Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Kaspar: Nothing lives less in me than my life.

Werner Herzog's new movie titled Bucking Fastard is premiering at the Venice Film Festival today and if you go looking you can find the first critics reviews dropping for it in the usual places. I've read no further than the headlines because I'm seeing it in just a couple of weeks at NYFF but the general vibe seems positive, and given what little I've allowed myself to know about the film -- it stars Rooney & Kate Mara as sisters who constantly speak and behave in eerie unison -- I couldn't be more excited for it. This is shit right up my alley yo. Like that scene where Luke Skywalker fires his laser into that tiny hole and blows up the Death Star? That's how this movie's coming at me. Anyway it's also Werner's 84th birthday on Saturday so taking a moment to celebrate one of the most staggeringly important and unique and talented filmmakers of our age seems, you know, the least we can do. Unlike some people: 

I don't know that there is a more disgusting factoid around

[image or embed]

— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 11:14 AM

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Neon Demon (2016)

Jesse: Something's in my room!

Hank: What do you mean something's in your room?

Jesse: I saw something in my room!

Hank: Are you high?

I love it when Keanu plays lowlife scumbags (a la Sam Raimi's The Gift) so it's always a treat when I'm reminded that he pops up for a couple of scenes to be a vulgar creep in Nicolas Winding Refn's 2016 masterpiece The Neon Demon -- I wish Refn and Keanu had worked together again! And I am kind of shocked they didn't. Give Refn a John Wick movie to direct! I don't like that franchise at all but NWR would make me watch it. And probably love it too -- he'd know how to make its beautiful neon-lit love of violence truly gratuitous to the point of sick-making instead of just pornographic like it's been in that franchise to date. Anyway it's Keanu's birthday and I gotta say...

Keanu being 62 is something I literally cannot deal with right now

— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) September 2, 2026 at 10:20 AM

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Pee-wee's Big Holiday (2016)

Pee-wee: You know I don't want to go 

anywhere, or try anything new.

Not to pile on extra sad with all of our queer legends dying this week but today would've been the one and only Paul Reubens 74th birthday and good god I miss him. It's been three years since he passed but I still think about him all the time -- it probably helps that Pee-wee memorabilia is scattered all over my home. including the holiday cards that I got every year from the man himself in the wake of him reaching out to me after I said some nice things on this very site regarding the above movie. (I don't care if I bring this up too much -- it's the great highlight of my "professional" life.) And his birthday and my birthday especially I think about Paul, because we'd also text each other on those days -- he'd send funny little gifs to me on mine and I'd send him one on his day. I was always too starstruck to be too chatty but he always replied, sincere and grateful. Since Dolly passed this week he's been on my mind too -- not just because of the below photo that made the rounds, but because they were both paragons of decency and humor from my childhood who taught me as much about how to be a good person as any actual human being in my orbit. I fail every day at living up to the standard they set but you know both of them would just giggle and say well get on with it. Being good is an every day effort, but look at the legacies of joy they left. What's better?

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Pillion (2025)

Colin: You know I love you, right?

Ray: ... Yeah.

Colin: But what?

Ray: That's not what this is, Colin. 

That's not the point.

Colin: Isn't... love the whole point?

Ray: Of what?

Colin: Everything.

It didn't feel right to've not wished Alexander Skarsgård a happy 50th birthday yesterday, but (again) we got all overwhelmed by Dolly's passing and everything else fell to the wayside -- thankfully that never-before-seen photo from Pillion's set popped up today (via) and reminded me to step back to our favorite Swedish sex-bot and wish him the best. (If you missed my forever-ago Pillion review click here. Phenomonal movie.) Did y'all see the list of people joining Muderbot for its second season? Everybody's running to rub on Alex's Ken crotch and we get it! 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Christine (2016)

George: We all have these different versions 

of ourselves competing to be the real us.

This brilliant and disturbing movie, featuring what remains probably still the best work by actor Rebecca Hall, is turning ten in a couple of months -- but that's not why we're here! We're here because it's the birthday of this film's brilliant (and possibly disturbed) director Antonio Campos, of whom I am a big ol' fan. This movie alone would've made that the case but he's also gifted us with the movies Simon Killer and Afterschool as well as the true-crime series The Staircase... I only saw Afterschool recently when Vinegar Syndrome put it out on blu-ray and if you can get past the Ezra Miller of it you'll discover a harrowing little thing that claws at some of the same lurid media-adjacent impulses that both Christine and The Staircase do -- you can see that fascination threading through all of his best work, actually. Hell...

... it's not impossible to believe that the same man who made Christine also directed a whole bunch of The Punisher episodes. As well as the uneven Pentecostal theatrics in The Devil All the Time -- Hary Melling pouring a jar of spiders on himself to delight a bunch of churchgoers fits right in among all of this work. That Campos produced Martha Marcy May Marlene also makes so very much sense, and one supposes that he would have brought the same level of enchantment with humanity's pathologies to the canned Batman spin-off series Arkham, a woulda-been perfect fit. None of his characters are calm in the head, but man can Campos ever laser in on the ineffable sloppiness of our worst instincts. He's not someone I've seen people make a case for as an auteur with the same fascinations bubbling up over and over again, yet it's very much there -- anyway he's a very underrated filmmaker and you seek his all of his work out if you haven't already.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Robert Campbell: I'm going to say a couple 

of words to you and I want you to say the 

first thing that comes into your mind. 

Creighton Duke: Okay. 

Robert Campbell: Jason Voorhees. 

Creighton Duke: That makes me think of a little girl 

in a pink dress sticking a hot dog through a doughnut.

Happy 33 to Jason Goes To Hell today! Yes indeed arguably the worst Friday the 13th movie is celebrating its "Jesus Year" as of today and it couldn't have happened to a better worse movie. Okay, truth-time: I haven't re-watched this movie in at least a decade. It's so fucking bad y'all. And yet, on the other hand -- it's also got the best male nudity of the entire series thanks to the exquisite Michael Silver. So, you know, two hands in the bush or whatever.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Wild Rose (2018)

Susannah: Why country?

Rose: Cuz it's three chords and the truth.

A happy birthday to the tremendously talented Sophie Okonedo, always a totally riveting presence on-screen, today -- when she popped up in Janet Planet a couple of years ago I felt like I hadn't seen her in ages. (And weirdly this is the second time Janet Planet has come up today -- guess iut's time for a Janet Planet rewatch!) But seriously why aren't I seeing Sophie Okonedo in everything all of the time?? So that's my birthday wish for her -- work more! Get with it, Hollyweird! Get her all up in my business, please.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

After the Hunt (2025)

Alma: I feel like deep inside I always expected this. 

I expected the rottenness in me to be seen by other people 

right before I managed to expunge it.

Hank: Spoken like a true woman... 

I never felt myself be rotten at all.

Alma: Spoken like a true man.

A happiest of happy birthday to the great and legendary Luca Guadagnino, who is turning 55 today! If you've been on this here site for longer than an hour you know our feelings about Luca, who speaks deep to us in a way that not many other filmmakers do these days -- not just in the obvious one (Call me By Your Name, which I wrote about just a little bit back circa 2017) but everything from his superior Suspiria to Bones and All to yes this one here After the Hunt, a movie which really didn't get a fair shake when it came out. (At least I knew it was good though.) I actually just re-watched it a few weeks ago and it's  shown itself to be even wilier about where the world was headed -- like all his films they're ever so slightly ahead of their time. We'll see what happens with his Sam Altman biopic Artificial soon enough -- I remain convinced he'lll be ten steps ahead of the current conversation -- but for today, let's just show the genius some love! My gift to him & us is this Andy Garfield gif:

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)

Ned Kelly: My wish for you, my dearest child, is that all the coarse words and cruelty I have related in these pages seem queer and foreign to you, like some strange tale from an ancient world. But if they do not, and you, like I, have suffered from injustice at the hand of oppressors, remember that you are a Kelly, and never forget that you were mine and that you were loved. Whatever they write about me, whatever names I am given or whatever falsehoods are attributed to me, know that much is true. So go out into the world and make of it what you wish. Write your own history. For you are my future now.

A very happy birthday to Mr. Essie Davis himself, the great Aussie writer-director Justin Kurzel -- we're huge fans of his movies which have been non-stop dissections of modern masculinity and its various elaborate grotesqueries. I am ashamed to admit that I still haven't watched his Jacob Elordi series The Long Narrow Road to the North -- have any of you? I mean...

... how have I not watched this yet? Between that and Kelly Gang and Fassbender in Macbeth -- our man knows how to make men look gorgeous when he wants to, and disgusting (Snowtown, Nitram... also the Kelly Gang) also when necesarry. That should wor well if his next project ever starts filming -- I told you about Burning Rainbow Farm all the way in January 2025 but it still hasn't filmed; not sure what's up with that. It will tell the true story of a gay couple who boult a stoner utopia in Michigan in the 90s which became embroiled in a war with the government, and it was set to star Sebastian Stan and Leo Woodall. The people demand this movie happen dammit!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Green Knight (2021)

The Lady: Why is he Green, do you think?

Gawain: The Knight?

The Lady: Yes. Was he born that way?

The Lord: Maybe it is the color of 

his blood when he blushes.

The Lady: But why green? Why not blue? Or red?

Gawain: Because he is not of this earth.

The Lady: But green is the color of the earth. 

Of living things. Of life.

Gawain: And of rot.

The Lady: Yes. We deck our halls with it, dye our linens, but should it come creeping up the cobbles, we scrub it out, fast as we can. When it blooms beneath our skin, we bleed it out. And when we, together all, find that our reach has exceeded our grasp, we cut it down, we stamp it out, we spread ourselves atop it and smother it beneath our bellies. But it comes back. It does not dally; nor does it wait to plot or conspire. Pull it out by its roots one day, and the next there it is, creeping in around the edges. Whilst we're off looking for red, in comes green. Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind--in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies, when we die, too. When you go your footprints will fill with grass; moss will cover over your tombstone. And as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. The verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements, and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue.

Happy 5 to David Lowery's The Green Knight! 

Now there was a movie that knew how 

to turn an epic poem into a great movie. 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Paris, Texas (1984)

Walt: I thought you were afraid of heights.

Travis: I'm not afraid of heights. I'm afraid of fallin'.

The lo-fi legend Harry Dean Stanton was born 100 years ago this day. When I picture HDS I picture his small and heartbreaking role as Carl Rodd, often seen sitting on a bench and staring the clouds beside the Fat Trout trailer park, in Twin Peaks (both Fire Walk With Me and The Return) immediately, but that's just because I'm such a Peaks fanatic -- there are more treasures and pleasures to be had across the man's incredible and lengthy CV than I could even begin to list here. Paris Texas is a pretty biggun though, so I feel fine celebrating via it. What are your favorite Harry Dean moments across the decades? Like -- did anybody do more in Alien to make that crew feel immediately down-to-earth than him? He was such a VIBE, man.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The History of Sound (2025)

Lionel: I feel I've missed something. How to put this? It's not nostalgia, it's not grief. It's the... hardness of a fact that I should've stayed in Maine. Would I feel differently if we hadn't met? Would I feel now, that I had missed something? But we did meet. And what do I want now? I want the sound of my life, I think. What happens to it all, all the sounds released into the world, never captured? I want all of it. The history of sound.

I always feel bad for actors who've been tasked with speaking the title of the film -- how do you deliver it without it being distracting? It's kind of an impossible task and I think Chris Cooper -- who's celebrating his 75th birthday today, everybody send this treasure a happy one -- was smart to just lean into it since he wasn't just speaking the film's title, he was also delivering the film's final words. Yes the movie ends with its own title which should earn it a groan, but I find this entire timeline jump so moving thanks to Cooper's work that it doesn't. Not from me anyway. I love this movie so dearly. (Here is my review.) Have you gone back and watched it since its release? I think now, without all those annoying "awards bait" expectations crushing in on its slight frame, it breathes even more beautifully than before. It'll have a long, lovely shelf-life. What a beautiful heartbreaker.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Sin City:A Dame to Kill For (2014)

Ava: What does it feel like? Dwight: What?

Ava: Murdering an innocent man. 

Just wanna know what it felt like. Must have been beautiful.

Dwight: What are you talking about innocence?

Ava: I knew I could count on you. 

Sex always made you stupid, ready to believe anything.

A happy birthday to our beloved Eva Green, who is hopefully recovering well and with no pain whatsoever after beingn injured on the set of the next season of Wednesday last week -- latest reports say thankfully no bones were broken when she fell off a horse while filming a scene and my god, the things actors go through for us. Anyway as middling as I have found Wednesday the show to be so far I will absolutely be tuning in now that Eva's joined the cast. She's one of those actresses that has never not eleveated whatever shit she's gracing with her presence -- which isn't to say she's made a lot of shit, but when she does she's always the best thing about it. Did any of you see the two French Three Musketeers movies that came out recently? I finally got around to them a couple of months ago and they were legitimately terrific and absolutely did right by her. She's somehow still so damn underappreciated! We here at MNPP HQ are huge fans who'll follow her anywhere. A queen. Feel better, queen!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Old Dark House (1932)

Sir William Porterhouse: So, you got your feet wet?

Gladys: Yes, Bill, and that wasn't all either.

Sir William Porterhouse: Yes, I didn't suppose it was!

James Whale's The Old Dark House is a perfect movie -- if you were making a list of the ten best haunted house movies you'd have to include it and it's not even about a haunting. The fact that I only saw it for the first time within the past decade or so stuns me -- you can see how every "haunted house" movie after has been forced really to riff on it because it is a perfect distillation of the thing it is. Anyway I'm not really here to heap more praise on this movie, as I've done several times now since seeing it -- I'm just here to wish one of its stars, one of the gay ones, a happy birthday. 

Happy 127th to the grand old closet queen Charles Laughton -- speaking of James Whale, Laughton went on to wed Whale's Bride of Frankenstein herself Elsa Lanchester, which provides me with the opportunity to once again recommend any and all books about those two but especially her autobiography Elsa Lanchester, Herself, which is probably the single most entertaining celebrity bio I have ever read. Lanchester was a grand writer and storyteller and had one fuck-ton of a life to regale us about, including her gay ass husband. Not that it's possible to hold it against Chuck, given the times he lived during -- and anyway he directed the masterpiece The Night of the Hunter so anything he ever did is black water under the dreamy night-time bridge. 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Living (2022)

Sutherland: When a girl like that steals 

your hat, always cheaper to buy a new one.

A happy 45th birthday to the great Tom Burke today! I didn't realize he's been acting for almost thirty years now but it does make sense now that I realize the first thing I ever saw him in was the sleazy Aughts thriller Donkey Punch in 2005 with my beloved Julian Morris -- and repeatedly at that because he's the guy who has the threesome with Julian and a girl and there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of homoerotic tension between the two guys in that scene. 

Needless to say I have seen that one scene more than I've seen any movie on Sight & Sound's Greatest Films list haha. I never really put that together with Burke when he started showing up in classier fare though -- in 2013 there was N.W. Refn's Only God Forgives and then it wasn't until Johanna Hogg's The Souvenir in 2019 that he really grabbed me again. (What a performance that is though.) 

After that I knew who he was proper, so when he popped up in Miller's Furiosa, Soderbergh's Black Bag, and my beloved Oliver Hermanus joint Living as quoted up top -- and I'd say the sequence between him and Bill Nighy is probably the film's peak -- I was always excited to see him. Anyway I think he's become one of our finest actors and I wouldn't be surprised to see him be an awards-magnet for a role in the next few years. Big fan! 

What's your favorite Tom Burke performance?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Sonny: Kiss me.

Moretti: What?

Sonny: Kiss me. When I'm 

being fucked, I like to get kissed a lot.

The great Sidney Lumet was born 102 years ago today.

What's your favorite Lumet film that's not this or Network?

I have a real soft spot for Deathtrap but then, you know, gay.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Beach Rats (2017)

Simone: Aren't they beautiful?

Frankie: They kind of look the same 

as they did last week, and the week before last, 

and pretty much the same thing every fucking summer.

Simone: Hater.

Frankie: You know, this exact firework show 

happens every Friday at 9:30 p.m.

Simone: I think they're romantic.

Frankie: Fireworks are the opposite of romantic.

I don't pay a heap of attention to Bond casting rumors but I just saw Harris Dickinson's name among the rumored candidates in this article saying that the "next round of auditions" for our next 007 will be happening in August and weirdly I don't think I'd thought of Harris in the role before? And now that I have I think he might be great at it? He'd be different from any Bond before anyway and what other reason is there to keep this shit going if not for that? He's got a reserved quality, an amused intelligence, that would be interesting I think. I'm not saying he'd be my pick -- I'm probably still Team Henry Golding or Dev Patel -- but I wouldn't be angry at Harris being chosen. I mean...

Anyway all that's very much not the reason we're here -- we're here because today is Mr. Dickinson's 30th birthday and we wanna wish him a happy one, where ever he is right now... which is presumably wearing John Lennon drag for Sam Mendes. Going right from John Lennon to James Bond would be quite the story, though! I believe that Harris has got all of that in him. In the parlance of my "The Moment I Fell For..." series of posts I knew the minute I saw him in Beach Rats here that he was destined for big things and he has yet to prove me incorrect.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

City of the Living Dead (1980)

Blonde gravedigger: Will you check her out? 

Talk about a "box lunch". 

Gravedigger: I'm telling you, you'll end up a dirty old man 

reading that stuff. A pervert. A peeping tom. I saw this 

porno flick once. This guy in the audience got so carried away 

with it, he humped himself to death. 

Blonde gravedigger: Yeah, but what a way to go.

Just a heads-up to all of my Fulci Freaks out there that today marks the 99th anniversary of the great gore-maestro's birth! That means you've only got one year to create your centennial maggot-masks and wood-shard-eye-sockets and cow-intestine-tongues with which to celebrate! Get to goring! Okay actually now that I think about it, maybe starting a year early with half of that stuff is a bad idea -- it will start to stink real fast. Especially the intestines thing. Check out your refridgeration situation first I guess. Anyway yes here's to 99 years of Fulci -- I love several of his movies a lot but I do think City of the Living Dead will probably always be my favorite, and that discussion above, bringing Shakespeare into the age of Italian sleaze, is a good reprsentative moment why. To be or not to be, to jerk off to death or not to jerk off to death -- ehh what's the difference? What a king. 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997)

Michele: Remember the prom? You got so thin by then.

Romy: Oh, I know. I was so lucky getting mono. 

That was like the best diet ever.

I think we all forget that The Devil Wears Prada stole its funniest joke -- "I'm just one stomach flu away from my goal weight." -- from Romy & Michele. And that should not stand! Well perhaps there is a sliver of justice in the world because just as DWP did this year Romy & Michele are finally, finally, fucking finally getting their sequel. (Although unlike Prada it's going straight to streaming but whatever - I will take it.) THR first reported it last night and once I calmed down and stopped doing the "Time After Time" dance routine eighteen hours later I finally sat down and wrote this post. It's great timing anyway since next year marks (excuse this pause while I take an inhale from my old person oxygen tank) the 30th anniversary of the original movie. Besides our beloved blonde Post-Its pair in the leads also set to return are Janeane Garofalo, Alan Cumming, Camryn Manheim and Julia Campbell, while Keegan-Michael Key, Rob Huebel, Breckin Meyer, Patrick Warburton and Nathan Lee Graham (from The Comeback!) are all joing the cast. But what of Justin Theroux? I know his character was an asshole, but a hot one...

Happy Birthday To Us

Two things in that photo are celebrating a birthday today. One is our boy (shh Saoirse) Jack Lowden, who's turning 36 today. And the other is Plaid Pants. As in My New Plaid Pants. As in yes this very website. Okay maybe that was a convoluted way to finish this day off, whatever -- I got to stare at my boy (shh Saoirse) Jack Lowden for a moment. That makes it all worth it! All twenty-one years of this site's nonsense! Summed up in one batch of gobbledegook! Seems about right. Anyway yeah that's that for today -- thanks to everybody who wished the site a happy birthday on this morning's Chris-Evans-flavored  recognition of this same damn thing. I did want to end the day by bumping up our annual donation ask -- if you wanna say thanks to us with pennies as opposed to pleasantries you can donate whatever you see fit at this link. As I said yesterday -- I make zero point zero zero dollars off MNPP so once a year I feel as if I've perhaps earned a quick moment of beggary. (As opposed to buggery, which we enjoy year round.) Or there is also the eBay Store -- buy something there and we all win! But whatever -- it's shit out there, the economy's in the toilet and we're probably on the verge of societal collapse or whatever, so I understand if you've got more important things to squirrel away your nickels for. I get it. And enough of this starving orphan schtick, it's making me itch. As always -- thank you to everybody who comes round and gobbles up my nonsense daily, weekly, whenever your antidepressants are working. Me and my boy Jack (shut up Saoirse, I mean it) love you all! Forever! However long that is now! Like... a week, maybe?