Trailers To Talk About

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A pair of new trailers have popped up in my inbox in the past 24 hours that I would like to draw y'all's attentions towards -- you've probably definitely already seen the one for Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit about but there it is, again about, above. This is his anti-fascist comedy in which the Ragnarok director plays an imaginary friend Adolph Hitler to a little boy, co-starring alongside Scarlett Johannson and Sam Rockwell. I saw this trailer with a crowd over the weekend and they ATE IT RIGHT UP -- this movie might be a hit? If Disney doesn't chicken out with it, like's been rumored. (Hey Disney! Remember when you released anti-Nazi propaganda once upon a time? What happened?) Anyway Jojo Rabbit is out on October 18th.

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The second trailer I'm sharing is even more of a thrill for me I must admit -- if you've seen any of Swedish director Roy Andersson's surrealist beauties before (it's been five years since his last, the astonishing A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence) then you know why I'm thrilled already. His new one's called About Endlessness and it's playing both Venice and TIFF this month, but other than that we don't have a release date just yet. So who knows when we'll see it, but see it the second we can we shall. Anyway I don't know what About Endlessness is about -- except, you know endlessness -- but that hardy matters; his films are more about form than content.
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Max (2002)

Adolf Hitler: Genius and happiness go
together as well as cheese and chalk.

Wouldn't it be weird to be typecast as Adolph Hitler? I think that'd probably be weird. Not that the actor Noah Taylor (who is turning 50 today) has been exactly typecast -- he's had a long varied career, and only played Hitler twice. But twice is... more than once, ya know. (I imagine that Damon Herriman, who's been tasked with playing Charles Manson twice this year, feels much the same.) I've never seen Max, the 2002 movie about a young Hitler's "freundschaft" with a Jewish art dealer (played by John Cusack) but I have of course seen Preacher, the Dominic Cooper television series which has Noah taking...

... a decidedly wackier stance on the Führer, and Noah is really really really smashing in the part. I actually think of his performance every time I see the trailer for Jojo Rabbit (we just shared that yesterday) with Taika Waititi giving the mass murderer the same satirical ridicule. More ridiculing of Nazis please! Never too much. Claws had a very funny subplot that took aim at lame-ass so-called "Proud Boys" with their flaccid little tiki torches this year too.

Anyway speaking of Preacher here and now is where I sadly admit I totally missed, much to my deep and abiding shame, that its fourth and final season had started airing episodes already, and for several weeks at that. How dare I! I have some God-Damned catching up to do! I'm coming, Dom...
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Hammer Brings the Pain

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Heads up -- I said "heads up" but you Armie you can leave your "hands up" just like that, that's fine -- that Wounds, Armie Hammer's horror movie with Dakota Johnson, is on Hulu right this very minute! I can't wait to watch it but I have to wait, I've got tickets to see Jojo Rabbit tonight. Tomorrow it is! 

Regarding the earlier confusion about where the movie was being released -- turns out it's Hulu in the US and it's on Netflix everywhere else. Don't ask me why. Never ask me anything! I'm a moron!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Leave No Trace (2018)

Tom: What if the kids at school think I'm strange 

cuz of the way we were living?

Will: How important are their judgments?

A very happy 21st birthday to Thomasin McKenzie today! This Debra Granik movie definitely marks the moment I fell for her -- I imagine it's the moment most of us fell for her, if you saw it -- but it's kind of nuts to look at how many projects of note that she's stacked up in the past three years since this brought her to our attention. Why she was in M. Night Shyamalan's film Old just this weekend (read my review here) and she was very good in it in a difficult part; before that there were small roles in The King and True History of the Kelly Gang and of course the biggie, Jojo Rabbit.  

What's your favorite from her so far? The next year holds some good or at least exciting stuff -- she's in Jane Campion's new film The Power of the Dog, and I've already seen The Justice of Bunny King thanks to Tribeca (and I reviewed it too, right here) and she is wonderful in that, but it's Edgar Wright's giallo-riff Last Night in Soho with her playing opposite Anya Taylor-Joy that I'm obviously the most looking forward to; the trailer can be viewed right here. That's out on October 22nd! The happiest of happy birthdays to her and please keep the hits coming, Thomasin!

Taika 'Nother Little Piece of My Heart, Now Baby

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I noticed this weekend that the posters for Taika Waititi's TV reboot of his vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows have begun popping up in the subways of Manhattan, which makes sense since the thing premieres in less than two weeks on FX. But Taki's cup runneth over -- he's got his Hitler Comedy (yes you read that right) with Scarlett Johansson called Jojo Rabbit coming out sometime this year, and he's an episode of the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian filming right now, with Pedro Pascal and Omid Abtahi (one of the gays from American Gods) and, uh, Werner fucking Herzog (!!!) in the cast.

But even with all that he's just announced another another TV series -- he's going to make a series out of Terry Gilliam's movie Time Bandits for Apple's forthcoming streaming juggernaut. This show was announced last year but Taika's involvement is brand new news. Time Bandits, aka my boyfriend's favorite movie, is about a young boy who gets sucked into a battle with Evil itself, traversing through different time periods with a gaggle of salty dwarves. It's a lot of wacky fun, and I can only imagine the wonders that Taika could wring from all that. I'm in...

Endlessness Finds Its Beginning

I had a feeling was so and sure enough a quick search uncovered the fact that I first posted the trailer for About Endlessness, the latest flick from Swedish weirdo Roy Andersson, way way back in September of 2019 -- if you wanna calculate how long ago that was how about the fact that I posted it alongside the trailer for the movie Jojo Rabbit? Does that get the feeling of the passage of immense oceans of time across to you? Anyway I became such a fan of Andersson and his singular cinema thanks to his 2014 masterpiece A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence that the wait for this one was excruciating on day one... and then the damn pandemic happened!

Beginning to think the existence of Roy Andersson's About Endlessness is just some sort of meta joke that is being played on only me pic.twitter.com/w1UqKXc6WI

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 12, 2020

Anyway I am pleased as punch-drunk to share the news that About Endlessness is giving up the endless ghost at last, and will finally be released here in the US (theaters and demand) on April 30th. And they've just re-released the trailer (it is ever so slightly different, although it hits mostly the same beats) and here, I share it with you now, today, on March 4th 2021. Let it be noted! No more shenanigans please! (And yes I just called a deadly pandemic a "shenanigan" so feel free to cancel me immediately.)

Good Morning, World

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We just voted him the Hottest Director Alive and Taika Waititi's Nazi-satire Jojo Rabbit hits theaters today -- I won't be seeing it until this weekend sadly, so don't come around asking me for an opinion just yet -- and so what better time to skip merrily back in time to 2002 to the time he co-starred on a New Zealand television program called The Strip that was about, you guessed it... 

... male strippers. It's too early in the morning for me to google about and see what World Directing Superstar Taika Waititi has had to say about Lowly Regional Television Actor Taika Waititi's pseudo-stripper past, I'm sure it was amusing and he's not at all ashamed of it -- I mean it's a comedy, after all -- but just in general I don't know much about this show so if anybody's ever properly seen it or heard Taika talk about it feel free to share those insights.

That said the episode seen here was kindly uploaded in its entirety onto the YouTube, and I'll share that this morning in case anybody's got an empty morning staring at them in the face. Here's a proper way to waste it!

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Quote of the Day

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I think I might have to go out and actually physically buy a copy of this month's issue of Esquire magazine -- imagine that! -- because besides having that very fine photo-shoot of Jason Momoa that I shared on Wednesday there's also this very fine interview slash photo-shoot with The Hottest Director Alive Taika Waititi about his latest flick Jojo Rabbit, out in theaters today. Anyway interestingly they talk to Taika about the roles of Father Figures in his movies, which is very much a thing now that they mention it, and here's what he says broadening it out to New Zealanders in general:

"We don’t talk about it... We make films about it. No one in the films talks about feelings... It’s just so cringey to us. Americans love talking about feelings, to the point where it’s like, I don’t think you actually feel these things; you just like talking about these feelings. Which is what gives us the impression that Americans are fake. For me, it’s easier to make films—even though it takes two years—than to go to therapy.”

I mean making movies about something is kind of technically talking about something, but I get what he's getting at -- his characters are always acting in spite of their best intentions, fighting what they want and refusing to see it, and his making elaborate fictional worlds to apparently deal with his own issues is his own sort of process. Lord knows I get all of that -- I'd rather throw myself into molten lava than have a meaningful conversation with another human being sitting across from me. Life's too short to feel stuff! Goof off until you die! Okay maybe that's not his precise point but on that note hit the jump for more photos of this gorgeous goofball...

10 Off My Head -- 2019: Chapter II

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Well we're at the halfway point of the year basically, and per usual all the really good shit, movie-wise, is probably still ahead, heavily loaded onto the back-end -- Hollywood loves itself a big behind! I hear ya, Hollywood. I personally haven't done me a mental list of the 2019 movies I've loved the best so far in these here first six months, perhaps I should get around to that, but for now I just want to take stock of what we still have to look forward to (or what we might have to look forward to -- some of these don't have release dates yet, but I'd be surprised if they make us wait until 2020 for any of them.) So here are...

My 10 Most Anticipated Movies of the Rest of 2019

The Nightingale

(dir. Jennifer Kent)

releases on August 2nd -- more here

Midsommar 

(dir. Ari Aster) 

releases on July 3rd -- more here

Parasite 

(dir. Bong Joon-ho)

releases on October 11th -- more here

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

(dir. Quentin Tarantino)

releases on July 26 -- more here

Little Women

(dir. Greta Gerwig)

releases on December 25th -- more here

Knives Out

(dir. Rian Johnson)

releases on November 27th -- more here

Wounds

(dir. Babak Anvari)

release unknown -- more here

Pain & Glory

(dir. Pedro Almodovar)

releases on October 4th -- more here

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

(dir. Marielle Heller)

releases on November 22nd -- more here

The Lighthouse

(dir. Robert Eggers)

release unknown -- more here

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Runners-up: The Irishman (dir. Martin Scorsese), 1917 (dir. Sam Mendes, out on December 25th), Matthias & Maxime (dir. Xavier Dolan), Yesterday (dir. Danny Boyle, out on June 28th)...

... Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, out on October 4th), The Kitchen (dir. Andrea Berloff out on August 9th), Jojo Rabbit (dir. Taika Waititi, out on October 18th), A Hidden Life (dir. Terrence Malick), It: Chapter II (dir. Andy Muschietti, out on September 6th), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, out on December 6th)...

... Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (dir. André Øvredal, out on August 9th), The Woman in the Window (dir. Joe Wright, out on October 4th), Divine Love (dir. Gabriel Mascaro), Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (dir. Richard Linklater, out on August 16th), Lucy in the Sky (dir. Noah Hawley), Uncut Gems (dir. Safdie Brothers)...

... Waves (dir. Trey Edward Schults), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (dir. JJ Abrams, out on December 20th), Gemini Man (dir. Ang Lee, out on October 4th), Frankie (dir. Ira Sachs), Ad Astra (dir. James Gray, out on September 20th), Spider-Man: Far From Home (dir. Jon Watts , out on July 2nd), Crawl (dir. Alexandre Aja, out on July 12th), On a Magical Night (dir. Christophe Honoré)

What are you most looking forward to in 2019?

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Get Some Good Dickinson This Weekend

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I was just now looking through the movies out in theaters this weekend  -- that aren't The Lighthouse or Jojo Rabbit anyway, both of which you can see below I've already covered a'plenty today -- and was reminded that oh right there is a Maleficent sequel. And it's got Michelle Pfeiffer in it! That's all lovely and great but when it comes to posting something here I had to find the dudes, and it's got some good ones. That's Beach Rats star Harris Dickinson seen above -- he's playing a prince or some shit. But there's also David Gyasi (he's the guy who got to fuck around with Julian Morris in Man in an Orange Shirt, for one) and also Deadpool baddie Ed Skrein, and...

... Ed has a whole lot of look going on. Like... a whole lot. He's the sexiest half-man half-horned-thing since James McAvoy, maybe? Point being I'd watch the gay porn parody of Maleficent featuring those three in a skinny minute, I would. The actual Maleficent sequel? I'll probably wait for home video. Sorry, Harrison! Sorry, Ed. But I gots to go see The Lighthouse a third time.

All those pretty things aside I do want to make y'all aware that MNPP will not be silent per usual this weekend -- I repeat: I'm not being lazy for once! As mentioned yesterday the 2019 edition of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival has now begun, and my reviews of films playing BHFF will start popping off tomorrow, right as they premiere there. Reviews of horror movies, what a treat for all!
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I don't know what movie Harris Dickinson is seen here getting tattooed up for but I think we can all agree who gives a fuck about movies at this moment pic.twitter.com/WsKacVFdcC

— His Name Was Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 18, 2019

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But holy hell bags that's not all -- our annual 13 day long Halloween celebration also kicks off tomorrow, seeing as how tomorrow is, you know, 13 days away from Halloween. In the past we've done the "13 Mustaches of Halloween" and we've done the "13 Snakes of Halloween" just to name two examples -- well this year's is even more random than ever, and I can't wait for y'all to dig in...