Good Morning, World

I had some catching up to do on all kinds of things last week after I took a few days off, and one of those things -- the most important of those things! -- was watching the latest episodes of The Other Two on HBO. And sure enough they did not disappoint. The Other Two never disappoints. Not only was there an extended riff on the 1998 classic Pleasantville -- random as hell, but among one of my favorite movies so very geared to ME SPECIFICALLY which is what matters -- but Josh Segarra spent the majority of the episode getting in and out of the shower. 

At this point The Other Two so gets me (remember the Call Me By Your Name riff?) I'm legitimately worried that a character who spends an hour of their lives nearly every single day making gifs out of TV show scenes of half-naked men is going to show up on the show at some point, and the show will cut them / me to the quick. Okay not "worried" so much as "begging for it." I have it coming, The Other Two! Anyway happy Monday and hit the jump for how I spent an hour of my life (and I regret absolutely nothing)...

King Nabs Dane, More

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When they announced that the next big Stephen King adaptation, of his 2006 novel Lisey's Story, was going to be a Children of Men reunion starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen, I should have posted about it. When they announced that the eight episode series, which will air on the Apple+ streaming service, will be directed by Chilean master Pablo Larraín, who made the films No and Jackie, then I should have posted about it. When they announced this week that actor Dane DeHaan, seen pictured above and below, had joined the cast, then I should have posted about it. (thx Mac) But it's the latest news, that Joan Allen has joined the cast as well, that finally pushed my dumb ass over the edge and into a post. My god what a bunch of folks! Lisey's Story tells the story of... uhh, Lisey? More specifically, here:

"Lisey’s Story is a deeply personal thriller that follows Lisey (Moore) two years after the death of her husband (Owen). A series of events causes Lisey to begin facing certain realities about her husband that she had repressed and forgotten. Dehaan will play Jim Dooley, a huge fan of Scott’s (Owen) books who feels strongly about his unpublished work being released to the world."

King himself has scripted all eight episodes, which... well I love King, y'all know I do, but he's not always shown the best judgement when it's come to adapting his own work off the page and onto the screen. I have more faith in Larraín being there to transfer King's words into images, thankfully. All we know about Joan Allen's character is she's named "Amanda" -- I never read this book (did you?) so that means nothing to me. This will be Allen's second King adaptation this decade, after 2014's A Good Marriage -- the unmemorable AGM was also scripted by King, if you want to consider where this could go without someone as talented as Larraín in the director's chair. Fingers crossed.

My Favorite Tiger Lady

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It's our gal Joan Allen's 63rd birthday tomorrow so if you click on over to The Film Experience we've given some love to one of her under-sung performances -- Reba in  Michael Mann's original Lecter joint Mindhunter. She is terrific in the role and I wanted to focus on Joan because of her birthday, but I do wish I could've worked in a reference to Rutina Wesley's performance on Hannibal in the same part, because she too knocked this character outta the park.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Pleasantville (1998)

Betty: George, look at me.
Look at my face.
That meeting is not for me.
George: You'll put on some make-up.
Betty: I don't want to put on make-up.
George: It'll go away. It goes away.
Betty: I don't want it to go away.

A happy 62 to this week's banner girl Joan Allen, 

our forever beloved. Somebody give her a job worthy

of her talents! She hasn't worked in two years dammit.

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I Am Link

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--- Release The Hounds - I wasn't one hundred percent sold on the Aussie serial-killing-couple flick Hounds of Love last year when I saw it at Tribeca (here's my review) like I know some people were - I wasn't convinced it wasn't fetishizing its ugliness past its own clarity of purpose - but it certainly introduced a filmmaker with talent in director Ben Young. Anyway I hadn't heard he was making a sci-fi movie with Universal his next project (a big step up!) until this week when word came that the movie, titled Extinction, had apparently been yanked off their schedule months ago... but Netflix has now come to the rescue. The really exciting thing about this is the movie stars Michael Pena and Lizzy Caplan. No word on a release date but we'll keep our eyes peeled!

--- Not So Amazing - Things aren't looking great for the Amazing Stories reboot right now - Bryan Fuller left the series earlier this week after several solid years of working on it, and today comes word that his producing partner on the project has also left. Ye olde chestnut "creative differences" is invoked. Sad this didn't come together with Bryan, I'd heard some of his ideas and they were fantastic. Guess we've got to focus all our happy hopes upon his Anne Rice Vampire series now, which is good with us! bring on the sexy gay vamps!

--- Lady Metcalf - Sometimes you read an interview and you can just feel the decency sliding off the page and I got that feeling read this chat with Laurie Metcalf in The Guardian the other day - she just seems like such a nice lady. It's mostly about Lady Bird of course but she talks about Roseanne as well as her early career, and I especially loved this part (mostly because of the Joan Allen shout-out:

"The adolescent Metcalf grew up in Carbondale, Illinois, with a certain amount of talent, but no clear vision of what to do with it. “I had accidentally gotten a laugh on a line in a play I was in during high school. I got hooked but I had no idea I would ever be able to support myself by acting. I knew no one in the business. I was from the midwest. No one within a radius of a thousand miles was doing anything like that.” While attending Illinois State University in 1976, Metcalf fell in with a group of fellow drama students including John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Joan Allen and Terry Kinney. “They used their horrible magic on me and turned me into one of them.”"

--- Fishmonger Menfolk - The Witch director Robert Eggers has written and is directing The Lighthouse, about a lighthouse keeper in Maine (it will be filmed in Nova Scotia though?), and it will star Willen Dafoe. That all sounds swell! It's shockingly easy to picture Willem Dafoe dressed like the Gorton Fisherman, isn't it? Anyway like I said that sounds swell, but what's not so swell is this means that Eggers' Nosferatu is on hold. I was really looking forward to seeing him apply his old-timey fascinations onto that turn-of-the-last-century vampire tale. I hope he does it next, then.

--- Eight The Great - I'm ashamed that I haven't written up my own thoughts on the spectacular experience of seeing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's eight hour long 1972 television miniseries titled Eight Hours Don't Make a Day at MoMA a couple of weeks ago - it was so overwhelming I want to do it properly but time's not been on my side. But there's a really wonderful take on the series over at Film School Rejects that I recommend reading! And if you're in NYC in march the whole thing is going to screen at Film Forum from the 14th to the 27th. And one should assume a blu-ray release later, I think.

--- And Speaking of titanic sized directors of the New German Cinema even though it's somewhat mean-spirited towards one of my faves I found this piece dissecting Werner Herzog's commercialization of his "outsider" brand pretty fascinating - I hadn't realized that his 2016 internet documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World had been funded by an internet security company as a sort of "soft" brand marketing strategy. I have always found the entire idea of "selling out" fairly lame personally - Werner gotta eat! - but this does represent a new age of "content" conceptions worth reckoning with.

--- And Finally the best thing about the video Tom Hardy made of himself wearing his cup - as in the little dick shield that male athletes wear to protect their precious, precious testicles - over his face and doing Bane dialogue through it to his dog, is his dog's insistence on licking said cup. SMART DOG. (thx Mac)
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Tom Hardy quoting Bane lines to his dog with a nut cup over his face is, without question, the best video I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/OM5eFdtrl6

— KoyANDYsqatsi (@Andyzach) February 5, 2018

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The Moment I Fell For... Allison Janney

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I fell in love with Allison Janney the second I saw her in Ang Lee's 1997 masterpiece The Ice Storm. The black-and-white dress, the bowl of keys - iconic. If I saw someone dressed as her for Halloween I would marry them on the spot. Before The Ice Storm she'd mostly just done small roles in things like The Cowboy Way (a movie only remembered today, and rightly so, for the scene where Woody Harrelson covers up his junk with a cowboy hat) but for some reason she already felt like someone you knew, ya know? Soon enough came The West Wing (which I have never seen a single episode of, by the way) and she'd marched her way into all of our hearts. But every time I see her I think of the key party....

And right after the key party i think of Drop Dead Gorgeous.

What do you first think of when you see Allison Janney?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Contender (2000)

Laine Hanson: Principles only mean something 

when you stick to them when its inconvenient. 

A happy birthday to Joan Allen on Sunday!

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Godzilla (2014)

We knew from the first trailer for the latest Godzilla that Juliette Binoche would not be long for the movie since they featured this tearful goodbye in the promotional materials from the get-go - it was a blessing, really, since it allowed all of her fans to come to terms with that beforehand, going into the theater. I mean, imagine if we hadn't known and we'd shown up and they'd murdered her in the first 15 minutes then? They'd have had an angry mob of Gallic admirers storming the studio gates, beating security guards with baguettes in between long cigarette and espresso breaks. 

So if she had to go, better we knew. Still I can't help but think of an alternate film, one where this inciting incident, this nuclear blast, instead of creating the same old gigantic stomping lizard monster that we've seen so many times before, well, what if instead it had magnified Juliette Binoche herself to gargantuan proportions???

Picture it! BINOCHE breaks up through the crust of the Earth, seeking kaiju vengeance for all the serious talented actresses who've taken thankless blockbuster roles as mothers or scientists to then be sidelined by lesser actors or crappy special effects.

BINOCHE stomps on Bryan Cranston's head, BINOCHE picks her teeth with Aaron Johnson's bones, BINOCHE closes herself in the bathroom and has herself a tender yet expressive cry for five exquisite minutes of screen-time... now there's your fucking Godzilla movie.

Happy birthday, BINOCHE!

Hit the jump for links to all the previous Ways Not To Die...

Good Morning, Scudder

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I should probably just go ahead and schedule this same post to appear every single June 30th on the occasion of Rupert Graves' birthday for the next oh let's say fifty years -- I can't imagine a day coming when I don't want to be reminded of Maurice and Scudder's morning-after. Rupert's turning 53 today - did anybody watch that Joan Allen show The Family?

I kept forgetting he was on it. (Although Joan Allen really should've been enough to get me to watch the show.) Anyway some YouTuber was kind enough to edit the film Maurice down into just scenes about Scudder (including a couple of deleted scenes) - it's still 50 minutes long (Maurice is a long movie!) but a "Scudder Cut" is certainly welcome:

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Good Morn, Bourne

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Today's post is a triple-dipper - I posted this picture of Matt Damon on the set of the new Bourne movie on the Tumblr last night, and I just posted it over at The Film Experience this morning, and now I am posting it here, on here. I am spreading Matt a little thin, it seems! That's a lot of this for a movie series I have never smelled a whiff of. Actually that's my point over at TFE - I'm asking folks to tell me why I should watch the Bourne films. Well?

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"Umm yes. It's, uh, just that your father..."

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"... would never do anything like that."

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"Well you know, Mom... there are other ways to enjoy yourself... 

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"... without Dad."

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Happy birthday, Joan Allen!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

you can learn from:

The Ice Storm (1997)

Janey: Wendy... a person's body is his temple. This body is your first and last possession. Now... as your own parents have probably told you, in adolescence our bodies tend to betray us. That's why... in Samoa and other developing nations... adolescents are sent out into the woods, unarmed... and they don't come back till they've learned a thing or two. Do you understand?

In case you didn't notice what with this week's banner we're feeling Ang Lee's The Ice Storm this week -- we re-watched it yesterday for the thousandth time and as soon as we heard Siggy sell the hell out of this speech we knew it needed to have one of these posts dedicated to it. And then we decided that this week's edition of "Beauty Vs Beast" over at The Film Experience needed to tackle this movie as well, so we did that too. We got the Ice Storm fever! Head over to TFE to pick which 70s housewife you favor...
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I Am Link

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--- Preacher Teacher - I don't believe the rumor that Dominic Cooper is going to star in Preacher has been confirmed yet, but we have gotten two bits of supporting casting - Ruth Negga, who you might recognize from Agents of SHIELD (or maybe from all those times she was spied hanging out with a half-naked Dominic Cooper; are they still dating? Anybody know?), will play the female lead named Tulip O'Hara. Yes, Tulip O'Hare. The fact that Negga's so closely connected to Dominic Cooper though, this makes me think Dom might indeed be taking the lead. Anyway also cast on the show is the adorable Ian Coletti, seen there to the left, who will be put under a pile of horrific make-up to play the disfigured character called "Arse-face" in the comics. WTF with these names?

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--- Conduct Yourself - Steve McQueen's series for HBO has gotten an official six-episode order - it's called Codes of Conduct and it sounds a little Six Degrees of Seperation-ish (about a poor black kid infiltrating rich NY white society) and besides the unknown actor in the lead some recognizable names have been dropped: Paul Dano, Helena Bonham Carter, and Rebecca Hall will all co-star.
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--- The New Batch - Have you guys seen A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night yet? I think it's out on iTunes now, or it's about to be - anyway see it, here's my review, it's marvelous. The film's director Ana Lily Amirpour is lining up her next project and because of Girl's big-time success she's going stratospheric - it's called The Bad Batch and it's a cannibal love-story and it's going to star Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves, Jason Momoa, and Diego Luna (Oh Diego). Oh right and also the "newly" "single" Suki Waterhouse presumably as The Lead Girl. And LIly compares it tonally to Jodorowsky. Wowza.

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--- Go Outside - It Follows update! Earlier this week they were saying it was still rolling out onto VOD next week even though it was doing terrific business in theaters - well today they have announced the VOD release has gotten pushed back, and they're gonna see how it does as it expands across the country. This is great news - the more I thought about people watching this movie, which relies on a slow enveloping sense of dread, at home with their phones on stopping it every ten minutes, the less positive I felt it'd get the sort of reception it deserves.
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--- Fresh Women - Mentioning Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell earlier today when I did my list of favorite 2013 movies reminded me that I hadn't mentioned the news she's signed on to write (and maybe possibly maybe direct?) the latest Little Women movie. Yes please! Last we'd heard she was working on an adaption of a book by the guy who wrote The Fault in Our Stars; no word on that yet.
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--- Pushing Perfect - I'm pretty sure I could write a post titled "Quote of the Day" and just copy and paste this entire interview with Bryan Fuller in Esquire from start to finish - it's filled with excellent stuff on all of his shows, from Dead Like Me (he hasn't watched a single frame of the show from after he left the series mid-first-season) to Wonderfalls to Pushing Daisies and up through Hannibal. It's the little bit right at the end about his Munsters reboot Mockingbird Lane that breaks my heart though.

"[P]art of me thinks that there was so much story going on that I would have traded making that one episode for waiting a little bit and figuring out the best way to tell the story... It just wasn't ready yet to come out of the oven the way it did."

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--- Bobby Boy - I haven't read this yet so we can do it together - let's click on over and read this interview with Bobby Cannavale apparently talking about being friends with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro cuz that's how he rolls and also that little movie he made coming out this year about a bug person. I just wanna know more about the time he and Alan Tudyk hung out in jockstraps together, honestly. I hope he talks about that.
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--- The Upside of Age - Just one more thing added to the "Good grief, how old am I?" pile -- it's the 10th anniversary of Joan Allen's film The Upside of Anger, which probably should've netted her an Oscar dammit, but she wasn't even nominated. What a world. Anyway The Film Experience is celebrating the film with a tribute, head on over and read that and feel old and angry and then go get drunk, Joan would appreciate it.
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I Am Link

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--- Queens Scream - I've been especially scattered this week with my brains bouncing from one thing not to the next but the next next (I think I've been fighting off, so far successfully, a bit of a cold, and that's where my energies have all been aiming themselves, honestly) but if I was on ym death-bed that still wouldn't be a valid excuse for me not to link to Interview Magazine's conversation between Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis because oh my god Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis!!! Let's pretend they never made that shitty Kristen Bell movie together that one time, though. (thanks Mac)

--- Hinx Off - A lot of these links are actually a couple of days old though, so you've probably already seen Empire magazine's cover with Daniel Craig for the new Bond movie, and you've probably already seen the picture inside the magazine of Dave Bautista as the movie's bad guy (called Hinx), but I'm still gonna link over to it because Dave looks hot.

--- Rock Hard - And I believe these pictures are from the same magazine - some new shots of the new Fantastic Four were released, and Jamie Bell, pre-Thingening, looks typically adorable. I'm so sad he'll be covered up by CG rock for most of that movie. What a waste! In related news I saw the FF trailer on a big screen earlier this week and weirdly it played worse than it did watching it on my computer. The effects were more noticeably shabby, I guess.

--- Killer Doll - This is such a bizarre story, if true - apparently the Terminator in the new Terminator movie will have a Ken-doll like crotch-mound where his man-parts would normally be. It's how they're getting away with the franchise-usual teleported nudity scene and keeping the movie family-friendly. because a Terminator movie should be family-friendly! I believe they're just talking about the CG Arnold robot though? There had best not be a shot of a dickless Jai Courtney. We know he fills out his briefs.

--- Proper Lady - A trio of new pictures of Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' Carol have popped up and sure enough, Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' Carol is to die to die to die for. Carol is Haynes' take on Patricia Highsmith's book The Price of Salt, an adaptation we've been crowing about for probably a decade or so now. We are looking forward to it very much!

--- The Next One - It's not much info but in an interview with Jonny Greenwood he talks a little bit about where he and the Radiohead gang are right now with regards to working on their next album; he says they've played stuff through once, and next they'll start going back through and re-working it, but that they're in a really good spot right now. Good! 

--- Small Screen Big Talent - The next great actress of a certain age being forced to turn to TV for an interesting role is the great Joan Allen - she's going to make an as-of-yet untitled thriller for ABC about a politician's son who returns ten years after having been presumed murdered, and the fall out from all that drama. I hope it is good enough for Joan. The adorable (and ample-bummed) Zach Gilford is playing the son.

--- Pretty Girl - The first picture of Eddie Redmayne as The Danish Girl is online and shocking nobody Eddie looks just fine in female accoutrement. The Danish Girl is about Lili Eibe, who got sex reassignment surgery in Germany in the 1930s, and the fall-out from that. I'm curious to see how Eddie walks the transgender tightrope later this year, after Jared Leto pissed so many people off; seeing as Eddie's about a billion times more sincere-seeming, I think he'll probably do a better job.

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I Am Link

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--- Monster Laffer - I get what Matthew Bomer was getting at in this interview with The New York Post where he talked a little bit about his brief stint (heh brief stint, get it) on American Horror Story last week, and that it's just a misspeak on his part, but I think it's funny that he basically inadvertently calls all clowns supernatural beings. He's watched too much It, methinks. (thanks Mac)

--- Jim Crawls - I haven't read it yet and I don't know if I will, James Franco's writing sometimes makes me break out into a rash, but hey maybe you want to see what he has to say about Jake Gyllenhaal's performance in Nightcrawler. I'm only linking to it because it reminded me there were weird rumors once upon a time that these two fucked, but then this is the internet and there are weird rumors that everybody's fucked.

--- Mother Superior - We were already excited about the upcoming movie Room because it was set to star Brie Larson and golly we love her... and then the director of the "Michael Fassbender's big round head" movie Frank signed on to direct it, and golly that was good too... well now the cast is filling and, did we say golly? Golly. Joan Allen and William H. Macy have joined the movie! Room is based on Emma Donoghue's 2010 book about a mother keeping her son trapped in a room for years. (thanks Mac)

--- Holly's Heroes - I'd totally forgotten that Holly Hunter was entering the DC Comics world with a still unspecified role in Batman Versus Superman (I will never write that movie title the right way, never) but she talked an eensy weensy little bit about it to the Wall Street Journal of all places, basically just saying how hot the two lead superheroes are, which is why we love her. Well one reason.

--- Gay Stuff - I hope this becomes a series at The Film Experience (although I wonder if there will always be enough news to justify it) - here's Manuel rounding up the LGBT movie news out in the world right now, including that Looking teaser I posted about yesterday and also a picture of James Franco and Zachary Quinto in Gus Van Sant's ex-gay movie Michael that I had missed.

--- No Wonder - I found this little chat at Forbes with director Lexi Anderson (who directed Punisher: War Zone) interesting even beyond her saying that an offer's out to a female director (not herself) to direct the Wonder Woman movie (she says it's somebody we'd all be very excited about) because of how much pressure she expresses that woman, any woman, directing the movie will be under to deliver something fantastic or else doom woman-kind forever. She says she's discouraged her folks from even suggesting her.

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