Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

Beatriz: You think killing is hard? Try healing.

You can break something in two seconds.

But it can take forever to fix it.

It's ridiculous how prescient this movie was about all the conversations we'd be smothering in five years later. I re-watched it a few months ago and if you've never seen it, or if you haven't seen it since it came out, I really recommend a revisit. Just an astonishing piece of work, and Salma Hayek has never been better. The whole cast, top to bottom -- John Lithgow, Connie Britton, Chloë Sevigny, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass, David Warshofsky, and several reaction shots from John Early. Just perfect. I know a lot of people see it (and Enlightened) as dry-runs for The White Lotus but -- and I say this adoring The White Lotus -- they're better than The White Lotus. Enlightened obviously, but Beatriz too. Anyway this is all my way of saying -- Happy Birthday, Mike White! Watching him win award after award for Lotus has been one of the few pleasures the past couple of years have given us. A true king.

Partying with Mike White? Highly, highly recommend. pic.twitter.com/EtfBNJRqgS

— Ξvan Ross Katz (@evanrosskatz) June 25, 2023

Hours and Hours of Gay Entertainment

I don't know about you but today hasn't been nearly gay enough for me. I mean, I have gone into several different spaces and not once -- not a single time! -- has confetti fallen on my head. What is even happening??? So in order to gay up this Wednesday here, over at Mashable I give you my list of the ten best movies on Netflix that were made by LGBTQ+ creators. There's something for everybody but mostly for me, because I made the damn thing. And isn't that what matters the most, in the end? That I am happy, goddamnit?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The One I Love (2014)

Ethan: Well, I'm not an aardvark.
Fake Ethan: And I am not a gorilla.

Have you guys seen this movie? I thought it was lovely when I saw it back in 2014 (here's my review) thanks to the (expected, but appreciated) fine work from Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, and for such a small low-key film it's had a surprising lot of sticking power in my brain; I still find myself thinking about it fairly often at random moments.

Which signals good things for two projects I'm looking forward to soon that are both being shepherded to the screen by its director Charlie McDowell, who also happens to be celebrating his 36th birthday this very day. McDowell is directing Gilded Rage, the movie about that NYC trust-fund douche who murdered his father (produced by Jake Gyllenhaal and starring Bill Skarsgard), and he's directed the pilot for Kirsten Dunst's forthcoming TV series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, which looks super duper. 

Things I just right this minute learned about Charlie via his IMDb page: he is the son of the legendary actors Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen! And Charlie was in a long-term relationship with Rooney Mara until last year; now he is with Emilia Clarke I think? I suppose if I paid attention to tabloid things I would know these sorts of things. I didn't even know he was Malcolm's son but now that I do I can totally see the resemblance...

Wild Wild Woman

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So have y'all watched Wild Wild Country on Netflix by now? If not I highly recommend it - I flew through it fairly quickly when I was offline last week (offline as in "not blogging" - obviously I was online to a degree since I was watching Netflix, ya wisenheimers) and I've been enjoying seeing people talk about it ever since.

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One thing I that left me wanting about WILD WILD COUNTRY - I kept waiting for it to mention the Rajneeshee LGBT crowd and what it was like for them but outside of a brief nod with regards to the townspeople's horror about "sexual freedom" we got nothing

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 29, 2018

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Of course the one thing everybody really wants to talk about is Ma Anand Sheela, the fascinating woman at the center of the whole thing - the right hand woman to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the religious leader who took over a small town in Oregon in the 1980s with her help. (Actually it was mainly all her doing - you get the feeling that the Bhagwan was just off enjoying the sex-n-drugs fruits of his divine purpose most of the time). If you'd like to hear her thoughts on the doc there's a chat with her at The Daily Beast.

But what I want to hear is: who would you cast 

if they (when they) make a bio-pic of this woman? 

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I'll Show You A Creep (Too)

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One of my favorite sub-genres of horror films is the one where the horrible awful person who thinks they're like so bad finds out that no no no, silly, you ain't seen nothing yet. Lucky McKee's masterpiece May is probably the finest example there is - Jeremy Sisto's character thinks he's totally edgy the way he fetishizes creepy shit but then he meets May and finds out, too late for his life's liking, that real honest-to-goodness creepy shit is a little much for him.

Patrick Brice's original Creep in 2014 flirted with that idea a little bit, but the sequel Creep 2, out on demand right now, takes it on full-tilt. Both star a terrifically un-shy Mark Duplass as the titular creep named Aaron, a man who invites strangers into his intimate places only to speed into "too too intimate" at lightning quick speed. The first film had some fun subverting the slasher tropes it was toying around with by making the object of Duplass' obsession a dude - Creep borders on and then blunders straight into homophobia, but I found it a fascinating dance, watching a couple (presumably) straight dudes bat around at these (presumably) straight dude insecurities. They're not unaware what they're doing, at least.

The sequel remembers that about Aaron and it sits at the fringes, but his partner in creepiness this go-round is female - Desiree Akhavan (from Appropriate Behavior) steps up to the plate as his unsuspecting foil Sara, who under duress finds wells of weirdness she never realized existed. In that way it's much more of a Slasher Movie than the previous one - just instead of Laurie Strode finding the strength inside of her to stab a madman with a knitting needle we have Sara sneaking up on Aaron in the shower and scaring the bejesus out of him.

It also reminded me of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, 2006's stellar and somewhat forgotten slasher inversion, and if you're reminding me of that gem then you're doing something right indeed. Creep 2 builds on and improves the Creep world, and in the grand tradition of these kinds of things it points its rusty blade towards an even broader future ahead. I look forward to more creepiness, cubed. (Watch Creep 2's trailer right here.)

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Good Morning, World

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Any fans of the 2014 low-key horror flick Creep up in here? I liked it alright - I offered a few vague thoughts (along with some more Mark Duplass flesh, since these movies like to share that) about it right here - but the sequel hit VOD this week (WATCH IT HERE) and I actually think the sequel's a bit better. This post isn't going to be a review though - I actually have some proper thoughts to share and I'll share them a little later today. For now let's step back to the "Mark Duplass flesh" I just mentioned because holy cow does Mark go for it this time. That towel? It's coming off, folks! Hit the jump for that, keeping in mind we're going NSFW up in here...

Creep Harder

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Did you guys see the 2014 horror movie Creep with Mark Duplass? It's probably 90% jump scares but they are mostly pretty good jump scares, and the film understands in its bones a weirdness - a true weirdness; the kind of thing that would make you laugh in normal circumstances but divorced from normal circumstances becomes off-putting and unnerving - that not enough horror films try for. There's one moment near the end that still makes me shudder when I think about it. 

Anyway they promised a sequel at the time, and now we're really actually getting that sequel! Creep 2 comes out on demand on October 24th, just in time for you-know-what (Halloween, I mean Halloween! God!), and they've just dropped the trailer. Watch!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: 
Freddy's Revenge (1985)

Jesse: It isn't the gas. 

Ken: Don't tell me it's not the gas. 

Your mother thought she smelled gas. 

Cheryl: Well, Ken, I thought I did. I wasn't sure. 

Ken: All right, then. What is it? 

I mean, bird rabies? It's that cheap seed you been buying. 

Cheryl: Oh, please, Ken. Really... 

Ken: Well, it could be. 

There's got to be a reasonable explanation. 

I mean, animals don't just explode into flames 

for no reason. Do they? 

Gifs are one thing but I feel as if this scene really should be watched in its entirety and thankfully a kind soul uploaded the thing onto YouTube - watch and wonder:

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Calling it one of "the worst movie scenes of all time" is kind of a stretch though - I think you mean "one of the single greatest scenes in any movie ever in forever," folks. Anyway Gay Jesse's father is played by long-time character actor Clu Gulager there, and it's his birthday today - yep, he's still puttering along; he turns 88 today! Happy birthday, Clu!

Clu was mainly a cowboy actor at the start of his career (how'd ya guess with a name like Clu Gulager) starring on TV series like The Virginian and The Tall Man (as Billy the Kid, seen above) and Wagon Train, among many many others. He kept plowing on through the 60s and 70s...

... playing small but memorable roles in stuff like The Killers and The Last Picture Show and still lots more TV stuff. But it's the 1980s where he won this devoted follower right here when he co-starred in a bunch of horror flicks -- Freddy's Revenge of course, but also The Initiation in 1984 and then The Return of the Living Dead and From a Whisper to a Scream in 1987. 

These are all pretty terrible movies, mind you! But they're fun too, and he's a good sport in all of them. (The interviews he's given about the Nightmare on Elm Street film are all a hoot and a half.) And dude's still churning 'em out, mainly starring in films that his son John Gulager (from the Project Greenlight series) directs - there's the Feast series and then Piranha 3DD in 2012. 

And then just this year he had a role in Blue Jay alongside Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson. Have any of you seen that yet? I keep meaning to - I have heard good stuff. Anyway thanks for all the movies and happy birthday, Clu!

Boo For You

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Hey everybody! Checking in from here the middle of my holiday break to direct you over to The Film Experience, where today I listed The 15 Scariest Scenes of 2015! The above scene does not figure in but honestly if I was allowed I probably could've made the entire list nothing but scenes from It Follows, which is clearly the horror film of the year. (Even with a couple moments of silliness. Hell there's nothing wrong with some silliness.) Anyway click that link and check it out, I had a lot of fun writing it. And please let me know what you would've included that I was a dumb-ass for forgetting!

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Hoult Me Thrill Me Kiss Me

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Nicholas Hoult and Rooney Mara are going to star in a supernatural romance called The Discovery, which is set in a world where the afterlife has been scientifically proven - two points of note: if you haven't fallen in love with Rooney Mara yet that just means you haven't seen Carol yet, so hold on a hot second and get back to me after you've done that. And secondly I know this all sounds a big Ghost-ly, with infinite possibilities of supernatural schmaltz, but it's actually from Charlie McDowell, the writer-director of The One I Love, that delightfully bizarre doppelganger movie starring Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass. Here's my review of that movie -- I hope he's got more of the same unexpected weirdness up his sleeve.

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Good Morning, Creep

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That there would be Mark Duplass in the recently released horror flick Creep, which is about a man who hires another man to film him for a day because - SO HE SAYS, DUNDUNDUN - he's got cancer and he wants to send some life-advice to his not-yet-born son. Things do not, as they say, go right.
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Anyway Creep's got some creeps but I wanted more creeps from Creep. It's got some twists but I wanted more twists. I want more, Creep! More more! And I'm not (just) talking about the homoerotic stuff -- the movie actually commits to that aspect admirably, bless its black heart and blue balls.

There's a moment about halfway into the movie, once it's actually played most of its hand - earlier than I anticipated, mind you; it does have further to go than you think it might do - that offered a real road-less-traveled (it involves drugs, in case you're wondering what I'm talking about after you've seen the film) and for a white hot moment I thought we were putting on our big boy pants and strolling right down it... but the movie's not quite up to all that. Alas. There's some genuine, you know, creepiness up in here - silliness be damned (or maybe it's because it's so outwardly silly) that wolf mask actually got to me - but ultimately it all lands with not much more than a well-aimed thud.

I Am Link

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--- Luna Eclipse - Diego Luna, my beloved Diego Luna, has landed a leading role in the Star Wars spin-off Rogue One! He's starring opposite unsalted breadstick Felicity Jones and our boy Riz Ahmed. I love the fact that every male actor that's been up for a lead role in this film has been non-white - for awhile Edgar Ramirez was rumored. Gareth Edwards, of Godzilla & Monsters, is directing.

--- Streaming Windmills - This is what happens when companies use their power for good not evil - Amazon is throwing some money at both Jim Jarmusch and Terry Gilliam to make their next movies. I feel a little less gross about buying literally everything I ever buy via Amazon now. There's no word on what the projects are but The Playlist speculates that Jarmusch is making a bus driver slash poet movie he'd recently talked about, and Gilliam... well what else would it be besides that goddamned Don Quixote movie? That thing will be the death of not just him but us all.

--- Fantastic Man - Back in March the rumor was that Dr. Who star Matt Smith would be the lead in JK Rowling's new movie series slash Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, but now the word on the street is Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne's the frontrunner. I've never actually seen Smith in anything so it's not exactly a fair fight but I'm totally Team Redmayne. But he has to promise to make out with Hugh Dancy some more. That's all I ask. In a movie, on the street, whatever.

--- Super Selma - I'm torn on the news that Selma director Ava DuVernay is apparently Marvel's first choice to direct either their Black Panther movie or their Captain Marvel movie - it's great that they're looking for directors of color and females to boot! But Ava just made a transcendent fucking movie last year and I feel like maybe her time could be better spent? But then maybe she'd make a kick-ass superhero movie - who knows? I am going back and forth.

--- I Don't Belong Here - I've been dying to see the Mark Duplass horror flick Creep ever since it got great reviews at 2014's South By Southwest fest but I hadn't heard jack-shit about it since, even though I'd been checking sporadically - well we finally have news: it's getting released via Netflix on July 14th. The movie is supposed to turn into a trilogy of films; no news on any of that.

--- Extending The Apocalypse - While doing press for Ex Machina Alex Garland said that he's apparently come up with the genesis of the idea for 28 Months Later, a third film in the zombie series which he originally created with Danny Boyle, and it very well might happen soon. We'd heard Boyle was kicking around the project not too long ago... and as always I must add that my favorite film is the second one, which neither Boyle nor Garland had much of anything to do with.

--- French Fass - Michael Fassbender's MacBeth is premiering at Cannes very soon and so he's probably going to be doing tons of interviews over the next week or so (also hopefully he and Jake and Xavier will hopefully be sharing a hotel room) -- anyway here's an early one with Variety (thanks Mac) that I adored; it's quick and silly. Loved this:

Variety: Are you making Prometheus 2?
Fassy: I don’t know. I just follow the Internet to find out what I’m doing these days. The mighty Internet has told me it’s happening.

Hey Michael -- I am on the internet, and I have several things to tell you to do. SEVERAL.
 

--- And Finally here's the trailer for Mia Hansen-Løve's "90s rave scene" film Eden, which I missed at NYFF last year much to my chagrin - I guess I'll have to watch it with all y'all plebes when it's out June 19th. The trailer features a lot of Greta Gerwig but I don't think she's in it much? Still she's why I wanna see it.

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The One I Love in 200 Words or Less

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I suppose you've got to come up with a good angle to realize a solid science-fiction-tinged romance a la The One I Love (or TiMER or Eternal Sunshine or the also-Duplass-starring Safety Not Guaranteed) but the team of Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss makes it seem so effortless here that I found myself wondering halfway through why we don't see more movies tackle this terrain. It seems like there's a lot of gold to be shaken from them thar hills. But then at one point I was reminded of Joss Whedon's recent mostly-misfire In Your Eyes and I realized it's not an infallible route to goodness. But the percentages are high! The One I Love is mostly an exercise in watching two very good, low-key actors twist themselves into itty bitty pretzels of variation, and as such it's a perfectly worthwhile and maybe even in the end haunting use of ninety-five minutes. Moss is especially terrific - there's a late-in-the-film scene over some dishes that spins and pivots off of her own playful change-ups of expression and tone, and its a humdinger.

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I Am Link

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--- Well Shook - The world does not get to see nearly enough of Carla Gugino so this is most excellent news - she's landed the leading lady role in Dwayne Johnson's upcoming big-big-budget 3D earthquake movie called San Andreas - as I said yesterday when I wrote up a couple of brief thoughts on Pompeii it is really kind of impossible for you to make a disaster movie that I won't watch and have some level of affection for, so I'm totally down with all of this.

--- Ladies Who Lunch - Yesterday we got our first look at Cate Blanchett in The Number One Most Anticipated Movie By Everyone On Planet Earth called Carol from director Todd Haynes, and today (again thanks to Saint Murtada) we've got our first glimpses of both Rooney Mara and Sarah Paulson on the set. Looking good!

--- Agent Cooper - Marvel's top banana Kevin Feige has been giving off all sorts of news this week and Slash did a good job rounding it up, but the most interesting tidbit to me is the news that they've already made the television pilot for Agent Peggy, the Captain America spin-off about Hayley Atwell's character from the first film, they're just waiting for ABC to decide whether to make it or not... yadda yadda... Howard Stark, aka Dominic Cooper, would be a recurring character. Suddenly I am invested in this happening!!!

--- Lotte Love - Over at the Film Experience Tim did a wonderful post for Women's History Month on the shamefully forgotten female animator Lotte Reniger, whose 1926 silent The Adventures of Prince Achmed (pre-dating Snow White as the first full-length animated film by eleven years) is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. And Tim linked to a documentary on Lotte over there that I've never seen that's bound to be invaluable.

--- I'm A Creep - I stopped reading this review at about the half-point because I didn't want to know anymore, and I probably should've stopped before then, but Mark Duplass' new horror movie called Creep which just played at SXSW actually sounds terrific, and I'm very very much looking forward to it now. It's a found-footage thing about a strange fellow, played by Duplass, who hires somebody to follow him around with a camera for a day. Shockingly, it turns out badly. I love Mark, I hope this is great.

--- Break Free - I really really wish that the remaining dudes from the band Queen would stop messing with the people trying to get a Freddie Mercury movie made - their insistence on sanitizing it (supposedly they're adamant about it not being rated-R, which is just insane) has now driven the director to quit. I hope that Ben Whishaw stay on-board, I think he's a great choice for Freddie.

--- And finally I wasn't totally sold by the upcoming horror film Proxy when I saw it way back in November but there are some very interesting things going on in it all the same; you can't fault the film-makers for over-ambition. I'll definitely be curious with what they make next. Anyway Proxy is getting a small release here in NYC and also on VOD next month andwe have a trailer now, watch it:

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Spooking Up The Oldies

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How fabulous is that picture of Beatrice Straight and JoBeth Williams doing their Poltergeist thing? Totally absolutely fabulous, I love it. With today's news that Rosemarie Dewitt is going to take the JoBeth role in the Poltergiest remake I was going to photo-shop a picture of JoBeth and Rosemarie (apparently the mom role can only be played by women with double first names) together but I love that picture above too much, so it wins. It wins everything. Beatrice Straight is so good in Poltergeist, you guys.

As for Rosemarie, I will never not like her thanks to The United States of Tara, so her signing on edges me upwards on the indisputable hump this movie's got to get past in order for me not to rail against a remake of one of my most important childhood movies. Upwards, but not over. Let's see what sexy daddy they cast in Craig T. Nelson's role, then we'll talk.

Actually the casting of Rosemarie makes me think that Mark Duplass, her Your Sister's Sister co-star, might not be a bad pick. Go full second-string post-mumblecore on this mutha!

Weirdly I just re-watched three quarters of Poltergeist this past weekend, and was wondering where the hell JoBeth has gotten herself to. (Actually there's nothing weird about that, I'll watch Poltergeist any time anywhere.) Looking her up I see she hasn't gone anywhere - she's just doing stuff I haven't been watching, like Dexter and Private Practice and Hart of Dixie. They should hire her for the Beatrice Straight part!
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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Josh: I see why you like this video camera so much. 

Heather: You do? 

Josh: It's not quite reality. It's like a totally filtered reality. 

It's like you can pretend everything's not quite the way it is. 

Happy 38, Joshua Leonard! Here's some pictures of him and Mark Duplass getting gay with each other in Humpday just cuz...

Let's Write Some Movie Reviews

Again I am getting behind  on writing my reviews, argh! For a brief moment I thought I might write something over the holiday but ha ha ha yes let's all laugh at that one. There were far too many pillows and couches to be taken advantage of. Anyway, here are my thoughts on three movies I have seen lately.

Black Rock -- As far as mumblecore-ish horror movies go, this is a pretty decent one... but then I've only seen four movies I would classify as "mumblecore-ish horror movies" and this one's probably the least fitting to that title - I'm only calling it "mumblecore-ish" because it was written by a Duplass and stars that chick from The Puffy Chair (she also directed). For the record the other three "mumblecore-ish horror movies" are Baghead (loved it) and Ti West's Trigger Man and House of the Devil - I list those out not only because I opened that can of worms but because I kept thinking of Trigger Man while watching Black Rock. I never properly reviewed Trigger Man so let me say here - sometimes I'm pretty sure it's still the best thing Ti West has ever done. I found it seriously unsettling. Black Rock manages to borrow some of a similar doom-laden mood from it, where the air's heavy with menace, specifically of the bullet-shaped sort. It's basically trying to be a female Deliverance, while never going for the gory heights (to its own detriment) of The Descent, the already established female Deliverance. But it gets at you, now and again.

Mud - I kept wishing that Mud had nixed the entire Matthew McConaughey plot-line and just focused on the more practical and lovely story of the young boy character Ellis, played by an absolutely terrific Tye Sheridan. And for ocne it wasn't McConaughey's fault - in a post-Magic Mike world I am newly open to watching him on-screen. It's just everything having to do with MM's storyline felt like Screenwriting 101 to me - here's how we teach Ellis about the world with the most unsubtle strokes we can come up with. It's a real disappointment in that sense after Jeff Nichols made the remarkable Take Shelter, which kept up-ending the ways in which a story could be told in really fine and nuanced ways. And it doubly a shame since Sheridan's so great, and I would've been completely engrossed watching him deal with his parent's rocky times (Ray McKinnon is so terrific) and his messed-up meet-cute with that older girl. (PS - From now on I shall be known as "Neckbone.")

Starlet - Absolutely and totally captivating. Never ever the movie I expected it to be, while keeping itself entirely simple and straightforward at the same time. It's the sort of movie that really activates your imagination, instead of pummeling it into a brow-battered acquiescence like some big budget hoo-ha will - you watch a movie like Starlet and you realize there are tons of stories out there in the world just waiting to be told, about real people, if story-tellers were just more curious about real people. In a just world Dree Hemingway (who should really be showing up in everything soon, if you ask me) and Besedka Johnson would have been duking it out for something like the MTV Movie Awards "Best Couple" award or whatever - their chemistry is so strange and specific and unexpected, and blossoms into something lovely.

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... making sport with Chris Messina.

I'm glad somebody is remembering that Chris Messina is a hot piece, because I just realized while looking through these images from last night's "all Chris Messina half naked in gay situations all the time" episode of The Mindy Project that I, in this particular respect, have failed us all miserably.

See, Chris Messina took off his clothes with exceptional force last year in the movie 28 Hotel Rooms (see here and here), but I totally forgot about it when our "Great Gratuities" awards rolled around. He was nowhere to be seen!

Even though he'd given us everything to be seen. For shame, me. Well thankfully he's having none of it - this is the equivelent of Glenn Close screaming "I won't be ignored, Dan!" Only with a little black speedo, and man-on-man friction with Mark Duplass (himself an agreeable little number), instead of a boiled bunny rabbit.

I could go on like this for days. Days! This is some spectacular gratuity, y'all. Hit the jump for the rest.