Anybody Going To See The Crow?

It's out this weekend and I'm surprised to find myself pretty indifferent to see this movie since I'm a genuine Bill Skarsgård fan -- I guess this is where I admit I've never been too nuts about the 1994 movie. The soundtrack -- fuck yes, that is an amazing soundtrack. But the movie's cornball goth aesthetic always felt corny to me, even then. (Sorry, Bail Ling!) Anyway this is really just an excuse to post that photo of BIll's ab muscles on the set of the film -- as if you didn't see through me immediately. But if you're excited for this and if you go and see it, please come back and share your feelings! I am easily persuadable. 

Pimps Don't Commit Suicide

In the run-up to today's drop of Arrow's fancy schmancy blu-ray of Richard Kelly's mucho maligned 2006 flick Southland Tales -- which includes the also mucho maligned longer "Cannes Cut" of the film -- there have been approximately eleventy billion interviews with Kelly talking about the movie (this has been compounded by the 20th anniversary of Donnie Darko). Far more than I could ever begin to link to. Just google his name, they'll all come up, I promise. And I even watched the "Cannes Cut" a few weeks ago hoping I'd have something to say about the movie here. But... this movie, man. This movie still defeats my ability to say anything coherent about it. I both hate it and love it in equal measure -- it confounds me. I thought it might be better, 15 years on, but...

I AM GOING IN
WISH ME LUCK pic.twitter.com/qaCHHTdBnz

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 27, 2020

... no. Nope. Nada. I still just kind of sit there dazed by the thing. (By the way that tweet above, if you click over to Twitter, will give you a Twitter thread from December when I re-watched all three of Richard Kelly's movies -- Tales, Darko, and The Box -- within a 24-hour span.) I feel like I could make two columns, a Love and a Hate column, and diagram Southland that way, and maybe that flatness might approach the actual way Southland makes me feel, but then I'd be no better than the Jim Cunninghams & Kitty Farmers of the world, would I?

I love that Kelly got to make Southland Tales more than I actually love the experience of sitting through it -- it's always inspirational when batshit of its magnitude gets funded. I just don't think Southland, and what it is about, speaks to me like Darko did and does and forever will -- even The Box on this re-watch felt like it had more to tell me than Tales does. But if Kelly ever does get to make the sequel like he keeps saying he wants to in all of these interviews (he will not) I will be there opening night, that I promise.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

Chev: A man who calls himself The Ferret.
Venus: El Huron.
Chev: You know him?
Venus: No. It means The Ferret in Spanish.

As I wish this movie a happy 10 today -- it was released on April 17th 2009 -- I ask myself, could the extraordinarily un-PC Crank movies be made today? I mean they were offensive in 2009 (and please keep in mind that I don't mean "offensive" as a slight, not in this context) but now, now I assume they're slightly toxic. I haven't re-watched them since they came out but just remembering the Bai Ling scenes alone makes me, uh, worry. But they're so over the top that they're clearly knowing parodies of hyper-masculinity at the same time, so perhaps they manage...? I don't know. I don't personally feel like revisiting and depressing myself today; maybe you do. (Here's my original review although be forewarned half the links in it are dead by now.)

The co-directors known as Neveldine / Taylor who made the Crank films, along with Gamer and the second Ghost Rider, had cornered the market on way out there parodically hyper-masculine action flicks for a hot minute -- Neveldine married actress Alison Lohman and they both (him and Lohman) disappeared but Taylor's kept working. He does Chris Meloni's show Happy (which makes sense given the little I've seen, it seems to be carrying the bonkers torch) and his newest project just got some big news this week: he's making a TV series out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and it is going to star Alden Ehrenreich. That's an interesting mix of folks I cannot wrap my head around entirely...

10 Off My Head - Siri Says 2004

.

After the long, long, long run of the New York Film Festival (though there are still a couple more reviews to come!) I'm trying to get myself back in step with the regularly scheduled blogging, and since we haven't had the time to do one of these in a few weeks I figured this would be a good step in the correct direction for that. In case you don't recall this is the series where I ask my phone to pick a number between 1 and 100 and then I choose my five favorite movies from the year that corresponds with that number. 

And well we've had a first -- this morning Siri picked the number 4. This is the first time we've had a number lower than 10 chosen, given me two choices from Cinema's History to choose from. But as badly as I'd love to choose from such hits as Nervy Nat Kisses the Bride and A Nigger in the Woodpile (yes these are real films, and no I haven't seen either of them) I'm going to go ahead and pick my favorite Movies of 2004 instead of 1904, cuz duh. And since it's such a recent year we're going to pick 10 movies instead of 5, cuz duh.

My 10 Favorite Movies of 2004

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

(dir. Michel Gondry)

-- released on March 19 2004 --

Birth

(dir. Jonathan Glazer)

-- released on October 29 2004)

Three... Extremes

 (dir. Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, 

and Park Chan-wook)

-- released on August 20 2004 --

The Incredibles

(dir. Brad Bird)

-- released on November 5 2004 --

Shaun of the Dead

(dir. Edgar Wright)

-- released on September 24 2004 --

Enduring Love

(dir. Roger Michell)

-- released on November 26 2004 --

Bad Education

(dir. Pedro Almodovar)

 -- released on February 11 2004 --

Mean Girls

(dir. Mark Waters)

-- released on April 30 2004)

I Heart Huckabees

(dir. David O. Russell)

-- released on October 22 2004 --

Mysterious Skin

(dir. Gregg Araki)

-- released on June 24 -- 

-----------------------------------

Runners-up: Palindromes (dir. Todd Solondz), Primer (dir. Shane Carruth), Tarnation (dir.  Jonathan Caouette ), Dead Birds (dir. Alex Turner), Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne), Kill Bill 2 (dir. Quentin Tarantino), 13 Going on 30 (dir. Gary Winick)...
.

... The House of Flying Daggers (dir. Zhang Yimou), Team America: World Police (dir. Trey Parker), Dawn of the Dead (dir. Zack Snyder), Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon), Spider-man 2 (dir. Sam Raimi), Undertow (dir. David Gordon Green)

What are your favorite movies of 2004?

.

Pic of the Day

.

When Catherine Deneuve met Bai Ling! (via)

.

I Am Link

.

--- Super Fur - Because thinking about Henry Cavill's body hair is one of life's greatest pleasures, here's an article in the Times about how a razor company is teaming up with Man of Steel to ask the question on all of our lips (I wish henry Cavill's body hair was on my lips) - how does Superman shave? (thx Mac)

--- Forever Ling - The Film Experience is taking a look at some of the fashions out of Cannes and color me thrilled it includes Bai Ling. The world needs more Bai Ling - I know she works constantly but it's always stuff nobody ever sees; I wish real auteurs would snatch (heh) her up again, she's so entertaining on-screen (and off, for sure).

--- Nicotine Nightmares - He hasn't signed yet but I'll be very happy if he does - Chris Evans might star in the Stephen King adaptation The Ten O'Clock people, from the director of Fright Night. (The original FN, not the remake.) Justin Long had to drop out. It's about a guy who stops smoking with some new drug, which in turn causes him to "discover a frightening aspect of reality." I have no idea, I never read this story.
.

--- Death March - The director Peter Greenaway is going to adapt Thomas Mann's Death In Venice in the UK next year! It'll be his first time filming in England since he made The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover back in 1989, if you can believe that. (thx Gus)

--- Creed Like Me - Michael Fassbender's big video-game adaptation action movie Assassin's Creed doesn't have a director or any other actors attached yet but it's plunked down a flag on the date of May 22nd, 2015. If you ask me it doesn't need a director or other actors - Michael can turn the camera on himself, walk in front of it, and stand there for two hours, and then walk and turn the camera off, and that will be the greatest cinematic achievement of all time.

---  Brand New Dance - I haven't watched this yet but here's a trailer for The Dance of Reality, aka Alejandro Jodorowsky's first film since 1990's The Rainbow Thief. I guess it screened over the weekend at Cannes, but I haven't read any reactions to it either.

--- Triple Transport - Jason Statham isn't signed on to star in them (yet) but a second trilogy of Transporter movies has just been announced - I hope Statham does sign on, these movies are always good for getting him half-naked.

--- Tim Bone - We just mentioned Bone Tomahawk this morning while wishing Timothy Olyphant a happy birthday, but there's new news on it - a studio, Magnolia specifically, has picked it up, so if we were worried about it actually getting made we don't need to be now.

--- The Badger - I forgot to mention super sexy James Badge Dale in my Iron Man 3 review - specifically, how hot (heh) his first scene was with all that crotch-level gazing. Anyway here's an interview with him about that movie (and a couple others he's got coming out this Summer) to make up for my most egregious oversight.

--- Penn For Paul - Sean Penn might be joining the ever expanding cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's next movie, his adaptation of Phynchon's Inherent Vice. PTA is not exactly filling this movie with folks I adore, so he's fortunate he's PTA and can get away with it on his own merit.

Why Hast Thou Forsake Me, Bai Ling

.

(via)

Dancing With The Lings

Haven't gotten the chance to listen to this myself yet - I need to get my Valtrex ear-drops from the pharmacy first - but here's International Crazy Lady Bai Ling's first single, which is definitely the greatest set of words ever gifted to my fingertips. Why has it taken so long for this to be a thing? Without even having listened to it I know this is the song that will play at my funeral. I'll have somebody plunk down a cassette player like Nicole Kidman in To Die For and have at it!(via, thanks Glenn!)

.

.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)

Ria (Bai Ling): You need me like Whitney Houston dude!

It's true. I do need Bai Ling like I need Whitney Houston.

A happy 45th birthday to the International Crazy Lady.

.

Email My Groin

.

So my weekly piece for Celebrity Beehive's up, in which I discuss this week's new releases - Bunches and bunches of horror flicks! Facebook with Fincher! - and in there I mention that one of these horror movies is called Chain Letter - it's about... an evil chain letter - and that in some capacity it stars Bai Ling - perhaps only her nipples? So I went to the IMDb page to find a picture of Bai Ling in this movie to accompany this post directing you to that post, only instead I found this dude Matt Cohen who's also in the movie, and like half of his IMDb pictures are of his abs, and therefore he wins, the end.

Sorry, Bai! Maybe next time your nipples will win,
but the competition this week was just too stiff. (ha, stiff)
.

A Little Ling Goes A Long Way

.

(via) Needs more tongue, you two! It's a shame Gina Gershon wasn't around to show 'em how it's done. (As if I really think Bai Ling doesn't know how it's done, when the it in question is grabbing attention by being slutty on a red carpet. I mean... that's really her it.)
.

Sex Good Bai

.

Over at Cinematical they've outdone themselves this time - they got MNPP's butterfly-pet Bai Ling to list and then discuss her seven favorite sex scenes of her own on film. Says the International Crazy Lady of her mad-hump on Tony Leung Ka-Fai in the delightful horror film Dumplings:

""She's so mischievous and provocative; she's making her dumplings but her whole life is like making love. Every being that encounters her, she has the mischievous task of seducing them, very erotically. For me, love is a transformative energy to focus on a person or thing that can be changeable. It can be him, it can be her, it can be this and that. For this character, she can fall in love with her dumplings, fall in love with a stranger, she can seduce anything. She puts a spell on you.

It has the most primitive love scene ever in history of movies. Tony Leung Ka-Fai is a sex symbol in Asia, and I made love with him in Dumplings. It is so f***ing raw, and I loved it. It's passionate, it's crazy. That's one I enjoyed filming because it had pain – I saw myself and the corner of the table kept moving – and he tore my clothes off and broke my clothes. It's brutally, brutally primitive and honest.""

What could I possibly add to that? And that's only her first pick, there are six more! So go and read, you fools! Time's a' wasting!

As for Tony Leung Kai-Fai, well I can hardly allow this moment to pass without devoting a little love lust at him. First off, he is not the other Tony Leung, star of Hero and In the Mood For Love and Lust, Caution and Infernal Affairs and I could keep going (although to complicate matters they both starred in Won Kar Wai's film Ashes of Time). No, I first saw this Bai-Ling-baptized Tony Leung in that 1992 pretend-classy-but-really-just-a-raunch-fest The Lover opposite Jane March.

Well, I saw part of him at least...

... and it was love at first sight!

Who, me, predictable? Never. Anyway, he's been in loads of films in Asia over the past couple of decades and is a fairly big star out there. Not as big as the other Tony Leung, but big. And worth glaring at a for a moment too.

.

Bai's On The Breeze Today

.

My boyfriend just emailed me to tell me that Bai Ling is in NYC (reason #30,502 why he's awesome: he reads her blog even more often than I do) and so I replied to him with this:

"Oh god! I have to find her! And I think she'd enjoy it if I just walked up to her, took her by the hand, and brought her home. She'd follow me happily without a thought, and then we'd have our very own Bai Ling to play with!"

And I mean every word of that. I'd buy her nipple-cozies and we'd sing each other nonsense songs made out of our own pretend-twin-language, and then one day she'd fly out the window like a butterfly leaving trails of stardust and gonorrhea in her wake, and my life would have been all the better for the sweet, beautiful time we spent together.
.

Sentence of the Millenium

.

Via io9:

"Pet Semetary director Mary Lambert is working on a ocean horror movie starring Bai Ling as a blood-thirsty fish zombie who can materialize over any body of water."

We can all stop whatever we're doing right now because the apex of human achievement has been reached. The end.
.

.
.

From The Man Who Brought You Dumplings

.

To my horror-loving peoples out there, I hope y'all have found the time to watch Fruit Chan's 2004 film Dumplings at some point. Either the full-length version or the shorter version that was included on the anthology-film Three...Extremes (which also featured shorts by Takashi Miike and Park Chan-wook), which ever, just so long as you've given some of your time to watch the wonder that is Bai Ling making a youth-elixir out of... um... youths. It's one of the best horror flicks of the decade and I don't mean that just from a camp perspective - it's terrifically creepy and Bai Ling gives a legitimately good performance. For real. Seek it out, y'all!

Anyway, director Fruit Chan has finally got another film coming out. It's called Don't Look Up and it stars Henry Thomas (Elliot from E.T.!) and Kevin Corrigan and STYD tells us that "even Eli Roth shows up for a cameo"! It's described thusly:

"Don't Look Up concerns a young horror film director's sensitivity to paranormal visions which sends him on a spiraling descent into madness that threatens his life and that of his crew. On location in the decrepit, abandoned former Transylvania Film Studios, the characters of the medieval Romanian folk tale he is attempting to adapt to film appear to come to life, opening a portal in which horrifying deeds from the past begin to recur."

Oooookay then. Anyway, BD posted the first pic from the film yesterday - be warned, it's really gory - and the trailer's out today. Check it!

.

.

The Greatest Movie...

... to have a beginning middle and end...

... although not really any of those...
... and definitely not in that order...
... ? ...


Crank: High Voltage (2009)

Dude it's all it was supposed to be and more. More! I could just type the word "more" a thousand times in an escalating font-size and that's the only way I'd even come close to getting across the experience of watching this movie. It's like the first one. Only MORE! It's like a headache. Only MORE! I felt pummeled and stupid and very very happy leaving the theater. Like it gave my eyeballs a hand-job.

I still couldn't even tell you what happened now, 12 hours later. There were lots of guns and lots of boobs and then the guns shot the boobs and everyone blew up or burst into flames, Bai Ling wrote her own dialogue and kept her nipples hidden (the craziest thing of all!!!), the end. Oh and I got to see this angle of Jason Statham (link NSFW) which... the best end. Ever. If you were to look "end" up in the dictionary, you ought to see that picture, but you wouldn't, which is why we should throw away all of the dictionaries in the world and just use this movie's script. It's the new Bible. It's our shiny lunchbox and we need it like Whitney Houston. Bow down, you sons of bitches!

ETA My pal Sean just reviewed the film too and and pretty much came up without words like me. There are no words. There are just bruises.

.

Quote of the Day

.

Hey now, it's everybody's favorite lovably crazy lady Bai Ling (via):

"I deserve so much more than the roles I get offered now. I'm one of the best actresses. One day I will win an Oscar. I'm already winning it. I just have to find the platform to show it."

Wiser words have only been spoken when they've been other words spoken by Bai Ling herself.

Also, Bai really has a book coming out later this year called Nipples. Really! I am going to buy a copy for every person I currently know and every person I might ever know in the future.
.

Statham! Ling! Fireballs! Nipples!

.

In just three days, the most important cinematic experience of the year (Avatar who?) will be upon us. Hell, it's the most important cinematic experience of all of our lives. Our grandchildren will ask us if we were there, and their grandchildren won't believe them when they tell them that people actually survived through the experience without their brains combusting from so much sheer unadulterated awesomeness.

And the Best Picture Oscar statue for 2009 is already way, way up inside Bai's vagina so don't even front, Clint Eastwood's Nelson Mandela movie. You been served!
.