Go Go Griffin!

I must have been buried in Fantasia Fest stuff when the official trailer for Griffin in Summer dropped because I can't fathom otherwise not sharing it until now. I saw this lovely comedy at Tribeca in June of last year and adored it -- here is my review -- and I've been awaiting news of its release (and posting sexy photos of Owen Teague) ever since. 

And the trailer gives you ample reason to see why I -- much like the character of Grffin himself -- discovered an Owen Teague fixation thanks to this movie. A first-time feature from writer-director Nicholas Colia (based on a short film he directed in 2017) this movie recalls the suburban acidity of Todd Solondz (clearly Colia worships at the altar of Welcome to the Dollhouse, and as well he should!) but with a real sweetness to it too. Having Melanie Lynskey play Mom is a dream come true for all the gay boys of the world, after all. So even as we're recoiling from our most obnoxious adolescent  traits writ cinematic, we're smiling the whole way. Here's the trailer:

The reason why I'm annoyed at myself for having delayed posting about this is -- Griffin in Summer is out next week! It hits theaters on August 29th! So I'm sorry to tell you this late but whatever plans you've made for Labor Day weekend you're just going to have to cancel them right now. This is more important than your stupid face sticking through a hole in a beach boardwalk photo-op that makes you look like a muscle-man and/or penguin. Priorities, people! But to make it even clearer here are a few more shots of Owen Teague to convince after the jump...

Don't Forget...

... the third seasons of both The White Lotus and Yellowjackets are back onn T.V. this weekend! And I have illustarated this news with two photos of Sam Nivola, son of Alessandro, who is on TWL so you don't forget. Of course Arnold Schwarzenegger already did that work for me when he told us all to keep our eyes peeled for his son Patrick's bare ass. What a proud papa!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Juliet: All the best people have bad chests 

and bone diseases. It's all frightfully romantic.

A happy 30 to Peter Jackson's masterpiece!

Maybe they could announce a 4K release today?

Seeing as how the movie doesn't even have a blu-ray.

Good Morning, World

Let's make like Melanie Lynskey and start our day off with Jason Ritter's cute little bum staring at us! (via) This is from a 2012 movie called Free Samples that I have never heard of in my entire life but which actually has quite the cast -- Ritter, Jesse Eisenberg, and the still under-appreciated Jess Weixler of my beloved 2007 vagina-dentata horror movie Teeth. (And justice for Teeth which I realized recently still hasn't been put out on blu-ray yet!) (You can watch it on Prime right now though!) Anyway thanks for getting us off on the right foot -- cheek? -- this morning, Mr. Ritter!

Good Morning, Owen Teague Twenty-Two Times

At the start of June I reviewed a movie called Griffin In Summer that premiered at Tribeca -- I absolutely and totally adored the film, it was my favorite at the fest, and I wasn't alone because it won the award for the Best Narrative Feature from the fest itself. The movie's about a tween named Griffin (Everett Blunck) who falls in love with the much older handyman (played by Owen Teague) that his mom (Melanie Lynskey) hires, and as I said here at MNPP when linking to my review the film had me suffering much the same fate -- I am now crushing like mad on Owen Teague. 

So imagine my joy, my ebullience, when I opened the internet this morning and this extremely gratuitous and plentiful photoshoot of Owen for Behind the Blinds magazine greeted me the very first thing! Yes this is the second grand Blinds photoshoot in as many days -- see Arnaud Valois yesterday -- somebody over there deserves a raise. Anyway it's one hell of a hot set of photos so let's just get them them! Hit the jump... 

The Summer of Griffin In Summer

Hello! Good to see you all. Sorry it's been even quieter than I warned you it would be last week -- I am fully engulfed in the maw of the 2024 Tribeca Film Fest. But it should slow down as of tomorrow afternoon. For right this second I'm popping in because I want to direct you to jmy favorite movie of the entire fest (as of this moment) -- I've now seen 34 movies for Tribeca and my heart belongs (as of this moment) to writer-director Nicholas Colia's first-time-feature called Griffin in Summer, which stars the tremendously talented Everett Blunck as an overbearing tween slash playwright who falls for the twentysomething handyman (Owen Teague, pictured above and below) that his mother (Melanie Lynskey) hires for the summer. Click here to read my review at Pajiba -- the movie is very clearly influenced by my beloved Todd Solondz but measures Solondz's acidity out with a dash of sweetness that makes it feel like it's own thing. I've watched it twice now and I wholeheartedly adore this movie. Prepare for me to be real obnoxious about it between now and whenever it gets released! (Also prepare yourselves for me to regularly moon over Owen Teague, because this movie forged a big-time crush. Hubba hubba.)

Good Morning, World

I did not make this gif, I found it, but my memory is telling me this was Raúl Esparza on the limited series Candy with our girl Melanie Lynskey killing it, both literally and figuratively. If that is indeed correct I'm surprised I didn't gif this when I was watching that show, but then I did get very distracted by Pablo Schriber's short-shorts. Anyway it's Raúl's 53rd birthday today and I'm pretty sure he might have eye-fucked me at the Opening Night Party of the New York Film Festival a couple of weeks ago so I wish him a happy day today! Thanks for making me feel seen, Raúl.

Good Morning, World

A happy 37 to Christopher Abbott today! Funny how Catch-22 director George Clooney was even more exploitative of Chris's naked flesh than Girls director Lena Dunham was, right? Right. And then Brandon Cronenberg blew them both out of the water with Possessor, haha. Anyway Chris has proven himself one of the finest actor of his age group if you ask me with those three aforementioned roles alongside his turns in Black Bear and On the Count of Three and and Piercing and alongside the ever-spectacular Melanie Lynskey in Hello I Must Be Going (what a great little movie that is), so let's give the boy some love today. What have you enjoyed him in so far? Any favorites? Tell me in the comments. 

Look Who's Coming To Yellowjackets!

Our boy François Arnaud, that's who! He's just joined the second season of the hit series -- he's going to be playing (and if you don't want to know anything about the second season I suppose this is a spoiler) "a New York writer and secret boyfriend of Coach Scott (Steven Krueger) who reminds Coach Scott of what might have been." Does this mean that the coach in the "present day" will continue being played by the same actor as in the flashbacks then?

I guess they can get away with that? I mean I wanna continue looking at Steven Krueger so I absolutely will be okay with it. It's just a little bit weird when he was only in his early 30s when they shot the first season, really only about ten years older than the "teen" versions. Whatever, add some eye wrinkles and we're golden. More importantly give him and François sex times, please and thank you! Oh and I think I forgot to post this news when it broke aaaages ago -- also in the second season will be Melanie Lynskey's adorable husband Jason Ritter, as well as her co-star in I Don't Feel At Home in This World Anymore Elijah Wood! Mel and Elijah made an awesome team in that awesome movie -- I hope they get to play together again. 

And The Award Goes To... Queens!

News today has been coming hot and heavy and I've been straaaaaining to keep up -- I haven't even gotten around to that news about a new season of Feud being directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Tom Hollander as Truman Capote alongside Naomi Watts, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockheart, and Diane Lane as the high society ladies he spurned when he wrote that tell-all back in the 1970s! And I'm not getting to it now either! (Really I just said all that needs to be said though, didn't I? Until we see the damn thing. anyway.) No this post here is to wham-bam out today's announcement from the LGBTQ critic's guild I belong to that we have awarded our TV Awards -- the Dorian TV Awards from GALECA are here, and you can read our entire slate of winners over at The Hollywood Reporter. No I don't have time to get into it too much, but I will say I think we did real good -- especially in the acting prizes, which went to Melanie Lynskey for Yellowjackets and Jennifer Coolidge for The White Lotus, in Lead and Supporting respectively. Queens, deserving queens, all of them queens!

Emmys For Everybody!

Congratulations from all of us here at MNPP (i.e. me and my shadow) to all of the Emmy nominees -- people like Nicholas Hoult in The Great, for instance. You hear me, Nicky? I said congratulations. You can feel free to dump that bottle of champagne over me in slow motion now, I will allow it. Anyway see all of the nominees over here -- as reported yesterday I have to run offline for the next couple of hours so y'all tell me what you think is good and what you think is bad about the Emmy nominations in the comments here and I will listen to you when I get back! I already complained about a couple of snubs on Twitter a bit ago (Julia Roberts and Michelle Pfeiffer to be exact) but there's good stuff -- The White Lotus ruled and I am terribly happy to see Mike White have such success at last, and then there's our favorite person in the world...

There's no way I am wading through all the Emmy nominees just so I can get annoyed but I did make sure that the most important thing happened -- yay @melanielynskey!!! #YellowJackets pic.twitter.com/nuOSgz6MkN

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) July 12, 2022

Good Morning, World

So I finally started watching the Hulu limited-series Candy this weekend, which I'd been meaning to get around to for ages -- Melanie Lynskey, after all! -- but what I was not ready for was this being a story about the seductive power of Pablo Schreiber playing volleyball in 80s-era short shorts! Never have I felt so seen! I have only watched a couple of episodes so far but so far it's terrific -- anybody else watched it? But I'll save the complete thoughts for when I've finished the series. For now let's just get back to "Pablo Schreiber playing volleyball in 80s-era short shorts." That I can do. Hit the jump for the gifs...

Small Screen Dorians

This year GALECA, the LGBT critic's guild of which I have been a member for a few years now, decided to split our annual Dorian Awards into two parts, with our Film awards following the end-of-year schedule that the Oscars do basically, and our TV awards hitting mid-year, closer to the Emmys I guess. (I have no idea when the Emmys happen, I haven't paid the Emmys attention in at least a decade.) Point being the TV portion of our Dorians is happening right now and today the nominations were announced! Photographed above is the one that made me the happiest -- we have been worshipping the goddess Melanie Lynskey since Heavenly Creatures and the Yellowjackets love is well-earned! -- but if you click on over to The Hollywood Reporter you can see all of our noms, and I actually think they're pretty good! Nomination leaders Hacks and Somebody Somewhere are both wonderful shows anyway, and there are countless highlights besides. Okay I don't really know how The Staircase got totally snubbed but I'll just chalk that up to us being unsure where to spread the wealth, in which case let me just add... 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Invitation (2015)

David: It's okay, I'm not offended. A lot of people think 

we're crazy. But I doubt they're as happy as we are.

Happy birthday to director Karyn Kusama today! I hope she comes back and directs more episodes of Yellowjackets next season! She only did the pilot, but I'd love more of her golden touch in season two. (Whatever the case if Melanie Lynskey's there we'll be in good hands.) Stepping back to The Invitation (masterpiece!) which is to say more specifically Michiel Huisman news though, did y'all see this photo of Luke Evans teased us with on his Insta last week?

The two of them recently filmed Echo 3, an upcoming Apple+ series from Mark Boal, screenwriter of Triple Frontier and Zero Dark Thirty -- here's my post about that announcement. One assumes this photo was taken during the time of that shoot, or maybe they just couldn't get enough of each other's half-naked company. And if it's the latter we need to take to the streets to demand more proof. 

From Yellowjackets To Yorick We Go

I have to big important and exciting trailers to share with you and you today! Above is the first (clearly), for the forthcoming Showtime series called Yellowjackets. What is Yellowjackets, you ask? I am glad you asked, here's what Yellowjackets is -- Yellowjackets is a series that stars Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci, with a pilot directed by Karyn Kusama. What, you need other information? Fuck your other information. Watch the trailer, that'll give you your precious "other information" -- me, I know what I need to know to rearrange my entire life around that thing, thank you very much. Yellowjackets premieres on Showtime sometime this fall.

And then we have the first trailer for the long and I do mean long gestating Y: The Last Man adaptation, which I have been documenting basically since I began posting on this site 15 years ago. (Chart all of our coverage at this link.) It's been some time in the making! It was supposed to be a movie, or two, at one point -- it almost got made with Shia LaBeouf. But now, eighteen years after comics writer Brian K. Vaughn first introduced Yorick Brown, the sexy regular-guy last male on Earth after a plague wiped out all of the menfolk leaving a world of pissed-off and free women to pick up the pieces, we've got an FX series. And it premieres soon! On September 12th! I gotta go see about screeners, yo.

Good Morning, World

Good Monday and Happy Morning, one and all! Hey, eyes down here. Yes this morning seemed a good time to finally share some "Christopher Abbott in Possessor" love -- took me damn long enough. I reviewed the movie weeks ago (right here) and as we all now know movies only get discussed for one to two days now and then they're done! Finito! Well I apologize -- last night I was watching Christopher's next conversation starter, called Black Bear and co-starring Aubrey Plaza, and...

#NowWatching BLACK BEAR and you guys... my thing for Christopher Abbott has gotten really really real in the past twelve months or so; he sure is something pic.twitter.com/QQECuCsly3

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 16, 2020

... that got me thinking about Chris. He really is something, right?  I'm trying to think of what did it -- you know, "it", turned the tide, or in the parlance of this here website you're on right now: what was "The Moment I Fell For..." Christopher Abbott? It was Piercing I think? A combination of Piercing and Catch-22. I mean I'd thought he was good before that -- I thought he was good on Girls way back. 

Oh and (sorry I am looking through his IMDb as I type this) there was Hello I Must Be Going with Melanie Lynskey of course! How could I forget that? What a wonderful movie. (PS it's on Amazon Prime right now.) His resume really is scattered with gems. The only major one that I haven't seen is James White and I'm just gonna admit I am afraid of James White. I am afraid it will destroy me, emotionally speaking, and so I haven't been able to bring myself to watch it. Some day I'll be in the mood for that but given the way of the world for the past few years those days have been in short supply. Anyway...

... I hadn't shared the trailer for Black Bear, Chris' new movie which inspired this entire post, before, so there that is. And I will definitely, definitely have more to say about it when it comes out on December 4th. To get us through the next two to five minutes of that wait here after the jump are a handful of prized Possessor gifs, and believe me you'll dig...

The Comfort of Criterion

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Happy Criterion Announcement Day! As you're no doubt well aware by now every middle of the month Criterion announces their disc releases of three months into the future, and we're here to rapturously applaud them every damned time. Now here today we're talking the releases of August of 2020, and it's a surprising bunch -- surprising in that I haven't ever seen a single damned one of them! That doesn't happen often, but August has gone and done it.

Tops of my list is Paul Shrader's 1981 thriller The Comfort of Strangers starring Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren as a seductive old-world European couple that ensnares into their Erotic Lifestyle the younger prettier duo of Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson. I've wanted to see this movie for ages but it's one that's always skirted by, and here's my chance with a 4K restoration and all the usual Criterion bells and whistles. Any of you seen it before?

Other releases: There's Jean Renoi's 1934 film Toni, about a love triangle set in the French countryside; then there's Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta's 1975 political thriller The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, about a young woman sleeping with a terrorist -- that young woman is played by the great Angela Winkler, who was seen most recently playing Miss Tanner in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria!

And then there's D.A. Pennebaker's 1971 documentary Town Bloody Hall which documented the night that author Norman Mailer defended on stage his controversial essay "The Prisoner of Sex" against charges of sexism from a group of prominent feminist icons, including Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, Betty Friedan, and Susan Sontag. This reminds me -- is anybody watching Mrs. America on Hulu? I lovvve Mrs. America.
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Thank you Thank you THANK YOUUUU for this spectacular @melanielynskey moment @MrsAm_FXonHulu — Bake me some Lesbian Pie I’m in!!! #MrsAmerica pic.twitter.com/gEvJF0DErI

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 15, 2020

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Finally, and hardly lastly, there's the enormous boxed-set of Agnès Varda films that we knew was coming -- hitting on August 11th the fifteen-disc set will include all thirty-nine of her features, shorts, and documentaries spanning Varda's six decades of film-making. Here below is the trailer for the set, which gets across its massive scope pretty well, I think:

From Castles To Cannibals

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If we have to make due without any Melanie Lynskey on the second season of Castle Rock -- don't get me wrong I am real excited about Lizzy Caplan playing Annie Wilkes, but still, Melanie Lynskey -- then at least we can hold on to today's super news of what the world's sweetest (but not in an annoying way) actress is up to: click on over to The Film Experience, and believe me it's worth clicking on if you like cool things, to find out.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Bright Star (2009)

Fanny: I still don't know how to work out a poem. 

John: A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept a mystery.

Fanny: I love mystery.

There are four movies of some note celebrating their tenth anniversaries today. There's this film here by Jane Campion. Then there's Karyn Kusama's horror flick Jennifer's Body, which seems to have finally started getting the respect it deserves now that everybody's hate for Megan Fox has cooled. 

Then there is Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! which I really and truly adore -- mostly for Melanie Lynskey, but I think it's one of his best and I'm a fan. And then finally there is Vicenzo Natali's much maligned Splice, which damn the haters I really enjoyed. I will admit I haven't seen it in ten years, but I think it's one of those movies that got an "F" from audiences that was just too freaking weird for them to get. 

But I digress! I polled y'all on Twitter earlier this week and Bright Star won the poll, just by the smallest of smidges over Jennifer's Body. So Bright Star gets today's post. I am fine with this, as Bright Star is a masterpiece and Ben Whishaw in Bright Star is also a masterpiece. Tell us which of these movies you love the most, or about how much you fell in love with Ben Whishaw here, in the comments!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Away We Go (2009)

Tom: It's all those good things you have in you. The love, the wisdom, the generosity, the selflessness, the patience. The patience! At 3 A.M. when everyone's awake because Ibrahim is sick and he can't find the bathroom and he's just puked all over Katki's bed. When you blink, when you blink! And it's 5:30 and it's time to get up again and you know you're going to be tired all day, all week, all your fucking life. And you're thinking what happened to Greece? What happened to swimming naked off the coast of Greece? And you have to be willing to make the family out of whatever you have.

I love everyone in and everything about Sam Mendes' 2009 film Away We Go, which was released 10 years ago today, but whenever I think back on the film I think of two particular things first. I think of Maggie Gyllenhaal talking about her hate for strollers -- "Why would I want to push my baby away from me???" -- and I think of every single moment that Chris Messina & Melanie Lynskey are on screen as old college friends of Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph). Their mini-movie is a thing of grace of gorgeousness that breaks my heart and puts it back together again within however many minutes it is they're on-screen. What a gift. 

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