Pic of the Day

As stated last evening I did indeed get to go and see Paul Mescal play Stanley Kowalski in the new production of the Teneessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire currently running at BAM in Brooklyn -- if that photo I took during the bows last night didn't clue you in to that fact already. It's a very fine production and all three leads -- alongside our Paul (who I suppose I should note given my audience is in his underwear twice and shirtless several times -- I was in the front row only ten feet away y'all and I kept myself seated; please clap!) there's Patsy Ferran (from my beloved Living with Bill Nighy!) as Blanche and Anjana Vasan (from Killing Eve) as Stella and they're all very very good. I had a couple quibbles with the staging, but then I have got to admit that having seen Gillian Anderson play Blanche in 2016 kinda spoiled me on this play -- she gave what I called at the time the greatest stage performance I'd ever seen, and that remains true today. Anderson played Stella as very much a larger than life archetype though, making the show mythic in its proportions; Ferran smartly brings the character down to earth and so her performance, while not quite as shattering for me, stood on its own. And I think Mescal was a better Stanley than Ben Foster was opposite Anderson -- now I'm picturing Paul & Gillian doing the show together and kapow, mind blown. Anyway I'm very happy I was able to get out of my foul headspace last night and escape into somebody else's foul headspace for a bit -- thanks, Tenneessee! Below are a couple more photos I took:

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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!

A Stranger's Kindness

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Tremendous news today -- on May 21st at 2pm the National Theater will be live-streaming the 2014 production of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire that starred Gillian Anderson as the faded belle Blanche Dubois and Ben Foster as the monkey man Stanley Kowalski. (thx Mac) I saw the show when it transferred to Brooklyn in 2016 and posted about it, calling Gillian's work the greatest stage acting I'd ever seen, and I maintain that here four years later -- I'd always liked Anderson as an actress but this night was quasi-religious. She blew me away, so much so that I went back and saw the show two more times, and so much so that I'm actually a bit shaken right now reading this news. It's the best news I've heard inside this miserable year anyway, by far.

And I recommend you pay attention to the National Theater's website these days (specifically their YouTube channel) as they're gifting us with tons of free content; literally right this second they're streaming Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo as Antony and Cleopatra, and coming up in June they're going to show Tom Hiddleston's Coriolanus. They need to show Angels in America and then they need to show Jack O'Connell's mostly naked Cat on a Hot Tin Roof performances next!

We’re so excited to announce new streaming titles for #NationalTheatreAtHome on YouTube:

🌟 Barber Shop Chronicles @FuelTheatre @LeedsPlayhouse on 14 May
🌟 A Streetcar Named Desire @YoungVicTheatre on 21 May
🌟 This House on 28 May
🌟 Coriolanus @DonmarWarehouse on 4 June pic.twitter.com/H6kHuaVv7C

— National Theatre (@NationalTheatre) May 7, 2020

Ben Foster Get His Very Own Dunkirk Twink

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There are so many Dunkirk Twinks that even though it seems as if I've posted about one every week since Dunkirk came out three hundred years ago I still haven't been able to keep up with them all -- Tom Glynn-Carney is one I've only mentioned here once before (when he joined the cast of The King with Timothée Chalamet) but today we've got a new reason. Ben Foster has written and is directing a film about famed author William Burroughs, which will have Ben playing Burroughs and will tell the story of the writer's bisexual love triangle with his muse (played by Kristen Stewart) and "an American ex-pat named Allerton" played by Tom.

This will actually mark Foster's second time playing Burroughs after 2013's Kill Your Darlings -- Foster was terrific in the role then, and I look forward to him revisiting it, now with added gay stuff. I guess he watched Daniel Radcliffe and Dane Dehaan having all that gay fun last time and felt left out, the poor dear. Anyway whilst looking up a picture of Tom Glynn-Carney to illustrate this post with...

... I stumbled upon these shots of him in a 2017 miniseries called The Last Post, which looks right up my alley, right? Anybody seen it? Is it just eight hours of shirtless army men playing cards and drinking beers, otherwise known as "what happens between when I close my eyes at night and re-open them in the morning"?

5 Off My Head: 2018's Feats of Stache

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First things first yes I know that Sebastian Stan does not have a mustache in Destroyer -- he has a goatee. The world's sexiest goatee ever! But while goatees do seem to be making a comeback -- look no further than half the cast of The Predator reboot...

... the year that was 2018 was more about the Staches. Staches were so thick in the musky air that we started up a series on Movie Mustaches! And so I figured before I kissed the year goodbye I should give some love to our favorite examples of them there nose-ticklers in the twelve months that was. Make like you're Sam Elliott's Oscar Nomination and get on for the crazy ride y'all...

Our Top 5 of 2018's Greatest Mustaches

Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at El Royale

Riz Ahmed in The Sisters Brothers

Tom Sturridge in Mary Shelley

Rupert Friend in The Death of Stalin

Raúl Castillo in We the Animals

And with a special off-movie shout-out...

... to Billy Magnussen in Maniac, just cuz.

Oh fine as long as we're here we might as well 

take a moment for the bounteous beards, too...

Left to right: John Krasinski in A Quiet Place, Boodi Kabbani in A Moment in the Reeds, Ben Foster in Leave No Trace, Jason Momoa in Aquaman, and Colman Domingo in If Beale Street Could Talk

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Now share some of yours in the comments!
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Who Wore It Best?

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The actor Ben Hardy (see more here) is celebrating his 28th birthday today on the back of his biggest hit to date - Bohemian Rhapsody, a truly godawful movie, is nonetheless a box office smash having just strutted past 700 million dollars this weekend. Hopefully watching it inspires at least a few people to go read about the real Freddie Mercury, nothing like that film's ugly miserable concoction.

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Sidenote: BR is getting dropped on blu-ray in about five weeks and they just announced today that the film's one highlight, the Live Aid performance, will be on the disc in full. So you can just watch that and skip everything else. (Or better yet just go watch the video of the real Queen's performance!) But that puts the BR a shocking full 150,000,000 above Hardy's previous Bryan-Singer-Joint, the shoulda-been-way-more-successful X-Men Apocalypse, which had Ben picking up his pair o' wings off of the previous Angel and Also-Blonde-Ben Ben Foster. But hmmm I do wonder if we've got an opinion on who wore those wings best...

bike trails

Good Morning, World

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A happy 38 to Ben Foster today, who'll probably always be the Stanley to Gillian Anderson's Blanche in my mind (I was a big big huge fan of the stage adaptation of Streetcar here in New York a couple years back in case you missed it, going to see it three times, a total freak occurrence when it comes to me and theater)  no matter what other goodness he serves up and he's already served up some goodness this year - I thought he gave a very fine little performance in Leave No Trace (read my review here), Debra Granik's latest. 

Anyway these shots here are from his latest movie called Galveston - anybody watch it yet? I believe it's streaming (yup here it is on Amazon). Galveston was directed by Mélanie Laurent and co-stars Elle Fanning and it's a "hit-man plans revenge on those who wronged him" movie. This movie completely slipped past me, I don't remember hearing anything about it until last week, and yet it appears to've gotten some good reviews. Ben Foster is a big fuzzy treasure, bless.

The Great and Powerful Outdoors

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A swarm of bees sums it up - indifferent, beautiful in its proficiency, and dangerous. That's how Debra Granik sees the outdoors, and that's the outdoors she tosses her characters into, head over foot first, tumbling into the moss of Northwestern no-place specific. So when Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) is drawn to the low hum of a bee colony she stumbles upon a woman keeping in the woods it's no surprise that she's willing to stick her hand right in - that's the girl we've watched her father (Ben Foster) raise from the movie's first frame. A tarp for comfort and drinking water.

Tom might make quick friends with Jennifer Lawrence's Ree in Granik's Winter's Bone, or they might just eye each other suspiciously, quietly, from behind a half-rot log - who's to know? These girls have plenty in common, probably too much, but Tom is sweeter, less broken than Ree - the swarm of bees she and her father stir up here aren't hornets, mad with boxed rage, but honeybees intent on making shelter and food, going about their day to day.

Home is not walls for them - it is air, light, life. A freedom that's got its pluses and its minuses - you've got one sting to protect yourself and then its lights out, but you hold your weapons close - they make for more than one tool. Leave No Trace's strength is in its ambidextrousness - in its ability to see the forest for the trees, the bedposts for the lumber. We watch Tom find her footing, her home, her four walls as she sees fit. We watch her become a woman in graceful dirt-strewn sweeps.

10 Off My Head: Best Picture Ranked

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I feel as if I have to say something, anything, about the Oscars since they are this weekend and I do present myself as a movie-lover. Of course one could argue that truly loving the movies makes loving or even liking the Oscars at best a sadistic enterprise and at worst an abominable hypocrisy, but... well let's not argue either of those things just for today. Instead I see some people on the Twitter ranking the Best Picture nominees from best to worst as they individually see it, and I figure I can do that much at least.  I mean I only actually like four of the movies nominated, but let's try anyway! Positivity, ho!

2017 Best Picture Nominees, 

Ranked Top To Bottom, Says Me

1. Moonlight 

2. Arrival (review)

3. Manchester By The Sea (review)

4. Lion (review)

5. La La Land (review)

6. Hidden Figures

7. Hell or High Water (review)

8. Fences (review)

9. Hacksaw Ridge (review)

No surprise that Mel Gibson made the perfect "Bottom." Aaaanyway no I don't understand why I never reviewed Moonlight either. That's very strange! I have seen it two or three times now and it's beautiful and moving cinema. It isn't my favorite movie of 2016 (in fact there are at least two movies that would rank higher if I'd ever get around to making such lists again) but it's up there. 

The other movie I didn't review is Hidden Figures, which is mostly harmless mainstream pablum that nevertheless did inspire a pair of choice tweets from me that get across my feelings about it...

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HIDDEN FIGURES is kinda goofy but it gets across surprisingly well how INSANE space travel is & how psychotic it is to fling ppl into space

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 14, 2017

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Listen, I love Taraji. But she's terrible in HIDDEN FIGURES.
Like she learned everything she knows
about being a "Brain" from these two pic.twitter.com/gQpRvHLfwg

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 23, 2017

So what does your list look like?

Share in the comments!

5 Movies in 150 Words or Thereabouts or Less

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2016 has been a very good year for movies and there are many ones that I have liked a whole bunch, but the past few weeks have been a real mixed bag for me. I was happy that Martin Scorsese's Silence (which I just reviewed earlier today) lived up to my expectations because a lot of what I've seen as of late has not. And now, upon the back of that dire warning, I give you some miniature reviews for five movies I have recently seen.

Lion -- The exception to my bitchy mood to come - Lion is a terrific happy-tear-jerker; it made me think of The Color Purple more than once, which is a high praise indeed. As good as Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman are in the movie (and they're both very fine) the real star of the movie, strangely, is the editing - I don't usually pay editing a ton of mind the first time through watching a film but the way Lion lays out and maps its somewhat inevitable story is surprising and turns what might've been a formulaic weepie into a real treat. Makes ye old adage about the journey being the destination feel like a great big brand new fresh thought you just had.

Allied -- I wish I had been watching this movie drunk with a bunch of drunk and similar-minded friends because it is caterwauling out to be viewed as High Camp. The second that Marion Cotillard showed up to the shooting range in her best "Joan Crawford Shooting Range Outfit, by Adrian" I felt it coming and the movie bucks and swerves across the line several times - if only I'd had that crowd to cheer it on through its more tediously serious-minded moments. I mean within the span of a couple of scenes Brad & Marion fuck a sand-storm into existence, and then she gives birth to the London Blitz. It's terrible star-fucker movie-making at the lowest register of the highest caliber in the best old-fashioned kind of way.

Hell or High Water -- There are a couple of movies getting praise this Awards Season that I am not getting the affection for and this is definitely one of them (another is Jim Jamusch's Paterson, but I don't usually "get" Jarmusch). I tweeted out a snide comment about how this is the "male version of Thelma and Louise" we've always needed, thinking the sarcasm spoke for itself, but then the official Twitter account for the movie liked my tweet and I feel less sure that read clearly so let me say it clearly - there is nothing going on here that I haven't seen in a thousand movies at this point. I like all of these actors but this is like the adult coloring book version of a Coens movie.

Fences -- Viola Davis is going to finally going to win an Oscar for this movie and she is genuine and spectacular in it, so that's terrific. But I found the experience of sitting through this movie somewhat excruciating - it feels claustrophobic and airless instead of intimate, and every turn of the plot I saw coming from a mile back and yet it still felt as if it took every single thing an extra twenty minutes to get there. When the movie version of Sweeney Todd came out it was my first exposure to Sondheim and I horrified some theater-lovers by speaking out loud that I just did not "get" Sondheim (PS I still don't); well this here was my first exposure to August Wilson and I have to admit I am feeling that same blasphemous feeling again. It's a shame that these lackluster film adaptations are poisoning some of theater's "great" works but Fences just did not speak to me - its language and ideas feel dusty, its emotions rote. Viola sells her scenes because she's Viola fucking Davis and that's what she does, but I still couldn't wait for this thing to end. (And as if to stick in the knife I don't know that I have hated a movie ending more this year than this one's.)

La La Land -- Don't get me wrong, when La La Land flies it flies - Damien Chazelle obviously committed The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to memory both backwards and forwards before embarking on this quest, and he took some very good lessons from that classic. (The color, oh god the glorious color.) But like Fences it also often mistakes claustrophobia for intimacy - save that Apple commercial opening song it's weirdly closed-off feeling; just a couple days after seeing it I can hardly remember anybody but Gosling & Stone even having a speaking role? On the one hand sure, it's a romance between those two, their love is meant to swallow the world with song and dance. It gets many of those moments right. (The best scenes are the ones at the Observatory and Emma's audition song.) But there's some spark of life, something new to say, that's just absent a lot of the time.

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I Don't Want Realism, I Want Magic

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Half Day Today.

See You Tomorrow.

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Theater, Queen

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I was planning on chilling tonight with the new Greta Gerwig but instead I won a ticket to see Jessica Lange & Gabriel Byrne & Michael Shannon do A Long Day's Journey Into Night on Broadway, so that's what I'm doing... even if it does make three nights in a row seeing three big depressing plays. As I made mention of I saw The Crucible with Ben Whishaw and Saorsie Ronan on Wednesday. 

And then last night I saw The Judas Kiss at BAM, which is what these pictures are from -- that's Tom Colley up top, who was... he was just a special effect, you guys. I have never seen a human person in the flesh shaped like that before. (Click here for our recent great big gratuitous post on the actor, it's super worth it.) Here is another shot, with him laying behind the also finely shaped Charlie Rowe:

And yet besides those three shows I'll have seen this week I also saw two shows last week - I saw Charlie Cox on stage in Incognito, and then of course there was Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire, which I had a lot to say about right here. (And I feel kind of bad that I saw Streetcar first because everything else has had to exist in the shadow of that staggering central performance.)

Anyway if you know me you know all of this is an outlier the likes of which we've never seen before. Never! I have lived in New York for 15 years but I hardly ever go see theater, maybe a couple times of year at most. And now it's every night. My brain kind of hurts from all the drama, and I feel like four hours of Eugene O'Neill might push me over the damn edge tonight, but whatcha gonna do?

These final few pictures I stumbled upon looking for more pictures of Tom Colley -- it appears the costume designer for Judas Kiss keeps a Pinterest page; you can hit the jump for a few pics of the cast and under-studies in their over- and under-garments...

I Have Always Depended on the SoCo of Strangers

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#nowwatching A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE with Gillian Anderson and Ben Foster #astreetcarnameddesire

A photo posted by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on May 11, 2016 at 4:17pm PDT

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If you're in New York or within flying distance of New York - in other words, if you are anywhere, currently breathing - you have got to get yourself a ticket to see Gillian Anderson's Blanche DuBois, you guys. It is just... it is just astonishing.

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I can say honestly & truly that I have never been as emotionally devastated by a stage performance as I just was by .@GillianA in #Streetcar

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 12, 2016

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I actually couldn't even speak about the show as we left the theater and walked to the subway -- every time I opened my mouth to say something I had to swallow down a humiliating sob I felt coming up. I've lived here in New York long enough to see a few performances that've been deemed extraordinary - I have seen Vanessa Redgrave do The Year of Magical Thinking and Kathleen Turner do Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, off the top of my head - but none of them destroyed me like what Gillian just did to me last night.

The performance is big, but only big enough to match the character - the specifics are absolutely heartbreaking. I was, and am, so shaken up at the end that I honestly see Tennessee Williams in a completely different light today. She surgically dissected what often felt stagey and actorish - people speaking his dialogue and posing his poses are often swallowed up by it, ya know? But her Blanche, so preening and pretend, so terribly terribly wrecked and ruined, my hands are actually trembling right now feeling for her. I'm sure people's mileage may vary but to me, personally, this will probably define for a lifetime what I think of as possible in theater.

Every Man's A King

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Ben Foster wasn't the reason I rushed out months ago and bought my tickets the moment they were available for the new stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire here in NYC - that reason would be seeing Gillian effin' Anderson giving us her best Blanche DuBois. But ever since I got that first hirsute-centric look at Ben in the role of man-ape Stanley Kowalski a couple of weeks ago, well, his prominence in my mind has moved upwards, to put it mildly. And tonight's the night! Stay tuned to me on Instagram and probably Twitter too for more later. Stella!!!

Ben Foster, Fur Beast

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No sooner had I tweeted about the fact that I'm seeing five plays over the next three weeks than was that picture of (click to embiggen, thanks Mac) and this interview in the NYT with Ben Foster - who's playing Stanley in a new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Gillian Anderson - brought to my attention. This is one of the shows I'll be seeing, and I'd bought my tickets way way back on the basis of Anderson alone, well before I knew I'd be gifted with a hefted-up and hirsute Ben in return. Good grief! Where did he even get all that body hair from? He's come a long long way from the slick twink he played in X-Men 3.

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The Finest Bana

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There's been a criminal lack of attention given to the fact that Eric Bana is The Finest Hours out this weekend -- if they'd worked on reminding me that there was "New Bana In A Uniform" to be had I'd have been paying way more attention. No all those trailers show is footage of a boat going up a wave - footage that makes me do a double take every time, thinking I've stepped through a time portal and it's the year 2000 and The Perfect Storm is suddenly new again. Nobody needs that! Give me Bana or give me nothing, nothing at all, or Eric Bana wearing nothing at all, that's what I always say.

Furry Fantasy

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I am simultaneously not at all the audience for the Warcraft movie and totally the audience for it -- to the first point I have never played the game and it all looks silly as fuck to me here in the first trailer, but to the second it does star Dominic Cooper and Travis Fimmel and was directed by Duncan "Moon" Jones. And as if he knew I was going to be torn Duncan seems to be offering me specifically an olive branch in the form of... hairy chests on the orcs???

Ahhhhh crap... I wanna fuck an Orc.

I totally do. Here's the trailer.

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