question -- do blond people make blond werewolves? When I think of Werewolf Movies I think of Brunette Actors -- Michael J. Fox, David Naughton, Katharine Isabelle. It is, to my mind, more of a dark-haired goth genre. Ryan Gosling is a lot of things but Goth ain't one of them. It's not that I'm not open-minded about this -- especially if they hire a director as proficient as Leigh Whannell. Although last time they hired the great Mark Romanek and proceeded to fuck it all up, so. I just have a hard time picturing a Golden Retriever Swedish Werewolf, is all. Anybody else?

They Go Mad

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One of the movies I have most been looking forward to for 2020, disease be damned, has been Josephine Decker's Shirley. A biopic of Shirley Jackson starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael efffin' Stuhlbarg, directed by the talent that gifted us with Madeline's Madeline a couple of years back? How could I not be creaming my jeans for all that jazz? Well today comes surprise news (surprise to me anyway) -- Neon is now dropping the movie on June 5th! That's less than a month away! Holy Mother of Hill House my body is not ready. Word out of Sundance on Moss' performance was histrionically good, and the trailer they've just released shows a little of why:

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Can Moss finally get a damned Oscar nomination this year? She's years upon years overdue but last year's snub for Her Smell was the egregious-ist of them all, and she's already turned in praise-worthy work in 2020 with Invisible Man. I say huzzah! Anyway I'm not sure on the specifics of this release -- all we've got is Neon's tweet about the release which says the movie will be "Everywhere" on June 5th. I'm guessing we're talking an online drop. I'll keep my nose to the pavement and let y'all know when it sniffs something of note!

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Take a Bite Outta Count

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Okay so sure here in 2020 we've seen the Carpathian Count more times than we can, you know, count, but I'm forcing myself to shrug off my shrugs about a new movie version of Dracula this morning because of who's been hired -- The Invitation and Jennifer's Body director Karyn "fuckin'" Kusama, that's who. She's a big who! We love her! Maybe we didn't love her last movie so much -- that'd be Destroyer with Nicole Kidman -- but everybody's allowed a whiff now and then, and it's not like Destroyer's not an interesting experiment with structure and tone even if I don't think it ultimately worked. 

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Okay but hear me out what if Karyn Kusama made a Lesbian Vampire Movie instead

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 11, 2020

Anyway back to the bloody business at hand -- this is the studio called Blumhouse doing this, who just let Leigh Whannell reimagine The Invisible Man in a way that really worked and made that nearly hundred year old franchise feel fresh, so let's keep hope alive. (Also props to Jason Blum for hiring another female filmmaker after his jackass comments from a couple of years back.) And I mean after all it's not like Plague Times aren't the exact right time for a Dracula resurgence...

Oh I seriously might have to watch Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre tonight, I might. That sounds perfect. (And it's on Amazon Prime to boot!) Anyway the conversation now of course turns towards the casting department. I personally think they need to stay far far away from the Count being played by a white man with black hair, as that's been done to literal death at this point -- there's one on Netflix right now, and Claes Bang is pretty damn good at it too. That said I don't know what ideas Kusama & Co. have got in mind for their take -- they could go the route of The Invisible Man and make Dracula a supporting character in his own story, focus on Mina or Lucy, who knows. Thoughts from y'all?

Pantys '19: Performers, Part Two -- Actresses

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Earlier today I shared with you my ten (well really twenty, with the runners-up included) favorite performances from actors in 2019. Now the time's come for my ten (well twenty really, with the runners-up) favorite performances from actresses coming out of 2019. That's how things work, see? Amazing. 

And no, sidenote, I don't really know anymore why I'm splitting these things up by gender in the year that is 2020 (not to mention even using the word "actress"), except it gives me a good way to split this into two lists and thereby include twice as many names -- I try to do my "Actor to Actor" series when I can manage my time well enough since it sidesteps all this, but this year we're falling to the old standby due to time constraints. So Actors and Actresses it is. Yadda and yadda, in no particular order I give you...

My 10 Favorite Actresses of 2019

Elisabeth Moss, Her Smell

Fatma Mohamed, In Fabric

Lupita Nyong'o, Us

Florence Pugh, Midsommar 

Yeo-jeong Jo, Parasite

Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Dolemite is My Name

Marietta Subong, Ode to Nothing

Adèle Haenel, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Alfre Woodard, Clemency

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10 Runners Up

Isabelle Huppert, Frankie

Octavia Spencer, Luce

Mia Wasikowska, Piercing

Taylor Russell, Waves

Mary Kay Place, Diane

Julianne Moore, Gloria Bell

Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, In Fabric

Molly Shannon, Wild Nights With Emily

What were your favorite Actresses of 2019?
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