I See London, I See (Chris Messina in) France

Oh yes this is just the news I can use to get me back into this "writing posts" thing that I've spent the past several hours not doing -- our favorite Chris of them all Chris Messina has just gotten his sexy furry butt cast in the next season of The White Lotus! Bless you, Mike White -- a king, a god, anong us peons. Messina joins the formely announced also-hot-piece Alexander Ludwig, as well as actress AJ Michalka (don't knwo her) and that nutty dame Helena Bonham Carter. I suppose I should ass... okay I meant to type "add" but obviously I'm still thinking about Chris Messina haha. Let's try it again -- I should ADD that both Messina and Carter are still "in talks" but whatever, I'm not a legitimate entertainment reporter, I don't care about "specifics" or "facts." I think we all know what I care about and it's what I just typo'd a couple sentences ago.

Messina Gotta Boogie, Man

This bit of movie news today is one of those two steps forward, two steps back bits that MC Skat Kat long ago warned me about -- the good part is that the Stephen King short story "The Boogeyman" (from his famed 1978 collection Night Shift) is finally moving forward as a feature film! And it will star Chris Messina! And it will also star Sophie Thatcher, aka the teenage Natalie from Yellowjackets! We like the both of them, and it's pretty crazy that this story's never gotten the film treatment. Well there is...

... that 1982 short film (which I have never seen myself and which I was surprised to see sitting there on YouTube when I looked) but that doesn't entirely count. Here is how Deadline summarizes the story:

"The original short was truly scary and dealt with a man’s visit to a psychiatrist where he recounted how his children were each killed by the title character. The story follows a teenage girl who’s still reeling from the tragic death of their mother and finds herself and her brother plagued by a sadistic presence in their house and struggle to get their grieving father to pay attention before it’s too late."

So anyway that's all good news -- the not-so-great part is that the film's going to be directed by Rob Savage, who made a fun horror movie called Host at the start of the pandemic and then made a horror movie a year after that called Dashcam that was so fucking terrible and obnoxious that it not only wiped out every inch of goodwill Host had accumulated it shifted the concept of "goodwill" into its direct inverse, obliterating all goodness and will in all of the world. (Man did I not like Dashcam!) Anyway maybe Savage learned something useful from that experience and he's not actually a negative on the project -- I promise to keep an open mind from here on out. I'd love for this creepy-ass story to get the proper big screen treatment it deserves. This cast is a good step in the good direction.

I Care a Lot, About Certain Things

The email I got about the forthcoming Netflix film I Care a Lot really should've led with the fact that it has among its cast both Chris Messina and Dianne Fucking Wiest, because those were the names that got me, and all news and content should be tailored specifically to me, duh. The film is actually a Rosamund Pike vehicle -- she plays a cunning lesbian who robs the elderly by manipulating legal guardianship laws -- and a Peter Dinklage vehicle -- he plays a mobster connected to one of Rosamund's marks -- but let's be real, we're here for them sexy supporters. 

Our beloved Wiest plays Rosamund's latest mark, while Messina... well he wears a suit, has salt-and-pepper stubble, and fucks me through my computer screen with his eyes. At least that's what his character description keeping saying when I try to read it. Also in the movie are Baby Driver's Eiza González, Dune baby Alicia Witt, and Blue Ruin's Macon Blair, while it was directed by J Blakeson, who previously gifted us with that movie starring Chloe Grace Moretz and a tidal wave or whatever. Or maybe it was about aliens. I don't care. I Care a Lot hits Netflix on February 19th. Here's the trailer...

Oh and dd I mention Chris Messina wearing a suit and eye-fucking us? That was in reference to this trailer, and I giffed those bits because... why wouldn't I? After the jump...

Quotes of the Day

"I’ve always found that [nudity] made me feel very powerful. You’re saying: This is me. This is the bad shit. I’m not in good shape. This is the hair on my chest. Forgive me, that sounds so fucking actorly, but there’s something about nudity that just gets right to the point.”

I know I saw some people -- the right, smart people -- answering that "Who's the Best Chris?" meme that was going around this past week -- the one that rears its head very few months, and which this time pissed homophobic-church-supporting Chris Pratt off since he per usual came in last -- by saying, "Chris Messina, obviously!" But for serious -- Chris Messina, obviously! He's the only Chris that's not only whipped his dick out on screen, and more than once -- he has talked beautifully about how important whipping his dick out is to His Art here in this new chat with The Cut (thx Mac). How does that not immediately crown him King of the Chrises? Oh and then there's this amazing bit of deeply admirable pervertedness:

"He goes on to describe an early acting experience in which he had to masturbate to completion (with his back to the audience) in a play. He usually mimed the action, but the day his parents came to watch he decided to go for the real thing: “I remember thinking, You’re not a real actor. I could end this now and put them at ease, or I could be a real fucking actor and keep going.” So this time, he really went for it — as in he really jacked off — but in his determination to prove himself he got stressed, and just ended up making the scene much too long. Luckily, his parents didn’t bring it up afterward. “They were just like, ‘Where do you wanna go, wanna get something to eat?’”

The Kinnamans We Keep

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Last week I showed you a couple of photos from The Secrets We Keep, the thriller starring Noomi Rapace as a Holocaust survivor who comes upon a man she believes to be the Nazi who tormented her, played by Joel Kinnaman, and kidnaps him to get her revenge. With added support from Chris Messina as her husband who wears suspenders. Well now we've got a poster and a trailer, and here I am sharing those things with you. 

The Secrets We Keep is being released in theaters (where such things still exist) on September 16th and for the rest of us on VOD on October 16th. Come for the psychodrama, stay for the Chris Messina fingering Joel Kinnaman's clavicle.

Pics of the Day

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No he might not be naked peeing into a lake like we'd gotten used to seeing Joel Kinnaman this week, but he is looking fine all the same in the first images from The Secrets We Keep, a forthcoming post-WWII thriller he's starring in opposite Noomi rapace and Chris Messina, which EW just shared. You can read more about it at that link (the film is hitting some theaters on September 16th and then VOD in October) but the gist is the movie's about a woman who was tortured in the Holocaust stumbling upon the man she believes to be her torturer (Kinnaman) years later -- Messina plays the husband, as Chris Messina is prone to do, and we understand why. Look at him in his vintage trousers for god's sake! Perfect Hubby Material.

Who Wore It Best?

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bike trails

Today's the birthday of one full fifty percent of The Chrises -- Chris the Hemsworth is turning 37 while Chris the Messina is nine years uppers, at 46. Anyway normally I only ask "Who Wore It Best?" when people wear the same piece of clothing but Chris Hemsworth, for all his Aussie Beach Lifestyling, refuses to wear a speedo, so fuck him. He gets the disadvantage in my poll! That said Chris Messina only rocked his speedo for an episode of The Mindy Project, but rock it did he ever -- click here for that post, it's epic and delightful.

I've Seen The Future, Brother...

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Once in film school a thousand years ago my film came back from the lab black -- pitch-black, nothing on it, ruined. Twas a disaster. And this being film school everything was already spinning at a breakneck pace -- my project was due the next morning, and I had nothing, nothing, to offer. Somehow -- and don't ask me the origin of this precise lightning bolt, it's lost to time and memory loss no doubt due to all these many years of mid-life excessive drinking -- the thought occurred to me that a sure way to save this disaster would be to take an X-Acto blade and do an animation on the blackened film. To scratch a story into it, frame by frame by frame, over the course of that night before the project was due the next morning. As one does. 

And that is the origin story for how I spent several weeks of my film school experience haunted by visions of an X-Acto blade slowly tenderly slicing into the flesh of my left pointer finger. This is not a thing that actually happened -- I was not cut. I managed to do the animation without any injuries to my fingers, and get a decent grade for it to boot, especially on the back of my tale of woe and forced ingenuity. 

But while my actual fingers might have gone unscathed something, something incorrect, clicked in my brain over the course of that insane fifteen or so hours, hyped up on unholy amounts of caffeine and scratching a caveman's basic script into infinitesimally square of celluloid after infinitesimally square of celluloid after infinitesimally square of celluloid for hours, endless hours. And for weeks after this experience every time I closed my eyes I saw it -- a blade pushing into my the meat of my finger. I dreamt it. I ate and breathed it.

The compulsion of this violent image became so bad that I had to go to the college provided therapist  -- I became convinced I was actually going to go full Hellraiser and start mutilating my own fingertips if this image persisted in this way. There are many reasons that the process of actual hands-on filmmaking turned out to be Not For Me, but the insane spectacle of this pressure, this mental snap, my finger splitting open like a baked potato seems to sum it up whenever I think about what film school was. Bad news.

I tell you that too-long story because all of it came back to mind while I watched actress-turned-director Amy Seimetz's brand new psychedelically haunting horror flick called She Dies Tomorrow, which is out at drive-ins, you guessed it, tomorrow (watch the trailer here), and which is about a woman who becomes so deeply convinced that her death is imminent that this conviction spreads among everyone she tells it until a plague of meaninglessness, of curdled foreboding, sweeps the land. The film is about the way bad ideas take seed, and spoil us and the good things from the inside -- you don't have had to become obsessed with cutting to understand this concept; anybody who's ever been in love understands it just fine. Seeing the person you love across a crowded room laughing at some bohunk's joke will goose the same sensation -- doubt, that many tentacled depressant, will find its way in, and like water freezing and expanding, bursts us at our seams.

Starting with a character pointedly no doubt called Amy (played by Kate Lyn Sheil), Seimetz shows one woman's utter certainty of doom infects all the people in her life, toppling like impressionable dominos -- at first Amy's Cassandra declarations seem absurd, of course; no one knows when or how they will die beforehand. 

But unease whispers bitter nothings in the backs of everyone's minds whether they want to think them or not, and before you know it an Armageddon has come all the same -- it's like the riddle of which came first, all of our Apocalypse Movies or the actual Apocalypse now at our fingertips? Our subconscious has good sniffers, invisible antennae feeling into the future places our mind can't quite make sense of just yet -- the polar bears of today are the Emergency Room wait-staffs of tomorrow; Disaster's only a wee little harmless thought around the corner. We're all bleeding somewhere, some time.

Now Neon Apocalypse

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You know how Horror Cinema seems to come and go in waves? Waves that end up saying tons about the anxieties of their age? There are the Atomic Age giant monster movies of the 1950s, or the Slashers of the 80s, the J-Horror and Torture Porn of the 2000s. Well I think we need to come up with a new name for the ongoing wave of horror movies we're smack dab in the center of that are attempting to capture the apocalyptic madness of our current moment in time. A little while ago I reviewed The Beach House, which is out this weekend, and briefly compared it to Color Out of Space from earlier this year, and those are two terrific examples of what I'm talking about. And you could toss the creature-feature Underwater with Kristen Stewart onto that pile for a full Lovecraftian trilogy.

Then you should see also Cam, and Daniel Isn't Real, and The Lodge, and Platform, and Gretel & Hansel, and from last year The Girl on the Second Floor and even Midsommar and The Lighthouse -- hell go back even further to something like It Follows, The Neon Demon, The Invitation.

My point is there seems to be a concerted effort at meeting the unholy inexplicability  of our modern moment via a Phantasmagoria of reality-crumbling means in Horror Cinema. Surrealism, neon-saturated hallucinations, the concept of Doubles and oodles of Cronenbergian body-horror... ooh just wait until Brandon Cronenberg's film Possessor (which should hopefully come out later this year) -- that's yet another big one. 

My point is there is most definitely a Major Theme to the Horror Cinema of this period that we'll need to step back and digest in full when we're not, you know, on fire in the middle of this real-life nightmare, and the just-released poster and trailer for what appears to be another one of this ilk, called She Dies Tomorrow, is what got me realizing it today. Written and directed by the modern scream queen Amy Seimetz (actress in flicks like The Sacrament, You're Next, Alien Covenant, the Pet Sematary remake, and many more) She Dies Tomorrow is described thusly:

"After waking up convinced that she is going to die tomorrow, Amy’s carefully mended life begins to unravel. As her delusions of certain death become contagious to those around her, Amy and her friends’ lives spiral out of control in a tantalizing descent into madness."

Kate Lyn Sheil (who acted opposite Seimetz in several of those movies I listed above) plays the lead character of Amy, and she's surrounded by an amazing cast including Jane Adams (!!!) and Chris Messina (!!!) -- also supposedly Seimetz used her paycheck from the Pet Sematary remake to fund this movie of hers, which means something good came out of that truly forgettable thing. The film's playing drive-in theaters on July 31st and then it'l hit VOD on August 7th, and here's that first trailer!

The Book of Bomer

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This post has exciting Matt Bomer news in it which I will get to in a second, but its primary focus is reminding me to start watching the latest season of The Sinner which has Matt flashing bum and Chris Messina in it -- Chris Messina in the show, that is, not, you know, Chris Messina in Matt's  bum. As far as I know. I feel like, were that to be the case, I would know that? I would feel that like a vibration in the homosexual force. Anyway even without that why I'd need a reminder that this show is happening is a mystery to me, but the fact that I haven't started the damn episodes yet proves it so.

Anyway, again! Yesterday Deadline shared word that Bomer is going to star opposite the never not great Ruth Wilson -- seriously, never not great -- in a movie called The Book of Ruth, which promises to tell the true life tale of a Christian woman in 1983 Arkansas named Ruth Coker Burks who became a celebrated caregiver for people with AIDS (thx Mac). Matt will be playing her new neighbor, a gay man who's returned to his small hometown after the death of his partner in NYC. Surely goofy hijinks then ensue, like they rob a bank or something. Somebody gets a pie in the face. Hilarity ahead!
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Good Morning, World

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I don't know about you but after seeing the Birds of Prey movie last week (read my thoughts here) I've had a distinct flare-up of Chris Messina feelings. This is scarcely new, this, uhh, inflammation -- have I got to keep going with the STD metaphor? I think I've had enough of that -- if you check our archives we've been feeling these feelings for eons. Indeed I've posted stills from the scene you see here, from the movie 28 Hotel Rooms before, at this link. (And even more from the film here.) Those were stills, but these are gifs, proving these feelings have been around for a long enough time that technology needed to catch up with them. Anyway... Chris Messina, am I right? Where would you rank him among the Chrises?

Four To Die For

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I can feel myself running dangerously behind on getting my thoughts down on several movies I've watched and liked and want to get my thoughts down on, before all of said thoughts go poof poof boom. And so, in order to battle off that memorial degradation, I'm now going to do one of my quick review run-throughs. Wham bam fast thoughts, go.

Girl on the Third Floor (dir. Travis Stevens) -- This movie is an absolute goopy squicky and dare I say sexy blast, and I feel a little betrayed that none of you told me to see it immediately. I've had the screener for literal months, since it screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, but it kept slipping through the (gooey, vaguely anatomical) cracks until this past weekend, and as far as I'm concerned now that I have seen it I have a new classic fave I'm going to be revisiting often. 

WWE star C.M. Punk, a sultry mix of Bruce Campbell & James Ransone rocking the snuggest pair of dad-khakis you ever done seen and who this movie leers at like a prime slab of tattooed beef -- I was entirely unaware of him before this but I am now fairly to wildly besmitten by him -- plays Don, a husband and father-to-be who's moved into a small-town fixer-upper a few weeks early to do the fixer-upping before his wife comes to town. Turns out the house has a bad bad dirty down-low and poisoned history, one that begins manifesting itself in all kind of goopy white sprays of liquid onto Don's face. And yes, it's every bit as disgustingly eroticially charged as that sounds. This movie feels like Clive Barker's Evil Dead, and I loved every slimy perverted and sick minute.

Birds of Prey (dir. Cathy Yan) -- About as much fun as I have had with any superhero movie since the Marvel Age of Ultra Dominance began. I'll probably always prefer the older simpler school a la Richard Donner's Superman or Tim Burton's Batman Returns and up through Sam Raimi's Spider-man oh my, but in our current age of loud comic book theatrics this is about as good as they get. Which is good! Very good! It even somehow makes Suicide Squad look better in retrospect, just for the act joining Margot Robbie up with the character of Harley Quinn, even though I say that without any intention of ever sitting through Suicide Squad again in my entire life sans gun or hammer or hyena held to my head. 

They should take this fun can-do psycho attitude off and make a Captain Boomerang movie too, so I can enjoy and properly appreciate that film's other great casting coup (and I love that Jai is, as far as I noticed, the only SS character to get a nod here by Harley). Anyway I'll let the female critics further underline and accentuate all of the smarts and fun this thing has with taking a baseball bat to boy's club, but the film earns those feminist accolades and then some. And then the gang struts right past didacticism to also be just a riot of good time entertainment, full of pop and fizz and punches to the nuts. This is how you do it.

The Turning (dir. Floria Sigismondi) -- Much to my Mackenzie-loving chagrin Floria Sigismondi's reworking of Henry James' classic story of a nanny's adolescent hauntings doesn't really work. But there's something gorgeous and sad about it all the same that I admire, and the vague ending-less ending, which is what I've seen the most maligned, might actually be my favorite bit? If you want atmosphere, nothing but atmosphere, this isn't a bad way to get it -- Sigismondi has crafted an astonishingly pretty thing. And ghost stories as far as I'm concerned should feel unfinished and underwater, which is what I feel frustrated a lot of people here. I might be talking myself into liking this more than it deserves, but it sure didn't deserve that ridiculous F-grade Cinemascore rating it got. I feel as if people will rediscover this at home where they'll be more patient, more willing to soak in its murky stew.

Satanic Panic (dir. Chelsea Stardust) -- Another horror gem of 2019 that heretofore slithered by me unnoticed before now - I did a randomly decided upon double-feature of this with Girl on the Third Floor which led to a whole lotta surprise pulsating vagina things in one sitting. But I'm down with that! More surprise pulsating vaginas, please! They liven things up. This is basically the movie that I had hoped the failed not-a-slasher slasher flick Slice was going to be but wasn't, only instead of having a pizza delivery dude fighting a plain ol' serial murderer we've got a pizza delivery gal named Sam Craft (played by a totally charming Hayley Griffith) facing down a suburb fulla cornball sexy Satanists. Cornball sexy Satanists led by Rebecca Romijn not-Stamos at her cornball Femme-Fatale sexiest! Satanic Panic is a heckuva Haxan hoot.

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Chris Messina Three Times

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At this point I've pretty much given up on Chris and Ewan McGregor making butt babies as the bisexual bad boys in the Harley Quinn movie out this weekend -- if they did butt-baby it up I am sure somebody who's seen it by now would've alerted me via carrier pigeon -- but since I'm not a total psychopath I'm not entirely undone by this news; it was always a bit of a pipe-dream, given we're talking about sexless arrested-development comic-book-movie bullshit. (via)

Which isn't to say I don't plan on still seeing this particular brand of bullshit when I get the chance -- there are just a lot of awards shows this weekend with the Indie Spirits and oh right the Oscars though, so I might have to put off Birds of Prey til next week. If one or more than one of you see it feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. (And you can see one more photo from this shoot here.)

Bad Boys For Wife

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I can't decide if my favorite part in the new trailer for the Harley Quinn movie -- I can never remember that thing's entire title and I really can't be bothered -- is the part scene above where Ewan McGregor and his intimate thug Chris Messina are hanging all on each other, or if it's the part where...

... somebody sticks their hands into Chris Messina's pants. (Hey we know what's in there!) Both of those shots are big fantasies -- I suppose it depends on the moment, the time of day, the rise and fall of the tides et cetera. (See the first trailer with accompanying gifs here.) Anyway did you hear that Ewan's character is no longer gay as long reported, but is now bisexual? 

I know how you feel, Chris. Nothing against bisexuality or anything -- this just feels like a rug pull since they have been selling it as "The First Gay Character In DC Movies!!!" for months and now, a few weeks beforehand, we find out otherwise. Bah whatever, Ewan & Chris are still hanging on each other, I can work with that. It's not like the silly superhero movie was going to take a break in between the action for a ten minute buggering scene or anything anyway. (SIGH. If only I ran the movie studios!)

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Birds of Prey Etc. is out on February 7th.

Hit the jump for a few more gifs...

Prey On This, Punk

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While I think Margot Robbie's performance as Harley Quinn in the first Suicide Squad got a little over-sold -- if something is merely good opposite so much that is deeply deeply bad it suddenly seems like more good, ya know -- I'm still against the odds into the spin-off movie Birds of Prey, but let's place the blame for this fool's interest squarely where it belongs: on the big strong backs of Ewan McGregor as the big gay bad and his bleach blond sex god slash henchman Chris Messina. Those two...

... could very clearly murder it and get away with it. But the trailer is colorful -- the Marilyn / Madonna "Diamonds" recreation looks fab -- and fun and perhaps not bogged down by all the Jared Leto bullshit Harley Quinn can fly properly. Oh and Rosie Perez and Mary Elisabeth effing Winstead, can't forget Rosie Perez and Mary Elizabeth effing Winstead. Watch:

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Birds of Prey is out in February 2020, and now you can

hit the jump for a few more Ewan & Chris gifs just cuz...

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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Crazy Killer Chris Coming Our Way

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We already know that Ewan McGregor is playing the main bad guy in Birds of Prey, Margot Robbie's spin-off movie from Suicide Squad that's got her reprising her fun turn as Harley Quinn, who in this series recruits a bunch of super-ladies (including Mary Elizabeth Winstead!) to do [insert bland Macguffin plot here]. But since one bad guy (much less an entire team of super-females) ain't enough anymore we've just got word that there will be another bad guy (a crazy serial killer who carves himself up named Victor Zsasz) and he'll be played by Chris Messina. First thing I googled? To see if the villain wears leather pants. I really want Evil Chris Messina in leather pants. Well the pants depending on the adaptation...

... but Victor Zsasz is almost always shirtless, the better to show off his self-inflicted wounds (one for every victim), and I guess that will do. Looks like Chris will also have to shave his head? I think he can pull off bald, right? It will highlight those killer lips of his. Emphasis on killer, I guess. Oh man, another messed up pervert for me to fawn over? The list has gotten so endless...
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Whore Nun Whorenun

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Even though I'm nervous somebody might spoil last night's episode of Sharp Objects -- and yes I'm worried about that even though I'm not the biggest fan of the show; nobody wants a spoiler! -- I went ahead and wished Amy Adams a happy birthday at with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" at The Film Experience. But instead of facing her down with her nasty mama Patty Clarkson on that show I faced her down with her nasty sister Meryl Streep in Doubt, because nuns. Go vote! And bonus, some Chris Messina:

Good Morning, World

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The past couple of days have turned into The Chris Messina Show here at MNPP - okay so two mentions, once here on the site proper and one on Twitter, maybe don't make for a full "Show" but believe me if you're only seeing two mentions above-board then there is a load of behind-the-scenes wrangling with the subject, and I've been mentally wrangling, so to speak, with Chris a bunch.

So besides the news that Chris will be looking his best for Jean-Marc Vallee very soon he's got a new movie out on demand right now - it's called The Sweet Life and it stars Chris and Abagail Spencer (who you'll probably recognize from Mad Men or Rectify or True Detective) as a pair of depressives who make a cross-country trip together in order to throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge. I don't want to ruin it for you but I think they might find, psst, LOVE instead.

Anyway the most important thing about this movie (well besides the fact that it was directed by the director of Leprechaun in the Hood, natch) is that Chris once again proves he's a kind brave man willing to whip his naked self out (see previously) (and previously) (and previously) for any project, any project at all, and right now if you hit the jump you'll see what I mean...