5 Off My Head: Toni My Queen

It's Toni Collette's 51st birthday today and you could knock me over with a feather upon the just-now-made realization that I have never done a list of my favorite Toni performances before. Not even for her 50th last year? What the hell was I thinking? Well there's no time like the present. I don't think this list will surprise anybody with my choices given what a vocal supporter of her I've been since I saw Muriel's Wedding way back in '96 and it became basically my number one favorite movie of all time...

... I think the only thing that will surprise is that I didn't up the number to ten or fifteen performances! Because I coulda! And I purposefully decided to leave T.V. performances off because that coulda doubled it again (but seriously, The United States of Tara forever). The fact that I got to hang out with her for a couple of drinks while she was doing press for Hereditary will probably always remain the greatest perk this gig has ever gifted me. That brag aside, here's my list!

My 5 Fave Toni Collette Movie Performances

Sandy, Japanese Story

"To say goodbye."

Annie, Hereditary

"I never wanted to be your mother."

Muriel, Muriel's Wedding

"Why can't it be me? Why can't I be the one?"

Lynn, The Sixth Sense

"Do I make her proud?"

Mandy, Velvet Goldmine

"It's funny how beautiful people look

 when they're walking out the door."

Runners-up: In Her Shoes, The Hours, Knives Out, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Velvet Buzzsaw, Krampus, Little Miss Sunshine, About a Boy, Clockwatchers, Emma... and all the rest!

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What are your favorite Toni Collette performances?

Hey Look We're Hot: The Movie

I love how here in the first teaser trailer for Anyone But You, the rom-com (aka the excuse to stare at two exceptionally physically gifted people) starring Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, they couldn't even be bothered to frame the two exceptionally physically gifted people as if they're really ever even looking at one another -- they are mostly shown in this minute of footage as standing facing the camera, their physical gifts on display for us, the viewer. Even when their faces are turned toward one another, their bodies are not, so we can stare at them better. An Oscar for whoever the hell shot this movie! Also...

... we got a stealth My Best Friend Wedding's reunion in the house!!! Okay Griffiths role in that movie (as one of the slutty weirdo cousins) was a small one but it counts. And no offense to director Will Gluck (Easy A is obviously great fun) but this just made me wish that PJ Hogan had directed this... or was directing literally anything sigggghhhh. Anyway I know how to feel better! 

I stare are shirtless Glen Powell some more! Voila, better.

Here is the movie's teaser then:

Anyone But You is out on December 15th.

And for more Glen Powell gifs, hit the jump...

I'm Terrible, Muriel

Whoopsie I forgot to mention -- today is an all-day NYFF press screening day! So I won't be posting this here Hump Day -- deepest, sincerest apologies. If you check Pajiba though I have two NYFF reviews going up today, and there's one at The Film Experience right now as well -- so it's not like I leave you with nothing! I'll link proper-like to them tomorrow -- I'm just pounding this out in between screenings and don't have the minutes at the moment. See you tomorrow!

Corn in the U.S.A.

I always hesitate to write about how my worst fear in the world is suffocation, because I have this image in my head of some Jigsaw motherfucker out here on the wilds of the internet noting that down in their torture spiral-notebook for when they inevitably decide to kidnap and torture me. I mean, that's the only way this blogging thing can end right? Well I've said it enough times now that I might as well just say it again...

Watching a movie right now that’s giving me flashbacks to the horrific twist in The Dressmaker and having a miniature panic attack all over again (that cute fashion romance had no right containing that trauma within it NO RIGHT) pic.twitter.com/BPROAYDvZD

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 21, 2021

... movies scenes where characters are suffocated by [fill in the blank] traumatize me every fucking time. Always works. And it was with that headspace that I went into Silo, out today, a movie about a young dude working on a farm who gets stuck in a corn quicksand. This movie isn't explicitly a horror film -- it's more like an elongated countryfied episode of one of those Fireman TV programs that all the Boomers love. But I spent a lot of it covering my eyes and having a miniature panic attack all the same, because these situations make me a big ol' baby. Here's the trailer:

If you'd like to see Silo it's in theaters and streaming right now -- you can find out where on both counts on the movie's website. I'll add that the film has Jim Parrack from True Blood in a small role and gosh I missed him! Where has he been keeping himself anyway?

Which is Hotter?

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Last night came word that director David Lowery -- who made one of my favorite movies of the decade with A Ghost Story, although his remake of Pete's Dragon (which I still haven't seen) is probably more apt to the conversation at hand -- is going to tackle Disney's live-action Peter Pan movie, following in the footsteps of blah blah all of their other live-action remakes of their animated features which I have totally stopped watching at this point. But I might see this one? David Lowery is very talented, and Peter Pan exists as an idea outside of the Disney movie more than say The Lion King, which i think gives him more room to wiggle. They're also titling it Peter Pan and Wendy so I imagine they'll maybe recognize that Peter Pan is actually a girl's story this time out? Imagine that! Anyway I'll also probably watch it because Jude Law is probably going to play Captain Hook, and as Colin O'Donoghue attests I love me a Hot Hook. On that note I ask y'all...

panel management

Quote of the Day

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I know y'all know I'll wanna talk about the 25th anniversary of what I have come to consider my favorite movie of all the movies, PJ Hogan's Muriel's Wedding. It's just I couldn't really decide when to celebrate it. I've always considered it a 1994 film -- see how it made my list of favorite 1994 films -- because it was released in Australia in September of 1994. But it didn't hit the US until the following March -- a limited release on the 10th and then a wider one on the 31st. 

So when to celebrate? Seeing as how I didn't celebrate last September and the 10th of March has now come and gone, I guess we'll be celebrating on March 31st, you know, assuming I'm alive. But for today I will share with you a piece at Variety on the film (thx Mac), where they talked to several of the wonderful people who gifted us with the movie, including this choice bit about the film's origins from Hogan, something I've never heard him tell in this much detail before:

"Muriel was based on his own sister. “I was the oldest,” he noted. “My sister and I both had a fractious relationship with our dad. In fact, he was an absolutely bully, way worse than the bully in the movie.” Because he was the eldest, said Hogan, he got out of the town and away from his family. But his sister couldn’t escape.

“She wanted nothing more than to please him,” said Hogan. “She never could. Then I heard that she was a success, that she was selling cosmetics and making a lot of money. But three months later, I heard she disappeared, and no one knew where she was. What happened was that to impress our dad, she had taken a job with his mistress selling cosmetics and was stealing the money. She was bamboozling our mother, who was every easily bamboozled.” And she fled to Sydney. “Everybody was so angry at her, but I understand why she did it.

”Hogan told her, “’I have no career and I’ll probably never get to make a film in my life. But if I made a film, I want it to be about you. I think this story is incredible. So, I asked her permission years before I ever figured out a way to tell the story. She gave me permission on two conditions: the first was she would be the heroine in the story and the second was that I would not use her name.”

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Muriel's Wedding (1994)

Bill: Did Perry interview for the police force yet?
Betty: Yes, but they said he couldn't join
because he was too tall.

This throwaway line in Muriel's Wedding makes me laugh every single time, but that's the thing -- every single line spoken in Muriel's Wedding in a winner. Top to bottom, it's perfect -- every member of the cast, every lie delivery, I literally think it's perfect. On that note yesterday would've been the 80th birthday of the legendary Aussie actor Bill Hunter, who played Bill Heslop aka Muriel's dad aka You Can't Stop Progress (He Lost) and who had a long, esteemed career besides this, but this'll always be the one I'll post about.

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1994

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Okay it's been awhile since we've done one of our "Siri Says" series -- I take longer breaks in between each so I can make this last, since we're running out of possible years now, and also I get lazy -- so let me re-explain the idea: I pick up my iPhone and I ask Siri to choose me a number between 1 and 100. The number she gives me I then correspond to a year, and I pick my five favorite movies from that year. Today Siri told me the number "94" and so today we shall take a look at The Movies of 1994.

I'm actually pretty surprised that we haven't covered 1994 in this series yet -- sure Siri's fickle, but 1994 is one of those formative years in my movie-obsessing, and I'm glad to get the chance to look at it now. I was working in the home video department of the local Wegmans grocery store and devouring every video-tape I could get my hands on -- to the kiddies out there, this was what we did in the 90s, especially in the year Quentin Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, you see. 

Scanning through the movies for that year my first thought was wow, a lot of these have not aged well -- yes I'm looking at you, Forrest Gump -- but once I dove down into the cracks of it a whole lotta awesome bubbled up to the surface. And even the bad movies from this time period left a pretty indelible mark on me about what the movies mean, good and ill. So let's do it. I hereby give you...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1994

Muriel's Wedding 

(dir. PJ Hogan)

-- released on September 29th 1994 --

Heavenly Creatures

(dir. Peter Jackson)

-- released on October 14th 1994 --

Hoop Dreams

(dir. Steve James)

-- released on October 14th 1994 --

Ed Wood

(dir. Tim Burton)

-- released on October 7th 1994 --

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Serial Mom 

(dir. John Waters)

-- released on April 13th 1994 --

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Runners-up: The Lion King (dir. Minhoff), Speed (dir. Jan de Bont), Dumb and Dumber (dir. Farrellys), Interview With the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan), Pulp Fiction (dir. Tarantino), Bullets Over Broadway (dir. Woody Allen), Reality Bites (dir. Ben Stiller)...

... Natural Born Killers (dir. Oliver Stone), Quiz Show (dir. Robert Redford), Jason's Lyric (dir. Doug McHenry), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (dir. Craven), Little Women (dir. Gillian Armstrong), 71 Fragments of a Chronology of a Chance (dir. Michael Haneke)...

... The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (dir. Stephan Elliott), Chungking Express (dir. Wong Kar-wai), Crumb (dir. Terry Zwigoff), The Last Seduction (dir. John Dahl), Nightwatch (dir. Ole Bornedal), Leon: The Professional (dir. Besson), Priest (dir. Antonia Bird)...

... Shallow Grave (dir. Danny Boyle), Three Colors: White (dir. Kieslowski), Three Colors: Red (dir. Kieslowski), To Live (dir. Zhang Yimou), The Shawshank Redemption (dir. Frank Darabont), The Hudsucker Proxy (dir. Coens)

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Never seen: Crooklyn (dir. Spike Lee), Tom & Viv (dir. Gilbert), Wolf (dir. Mike Nichols), The Madness of King George (dir. Hytner), Ashes of Time (dir. Wong Kar-wai), Backbeat (dir. Iain Softley)...

...... Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley), Eat Drink Man Woman (dir. Ang Lee), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (dir. Alan Rudolph), Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori), Queen Margot (dir. Patrice Chereau), Vanya on 42nd Street (dir. Louis Malle) 

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What are your favorite movies of 1994?

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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It seems somewhat likely to me that the majority of you have never seen PJ Hogan's 2002 comedy Unconditional Love, which stars Kathy Bates as a heartbroken American lady and Rupert Everett as the lover of a dead singer she liked. (It's complicated.) Anyway neither of those two are much featured in this sequence here -- this climactic showdown involves Meredith Eaton as Kathy's friend and Peter Sarsgaard (!!!) as an evil window-washer slash stalker...?

Honestly I have seen this film but I barely remember any of this. But it's Peter Sarsgaard's birthday today and this scene is extremely silly and insanely this very strange movie was PJ Hogan's follow-up to My Best Friend's Wedding and since there aren't many death scenes in PJ films... why not? Hit the jump for the rest...
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You're Terrible, Jason!

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A wee bit earlier I posted Entertainment Weekly's reunion of the cast of PJ Hogan's film My Best Friend's Wedding, and mentioned in an aside that I wanted a reunion of Muriel's Wedding stars Toni Collette & Rachel Griffiths now. But it turns out EW already did that in 2015 and I totally missed it! WTF! Where have I been and what the hell have I been doing with my life??? There's a portion of the interview online right here, but it's not the whole thing -- I gotta go find the whole thing somehow! Here's a choice bit until then:

"“I’ll never forget the first day I met Toni,” Griffiths recalls, immediately telling the full story of finding Toni at a little café in Sydney after they’d both been cast, with Collette already at work on gaining the 40 pounds she would have to add for the role. “She was being fattened up like a Thanksgiving turkey and was drinking literally the largest milkshake, as advised by her nutrition doctor,” laughs Griffiths. “We were both unknown and nervous, and she probably did a better job of hiding it than me. But there was a sweet, tentative excitement — there was this moment of a significant stepping onto some kind of adventure together.”"

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Pics of the Day

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EW got the cast of PJ Hogan's rom-com classic and MNPP fave My Best Friend's Wedding back together for the magazine's annual Reunions issue -- the film turns 22 this year, and in related news I am a decrepit thing -- and man alive it brings me joy seeing Jules & Michael & Kimmy & George together again! If you haven't watch MBFW in awhile I suggest you do - it holds up, as do all of Hogan's films (cough Muriel's Wedding cough -- where's that cast reunion?) because he's a woefully underrated genius who should've made ten times the movies he has by now. Thankfully EW got to chat with Hogan too:

"“Romantic comedy is a really difficult genre,” says director P.J. Hogan, who was interviewed separately from the cast. “I think what kills romantic comedies is they often feel prepackaged or like frozen food that hasn’t quite thawed — they’re just not really fresh. But when I see the film, it’s still got a snap to it. When it’s funny, it’s really funny, and the actors all glow. And I think Julia was extraordinary in the lead role. I mean, who else could’ve pulled that off?”"

Even though I just re-watched this movie a couple of months ago I'm totally gonna have to watch it again now. I love them so! It's also really great to see Cameron Diaz, who hasn't worked in five full years -- come back, Cameron! Hit the jump for the photos...

I Feel Like I Win When I Lose

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This scene is my hopeful mood for 2019.

Let's dance while the assholes eat each other.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Muriel's Wedding (1994)

Rhonda: I had cancer.
It's all right, they cut it out.
Cheryl: You were so full of life.
Rhonda: I'm not dead, Cheryl.

A happy 50th to Rachel Griffiths today!

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7 Off My Head: Come Back to the Cameron Diaz

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I think it was about a week or so ago that Selma Blair told somebody somewhere that her friend, the actress Cameron Diaz, had retired from actressing. I think most of us were like... wait, it has been four years since she's been in a movie hasn't it? I felt terribly guilty that I hadn't even noticed she'd been gone that long, and perhaps that exact oversight is why Cameron came out over the weekend and confirmed it - she says she is indeed retired.

At least she says it in a weird sort of roundabout way that leaves the door open, at least, but still. We don't want it! And so I got to thinking about all the great stuff Cameron Diaz gave us in the movies and I was going to make our typical list of 5 favorites but there are actually too many for that! She's such a natural and gifted comedianne. So I expanded it, and that's how bad I think she should un-retire. Here goes...

My 7 Favorite Cameron Diaz Performances

Lotte, Being John Malkovich

"I think it's kinda sexy that John Malkovich has a portal,
y'know, sort of like, it's like, like he has a vagina."

Malkina, The Counselor

"To see quarry, killed with elegance, it's just moving to me."

Maggie, In Her Shoes

"It is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.
I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart."

Kimmy, My Best Friend's Wedding

"I could be Jello-O."

Natalie, Charlie's Angels

"I signed that release form, so you can
just feel free to stick things in my slot."

Mary, There's Something About Mary

"Who needs him? I've got a vibrator!"

Tina, The Mask

"Sharing the sunset with me. For being the only guy
whose ever treated me like a person and not some sort
of party favor. For being any kind of romantic.
Even a hopeless one."

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What are your faves?

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