Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Pics of the Day

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The Playlist shares four new pictures from Joss Whedon's upcoming Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing, which he shot in his own home with much of his usual troupe of actorly delights, and here are two. Up top there's Captain Tightpants looming large over questionably asexual Andrew, and here's the bad Watcher Wesley meeting and greeting his lost love turned blue god Winifred. I want this movie inside of me.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Estelle: I think it's crazy.
Mari: What's crazy?
Estelle: All that blood and violence.
I thought you were supposed to be the love generation.

Today is Wes Craven's 73rd birthday. Happy day, Wes! Similarly The Last House on the Left, which was Craven's first film, turns 40 at the end of this month. It was released on August 30th, 1972. I googled what was happening on that date and the first thing that came up was a John Lennon concert at Madison Square Garden - the fact that Last House starts off with its two lead girls heading into the city to go to a big rock concert and do some drugs was not lost on me as I saw this. To borrow the parlance of the times, it must've felt like a really bad fucking trip, this movie when it came out. This was three years after that bad Charles Manson business and right on the precipice of Watergate - whatever was left of that hippie-dippy free love vibe was well in its death throes. Bring on the cynical disco cocaine!

 In all seriousness, I've always had a really hard time with Last House. It is purposefully awful, and terribly successful at it. It makes me feel horrible, just grimy and gross, so I've only seen it twice and not in a long time. But then Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which it's basically a remake of, makes me feel legitimately awful as well. So good work, Wes! You kept the vibe alive!

I Am Link

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--- Up With Vertigo - Sight & Sound's "Greatest Films" poll has been happening every ten years since 1952, and Citizen Kane has been the undisputed champ for 50 years. (Bicycle Thieves won the first poll.) Until now! Alfred Hitcockc's Vertigo has claimed the throne, and I can't complain about that. I mean obviously they took my lead since I was just saying the very same thing only a month ago. Copycats!

--- Meet Mags - Oh all places where I might see a Synecdoche New York reunion, The Hunger Games was not what one I was expecting. Phillip Seymour Hoffman joined Catching Fire the other week, and now the actress Lynn Cohen, who played PSH's mother in Synecdoche, is joining the film as Mags. Mags is an important character in the book but I'm sure her part will be smaller in the movie, they always are. Old ladies, that is.

--- Post Coogan - Haven't watched this yet but will as soon as I get the chance - here's the trailer for Brad Pitt's reunion with his Jesse James director Andrew Dominik in Killing Me Softly (previously titled Coogan's Trade). If it's even a quarter as amazing as The Assassination of Jesse James... it will be worth watching.

--- Hammer Foe - Mads Mikkelsen dropped out of the running to play the big bad in the Thor sequel in order to play Hannibal Lecter for Bryan Fuller, and now Christopher Eccleston is picking up Mad's sloppy seconds and will now be the one to run around enormous Chris Hemsworth shouting like a flea.

--- Space Jockies - The studio is actively working on making a sequel to Ridley Scott's Prometheus. It probably won't be around for several years though, since Scott's so busy with that movie starring Michael Fassbender's cock in a suit, and then he'll maybe make a Blade Runner sequel too.

--- Slave Girl - The little girl who starred in Beasts of the Southern Wild has joined the cast of Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (which will inevitably co-star Michael Fassbender's cock in old-timey suits and breeches), and I wrote some about that over at The Film Experience yesterday. I looked up how to spell her name before but I'm being lazy right now. You know who I mean. Hushpuppy girl.

--- And finally, Michael Fassbender's cock in superhero spandex will star in what's now being called X-Men: Days of Future Past (at least for now), which will be the sequel to X-Men: First Class. DoFP is a storyline in the comics from the early 80s that deals with alternate timelines and big evil robots, and it makes geeks straight up wet.

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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The Fan (1981)

The coming together of Michael Biehn's birthday earlier this week with my current focus on water-sports (minds out of the gutter!) thanks to the ongoing Olympics brought about this perfect moment for some Fan love. Who doesn't love The Fan? To know The Fan is to love The Fan, that's what I always say.

How amazing is that shot, for one thing? If I were doing this movie for The Film Experience's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series I don't think I'd be able to find anything as great as that one. The way the flow of benches erupts into disarray once it comes upon Beihn's deranged character of Douglas Breen. He throws everything out of whack.

Up to and especially that great star that he's stalking and killing everybody around in order to get closer to, Sally Ross, played by an "I'm already too old for this shit" Lauren Bacall. But even though Bacall's character technically takes up about 85% of this movie, she's not its star for me. It's all about Biehn.

Y'all know I love a good "Queer Creep" movie after all. What's that, I didn't mention Douglas Breen's a big ol' repressed 'mo? Oh I'd say this next scene where he picks up a guy in a bar spells that out pretty succinctly.

Hit the jump for the rest,
including bonus killing and gay sex - it's got it all!

Good Morning, World

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A happy 36th birthday to Sam Worthington, who never really became what he might've here in the US, eh? In a coincidence I've got his last movie Man on a Ledge coming to me from Netflix today - did anyone see it? Why hello, Mr. Cricket, you sing a lovely song. Anyway I suppose Sam's always got James Cameron's fifteen Avatar sequels to look forward to. You know, ten years from now, or whatever.
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Caroline Dhavernas Just Joined Hannibal

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I can't even write about this news properly right now. I can't! It will make me sound like too much of a lunatic. This is so so so (so's for infinity) awesome. Read about it here. Dhavernas was of course the lead on Bryan Fuller's brilliant but short-lived Wonderfalls. She's playing a psychiatrist, a protege of Lecter's, who's also a consultant for the FBI. So so so (so's for infinity) awesome.

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Unleash the Beast

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(click to embiggen) There just really is nothing he can do about that thing, is there? What a curse he bears! The cross he carries for all of our sins, that is, our sinful thoughts, riddled with filth and lust, and off I go. Praise his holy name. (via)

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Zac Efron Brought His Milkshake To The Yard

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Hey! Eyes over here! Thank you. We're getting to that. There's a lot to like in the trailer for Lee Daniels' apparently batshit bonkers The Paperboy, but I think we'll all agree that that there above shot of Zac Efron dancing in wet tighty-whities takes the proverbial cake, right? Right. Here's the trailer anyway:

Oscars for everybody! It's out in limited release Oct. 5th.

And here's a couple caps...

A Tall Man Is Hard To Find

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For those of you too afraid to watch Martyrs, have I got a movie for you! The Tall Man (out on demand today and in theaters at the end of the month) is director Pascal Laugier's follow-up to that brutal 2008 French horror masterpiece, and it offers a lot of what I loved about that film without the, you know, crushing despair. Mind you it's crushing despair that's a lot of what takes Martyrs to the realm of masterpiece in my ever so humble opinion, but it's also what keeps me from generally recommending it to just any old stranger on the street. Martyrs is really hard to take, and even harder to shake. 

The Tall Man... is not those things. What it is though is an offering of Laugier's strengths on a more friendly playing field. (Yes in comparison to Martyrs a "more friendly playing field" is a story about kidnapping and child murder, what of it?) What The Tall Man offers up without the crushing despair then is the delightful way that Laugier has with telling a story. His films unfold from unknown depths, the bottoms keep dropping out, and they're never about what you think they're about. He is always several steps ahead of you. He knows what you're thinking about his characters - how smart audiences are working things out - and he's already turned that on its head, only ten minutes from now. The Tall Man and Martyrs feel like four or five different films as they unfold, but in the end everything snaps right into place.

I can say without hesitation that I have never bought Jessica Biel in a film as much as I did here. I'd been sadly hesitant over my enthusiasm towards this film because of her (Martyrs demanded I be more excited about it then my distaste for her was allowing), but she's actually good here. Being the main character she's got to lead you through the twenty layers of seemingly flip-flopping storytelling while maintaining a consistency of character (it's only our point of view on things that changes as we find more things out, after all), and she does a fine job with it. They played to her strengths to be sure - if there's any actress in Hollywood today that I believe could hop right out of a flipped truck it's her. She's sturdy. But she and Laugier mine other facets of her personality and more than not I was impressed. Low expectations surpassed, good work!

I don't want to oversell the film. It's nowhere near as ambitious as Martyrs was - it doesn't use its deconstruction of structure itself to break you the viewer right down to nothing, too. But as far as telling a story we've seen a bunch in an entirely new way that kept me on edge and unsure where things were going the whole time, The Tall Man's a success. I hope that Laugier gets to keep telling things his way for a long time, I wanna keep watching. 

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Pics of the Day

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Even though Anthony Hopkins has squandered a lot of Hannibal Lecter goodwill in the years since he gave us the world's most dignified cannibal, he will always be Hannibal Lecter, and therefore he will always have some goodwill. That's just the way it is. Lifetime pass. I share that so you know I mean him no ill will when I say that I'm really looking forward to Toby Jones' take on Alfred Hitchcock more than his. I mean the make-up they've got Sir Tony in is great (see that here), but I just really feel Toby in the role in my bones. Just like I thought Toby made a better Truman Capote than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, although PSH won the Oscar. Poor Toby. He keeps getting these killer bio-pic roles only to have some bigger named actor stomp along and play the same thing in the same year. 

Anyway we've got a couple new pictures of Toby and Sienna Miller playing Hitch and Tippi Hedren (via) in The Girl, and here they are; I looooove the top shot.

(thanks Mac) TV Line's calling it an HBO Film - I guess they must've bought it from the BBC? I thought it was a BBC movie. Anyway hooray we'll get to see it here. Maybe Toby can get an Emmy at least. As for Sienna, I think she looks better in that picture than she did in the previous one, but it's still not really a Tippi vibe she's giving off to me. I'm willing to give her the benefit for now though.

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Good Morning, Gratuitous Kris Holden-Reid

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I have a dentist's appointment today, so dental hygiene's on my mind. Teeth, y'all! Anyway because the world needed an actor to fill in the "Chris Martin" spot, here's Kris Holden-Reid, who turns 39 today. He's Canadian and seems to have done a lot of TV up there - including something called Lost Girl, which is what that above shot's from and looks sort of True Blood-ish in that it has to do with fantasy creatures being sexy. From what I can tell he spent a lot of time unclothed on it. Here in the US you maybe could've seen him on The Tudors or in the last Underworld movie. He was also on Degrassi. Anyway hit the jump for some more if you're so inclined.