Tadanobu Take Us Away

Nothing like a hint of Tadanobu Asano's furry tum-tum to take us into the weekend with a buzz -- sure the world's on fire but there are still for the moment small pleasures to be had. (In fact you can see three more of these small pleasures right here.) As for the weekend, well, it's here. And there's a new Final Destination movie to enjoy! If you missed my review earlier you can read it here -- I'm seeing it myself a second time tomorrow because once again we must grab onto the good things while they're available! Such doom tinged to all of my optimissm these days! Weird, right? Where could all of that be coming from... aaaanyway I have a second review of a different movie coming out this weekend that will drop at some point in the next couple of days, so check back and I'll try to post about that. Until then... well just smoke 'em if ya got 'em, my friends. Poof!

Today's Mood

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 7:35 PM

Gael y la Luna

Seeing these new photos of forever besties with benefits Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna (via) reminds me that it's been a very long time since I have watched the movie that began it all Y tu mamá también. I need to get on that, but I do feel as if the minute I re-watch one Cuarón movie I am going to have to suddenly re-watch them all, and I keep holding out for a 4K remaster of Children of Men before that happens. WTF are they even waiting for? That movie has been begging to get a great re-release for ages. Anyway I digress -- I'm using these photos as a smoke-screen for my disappearing act -- I'm headed off to get my new Covid vaccine! And so should you be! See y'all tomorrow. And if you wanna bring either -- or both, both is good -- of these fellas with ya, feel free!

5 Off My Head: Threesome Movies

I know I've told this story here before but in 1994 when the movie Threesome was released I was still very much a closeted high schooler, but I had to see it. HAD to.  This was before the internet so anything with any hint of gay content coming anywhere near my small upstate New York cow town was extremely rare. And yet here was this movie opening at our recently built five theater multiplex! I had to be there! So I sneaked into a screening one night... and bumped into one of my best friends from church. There with her current boyfriend. Her current boyfriend who I had done a little light fooling around with a few years previous. And she insisted on us all sitting together. It was an utterly mortifying experience for me, and probably drove me deeper into the closet for another six months lol. Oh well! 

Anyway threesome movies! They're a good topic for today because of Luca Guadagnino's Challengers being the number one movie in the country, and also totally ruling. So here are five of my favorites!

5 of my Fave Threesome Movies

3 (Tom Tykwer, 2010) 

Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 19833)

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) 

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Splendor (Gregg Araki, 1999)

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What are your favorite threesome movies?

Art Movie Apocalypse

Actually being on reputable movie press lists now makes me feel all grown up and semi-respectable! It is weird! But a good weird, like when the taxi hits a pothole just right. There, phew, I am no longer burdened with feelings of respectability. That was a close one. Aaaaanyway to get to my point I got the 2021 slate for the studio known as Neon this afternoon -- they're the fine people behind gems like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Ammonite and other movies not about lesbians on the water (here is that joke, but better) and there were several bits that caught my eye -- like the above photo, the first I've seen of Tilda Swinton in director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new movie called Memoria! It's described succinctly as being about "a Scottish woman who beings to notices strange sounds while traveling through the jungles of Colombia." Oh look, another photo:

That one's off of IMDb, although they don't have much more information than that tagline. We do know the film co-stars the great Spanish actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, so wonderful in Zama and We Are What We Are (the original one) and Blancanieves and Bad Education. Also bit of trivia -- he was the narrator of Y Tu Mama Tambien. Anyway no word on when Memoria is coming out other than "in 2021" but we'll surely stay tuned. Also of note on Neon's list of 2021 films... 

... is Titane, the new one from Raw director Julia Ducournau! After Raw we'd follow Ducournau anywhere, and this one's also got a killer cast with French actors Natalie Boyer and Vincent Lindon -- sidenote, I can't see Vincent Lindon without immediately thinking happy thoughts of the terrific film La Moustache, which I've posted about previously and always recommend. Anyway Titane is described thus:

"A young man with a bruised face is picked up by airport customs officers. He claims to be Adriane Legrand, who disappeared as a child ten years ago. For Adriene's father Vincent, a long nightmare has finally come to its end, and he takes the young man home. At the same time, a series of gruesome murders is ravaging the area..."

That ellipsis at the end of that description is doing a lot of heavy lifting! Still, knowing Raw, I feel like things might not work out in this father's favor. But I do love Ducournau's angle on plopping horror down among a family full of secrets -- it's a great space. No word on Titane's specific release date yet either, but I will surely let y'all know. Other films of note on Neon's slate -- speaking of Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma's new one Petite Maman is set for "Fall 2021," while Spencer, director Pablo Larrain's Princess Di bio-pic with Kristen Stewart, is set for "Winter"... oh, and the great and animated gay refugee movie Flee, which I saw at Sundance a couple months back, is also hitting in the fall.

5 Off My Head: Weathering These Storms

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Even in the middle of a real-life Disaster Movie it turns out I'll get sucked into a Disaster Movie if it's on TV, even if it's a terrible one I have nevertheless seen a billion times before -- look no further than the hour I spent with Dante's Peak, beloved Dante's Peak, just the day before yesterday.  (Is that the prequel to The Day After Tomorrow?)

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Worse than the fact that I have gotten sucked into Dante's Peak for the five thousandth time, I just cried a little when the guy went over on the bridge? END TIMES

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 29, 2020

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As a lifelong devotee of this often terrible -- or at the least terribly derivative -- genre, you come to know the tropes... hell you come to rely on the tropes. They're part of what makes the experience so satisfying time after time after time, decade after decade after decade. People often complain about the gooey moral centers of Disaster Movies -- the way they go out of their way to center and confirm the strength of the old-fashioned family unit, Dad and Mom and Son and Daughter and Dog, can't forget the dog.

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There's always the generic family drama that you don't care about, you just want to get to the Good Stuff of the earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos, the alien attacks and Sharknados. And if you go all the way back to the very first proper Disaster Movie, 1933's Deluge, this is still the case -- it turns a story about earthquakes and tsunamis devastating the entire globe into a love triangle! Of course...

... Deluge also ends with the extra third of that love triangle walking into the ocean to sacrifice herself, so this history is, uhh, complicated. Anyway in my forward-thinking brain those criticisms of conservativism are correct. And yet... my lizard brain don't give a hoot -- my lizard brain loves this shit. Save everybody and give me a damn gooey ending dammit! Reunite everybody in front of a sunrise, flags waving, generically patriotic music blaring obnoxiously as hugs happen in slo-mo -- I want all of it. That said some of these movies have done more with the tropes than others, and here's a list of some of my personal faves.

5 Great Disaster Movie Happy Endings

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Mars Attacks! -- This list you're reading right now exists because I started thinking about Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and its glorious deranged ending. Granted Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! has a gloriously deranged beginning and a gloriously deranged middle part to go with that gloriously deranged ending. But that ending! It's exactly what I picture the end of our current situation will be like. We all step out into the outdoors from some dark cavern, blinking our eyes in the too bright sunlight, a bunch of woodland creatures fly up, Annette Bening will be there in a wig and Tom Jones will start singing. That's what is going to happen right? I was promised Tom Jones.

Gravity -- I thought about including one of the most bombastic examples of the ending I described up top, like say your Armageddon ending (which is like 75% slo-mo and flags) or your Independence Day, which has people of every color across the globe yee-hawing over the downed saucers (which probably crashed on and murdered millions in the process). But I prefer Cuaron's little spin, with Sandra Bullock clutching that weirdly primordial patch of wet clay -- he shoots our natural soil like we're in a Star Trek episode, making home feel very foreign. Also for all of Gravity's emphasis on Sandy's astronaut being a Mother this ending does stand apart from the usual tropes in how internalized it keeps itself -- all that matters is this woman manages to stand and take a step, and another.

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Titanic -- Fuck you, haters! This is my list and I'm gonna include that old broad making an "Oopsie!" sound as she throws a priceless artifact into the ocean if I wanna, dammit. In all seriousness I will defend Titanic to my dying breath -- which hey might be tomorrow, so maybe this is it! -- and I love the sequence where the camera floats through the submerged ship and it comes to life and we see Jack and Rose dancing down there together once again. Yeah this is more "bittersweet" than "happy" but Rose gets a good life with horses and shit, and I'm crying just typing this, so fuck you! Heartless monsters!

The Impossible -- While I think the above scenes from James Cameron's and Alfonso Cuaron's epics are wonderfully acted it's the final moments from director J.A. Bayona's 2012 film about the 2004 tsunami that gets the Gold Medal performance-wise for Naomi Watts' deeply affecting portrait of terror and grief and relief and every other fucking thing that washes over her in these final moments.
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View this post on Instagram

Quarantine PROTIP: EAT your feelings... 🍰 😋

A post shared by Naomi Watts (@naomiwatts) on Mar 30, 2020 at 7:58am PDT

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And extra bonus points for Naomi brightening

our current situation with cake. We all want cake.

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Starship Troopers --Starting and ending this list on subversive notes seems about right, and it doesn't get much more subversive than Paul Verhoeven's Fascist Satire about gorgeous fuckable human beings gleefully conquering and torturing all those filthy foreigners -- to the winner the spoils, ya goddamn buncha bugs! Whaddya wanna do, live forever???

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What are your favorite Disaster Movie Endings?

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Magic, The New Criterion Gathering

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Oh me and oh my my my Criterion has announced their line-up of releases for the month of February and it's astonishment every which way one glances. Pier Paolo Pasolini's horned-up classic Teorema, which has a tight-trousered Terence Stamp romancing every member of a bougie family and driving them to madness? Yes please! Alfonso Cuarón's greatest-film-of-just-last-year Roma? Hells bells! The documentary to end all documentaries Paris is Burning? Best fuck believe it. You can see all of the new titles and their special features right here on their website. The one I'm most curious about though...

... is the one I know the least about. A three-film boxed-set of fantastical fables from the Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman who's been compared to Georges Méliès and who's named as an inspiration to Jan Svankmajer and Terry Gilliam, Zeman apparently mixed live-action with animation in revolutionary ways to tell "boy's stories" of the fantastical including Jules Verne adaptations and similar tall tales. The three films includes are 1955's Journey to the Beginning of Time, 1958's Invention For Destruction, and 1962's The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (the latter making that Gilliam connection immediately clear). Anybody seen any of these? I want them all right now! Hit the jump for the list of special features from this set...

My Favorite Movies of 2018: The Top 10

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See 10 runners-up here, and

see our #20-11 films here.

I wish I could lay out some sort of thematic through-line for what moved me in 2018, but per usual it's as schizophrenic as my insides -- our loves veer from Singing Nannys in the sky to Dancing Witches slinging meat hooks, and everything in between. As it should be, I suppose -- the cinema's the place for every mood, every inclination. It's like Mary Poppins' bottomless carpet bag -- reach in and put out a French drama about divorce, an American drama... about divorce... a British Jewish Drama... about divorce... okay, okay, whatever. You get the point. My life was scarred by divorce and I am a product of a broken home and these are my ten favorite cinematic achievements of 2018 -- god! Leave me alone, already.

10. Custody

(dir. Xavier Legrand)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: In the bathtub

9. Wildlife

(dir. Paul Dano)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Showing the boy the fire

8. Support the Girls

(dir. Andrew Bujalski)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: On the roof

7. We the Animals

(dir. Jeremiah Zagar)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Kissing a boy

6. Can You Ever Forgive Me?

(dir. Marielle Heller)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Lee goes on a date

5. Disobedience

(dir. Sebastián Lelio)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Spit take

4. The Favourite

(dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Through the door

3. Hereditary

(dir. Ari Aster)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Dinner conversation

2. Suspiria

(dir. Luca Guadagnino)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment:
When the dancer becomes the dance

1. ROMA

(dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

-- read my review here --

Indelible Moment: Breaking the waves
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Good Morning, Great Gratuity #9

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Seems fitting to head into our final day of 2018's "Golden Trousers" awards with Alfonso Cuarón's ROMA which, dunno if you've heard, I am quite the fan of. (On a related sidenote: stay tuned for our Top 10 later today!) We've got one more "Great Gratuity" of the year coming this afternoon but I don't think any scene felt more admirably gratuitous when it came to the man-flesh than did this one of Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) showing off to Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) -- that's not to say that Cuarón doesn't impart all we need to know about Fermin in this vital moment; he is a dick and a stick, he is bluster and seed. Sex and violence. And all Cleo can do is stare appreciatively.

We've all been there, sister. In fact let's be there right now 

by hitting the jump for the rest of this scene in gif form...

Miss Cleo Regrets

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I don't think it's a spoiler for our forthcoming (one of these days) Golden Trouser awards to let on that Alfonso Cuarón ROMA is my favorite film of the year -- I've said as much a few times already, and rather stridently at that!

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Listen, I loved a lot of movies this year. But anybody naming anything not ROMA the best achievement in film in 2018 is just embarrassing themselves pic.twitter.com/eOlF29PYS5

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 27, 2018

Here's my original review. Anyway we are tackling this my favorite film of 2018 for this week's edition of our "Beauty vs Beast" poll over at The Film Experience, so click on over to choose between its two Oscar nominated performances. Go on. Click I said!

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Good Morning, Timothée & Co

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I think this might be our first "Good morning" via evening wear but these pictures of Timothée Chalamet on the cover and inside of Vanity Fair's latest annual "Hollywood Issue" were the first thing I saw after sitting down at my desk this morning and they perked me up so I shall return the favor. 

Smart of them, pairing Timmy with his Lady Bird (and forthcoming Little Women) co-star Saoirse Ronan for a couple of snaps, since I don't know about you but I just keep hoping those crazy kids can make it work. (I realize I am projecting, they seem more like brother and sister than anything else, but that's what movie stars are for...

... projecting.) See more pictures here, including Rami Malek & Henry Golding & Nicky Hoult & John David Washington on the manly side, with the queen Regina King & Elisabeth Debicki & Tessa Thompson & Yalitza Aparicio taking care of the lady business.

Thom Talks Suspiria Stuff

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For Thom Yorke's 48th birthday back in October of 2016 I did a list of "My Five Favorite Uses of Radiohead Music in Movies" where I hit up stuff like Clueless and Romeo + Juliet but wanna know what's even better than me rambling about such things? Thom Yorke himself rambling about such things. (An eternal truth if ever there were one.) And that's just what happens in Thom's chat with Variety about his first score for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria - they ask him what uses of Radiohead music he's liked in other people's movies and here's what he says:

"There’s been a few that make me go, “I wish I wish we’d done that.” There was an old sequence in “Vanilla Sky,” where they used “Everything In Its Right Place” that we really liked. There was a use of “You and Whose Army?” in some independent movie — I can’t remember the name now — which had me in tears, it was so good. [Editor’s note: He may mean Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies.”] Generally, when it works, it’s the coolest feeling. I think my all-time favorite film now is “Children of Men.” They use a little tiny bit of “Life in a Glass House” during the Michael Caine sequence. I love the film so much, and then the fact that our music is in it is like “Wow, f—ing hell!”"

I mentioned two of those myself, but I've still never seen Incendies somehow - really gotta get on that. Anyway the Variety chat is full of fascinating stuff - he says that David Fincher was trying to get him to score Fight Club! (The Dust Brothers eventually did it.) Thom also dives deep on the process of working with Luca, and of getting advice from his band-mate Johnny Greenwood, who's pretty well-versed in the process now what with several Paul Thomas Anderson scores under his skinny belt. Go read the whole thing! And then go tell everybody you know that the song "Suspirium" should be nominated for a goddamned Oscar, please and thanks. And yes I am otherwise ignoring today's news that a limited-edition vinyl record of previously unreleased Suspiria music is being released next month because I just now read about it a whole three hours late and that shit is already sold right the fuck out. Dammit...

Kitty Smut & Other Fine Stuffs

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Welp, it's Friday already! How does this keep happening? Every week it seems. Well as long as it's Friday let's take a look at the movies that're out today; be helpful and shit. First things first to my fellow New Yorkers, two of this month's big retrospectives are starting -- the Quad Cinema is running "Rated X" a really rather unbelievable series of films that all got slapped with that rating. The series runs from the expected (like the Swedish art-house smut I Am Curious Yellow, co-starring the handsome Börje Ahlstedt, seen above) to John Waters movies to a grand cavalcade of horror flicks like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Evil Dead and Dawn of the Dead and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Oh and then there is...

... Salon Kitty, a truly insane looking 1976 movie from Tinto Brass, the director of Caligula, about a Nazi Brothel starring Helmut Berger and Ingrid Thulin. HOW have I never seen this??? I am seeing this. Oh and besides that also opening at the Quad today is their restoration of Visconti's Death in Venice, which I mentioned before...

... and speaking of "things I have mentioned before" the second series premiering today here in NYC is FSLC's retrospective of the director Jacques Tourneur; see my original take on this series right here. They are screening both Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie this very evening!!! Ya can't go wrong.

Okay so those aside for the rest of us schmucks in wide release there is Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse - I didn't write a full review but I mentioned this morning that this thing is fantastic and funny enough my opinion hasn't changed since then - it is still fantastic. Go see it. Also opening today -- Barry Jenkins' gorgeous If Beale Street Could Talk (read my review here) and then of course there is ROMA, which I finally wrote up yesterday and which is on your Netflix machines right now -- it is the year's best film. See it in the theater if at all possible, but see it whatever way you can.

But I Don't Know If You Know Who I Am

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You can hear the sound of the impromptu parade before you see it, but just subconsciously - you don't even notice the insidious sound of the horns and marching until it's cutting through the tender goodbye scene at the narrative's center. But once you see them, with their trumpets and cool hand batons, you realize they have always been there, will always be there, smacking their feet and sounds up and down this street or many a street just like this street, pah-rum-pum-pum-ing blessings bestowed, prayers whispered, cruel jokes twisting in the twists of fate and crowd scenes. 

That's the magic of ROMA, magical ROMA, Alfonso Cuarón's sneaky everything - a sleight of cinematic hand, making you look one way while the card you thought you had your eye on got shuffled up a sleeve, behind an ear, only to then pop out in the most unexpected of places. It's a reordering of expectations, as effortless as foot-falls starting at one place and ending at another - life itself works like this, and it isn't until Cuarón shows it to you so plainly, so magnificently, that you feel it, ache it, life death and everything on both sides, sky and night. Animals baying at parked big cars.

Every time the characters step out onto that street it's something - dog shit, student protests and bloodshed, cigarettes sucked during the pause of a stop-light - chaos and chatter, sweet 70s glamour and dust clouds clotting the sun like snow. Lines of Americans shooting their guns, fireworks setting the world on fire, tidal waves as tall as three children stacked tall. The memory places of ROMA run deep, unforgettable - I feel I lived these lives, caressed Cleo's cheek, clicked my heels across the hard stone coming home from drunken stumblings. ROMA is a part of me now, as here as my thumb - another person's experiences tucked under my toenails, shaved into my scalp. Alfonso Cuarón just tattooed his childhood, my childhood, inside my eyelids, and it hummed as warm as soft white honey.

More Globes & Me

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I got a way late start to the day today and I was already planning on trying to get some other stuff done off-blog so, point being, today might be brief. But for now you should head over to The Film Experience for a few thoughts from me and several few more from my TFE compatriots on yesterday's Golden Globe nominations. And that's the first part of two, so stay tuned for more.

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