Boy Kills Crunches

Any movie that has an entire shot that's entire purpose to to showcase an actor's abdominal muscles is a movie that's gonna grab my attention, and when the abs belong to Bill Skarsgård, and Bill Skarsgård has gotten especially shredded for the exact purpose of showcasing said abdominal muscles, well, consider me sold. 

Fact is I was already sold on Boy Kills World the first time I posted about Boy Kills World nearly two years ago -- see that here -- but it's nice that this first trailer made me feel right in my two-year-old assumptions. It looks like a total blast! And it's great seeing Michelle Dockery, Andrew Koji (mmm Andrew Koji), Sharlto Copley, and Famke Janssen running around being goofy and over-the-top in service of some action tomfoolery. Watch:

Boy Kills World is out on April 26th.

Idris Elba Punches a Lion

Much as Tomb Raider 2 will always and forever be known (well as much as anybody remembers Tomb Raider 2 at this point, anyway) as "the movie where Angelina Jolie punches a shark," so too shall the new movie Beast, be known as "the movie where Idris Elba punches a lion." I might also personally refer to it as "the movie where Idris Elba runs around in khakis a lot," but...

... that will just be for my own personal files. Anyway this movie is from director Baltasar Kormákur, who made one of my least favorite Jake Gyllenhaal movies -- that would be Everest, but I'll admit it's one of my least favorite Jake movies because they cut out the scene they filmed of Jake naked (we had paparazzi photos from the set) from the final film, and that's just an immediate docking of several grades from your product. But I remember the movie itself being crummy too. Vaguely. Anyway here's the beast trailer, which looks like a lot of late summer fun:

Beast is out on August 19th.

Do Dump or Marry: Bushy Gringo Triad

.

Nash Edgerton's new movie Gringo premiered last night - we showed you the trailer to the film way back when - and its red carpet was a veritable smorgasbord of beardage. A tonnage, even! And stars Sharlto Copley, David Oyelowo and Nash's little brother Joel weren't shy about getting all up in that business.

I mean were they all on ecstasy? So much face rubbing! I am not complaining - everyone should take ecstasy before hitting the red carpet if you ask me. Anyway I sadly missed a screening of this movie this week so I can't tell you if it's good or not but one thing I can tell you is it's got a cast (also including Charlize Theron and Melonie Diaz) that makes quality a secondary characteristic. I want to stare at these people for two hours no matter what. 

Tell us in the comments your 

Do Dump or Marry with these three!

.

I Am Link

.

--- Kill Planet Kill - Did anybody watch Mosaic on HBO? That's Steven Soderbergh's murder-mystery starring Sharon Stone & Garett Hedlund. I think it is good so far (I'm halfway through it), enough that I am hooked to see it through - mostly due to some deliciously unlikable work from Stone - but I wouldn't say it's blown me away like I was hoping for. Still there's plenty more to see so... we will see. Anyway on the Soderbergh tip the trailer for Unsane, his "shot on an iPhone" thriller starring The Crown's Claire Foy, dropped recently, you can watch it right here. That's out on March 23rd, so soon! And today comes word of his next project, roundly burying his recent retirement from movie-making but good - all we have is a title, but it's a doozy - Planet Kill. Sounds like something! Oh and it's co-written by his frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns, who wrote The Informant! and Contagion.

--- Neighbor Knocking - This is old news at this point but that's what these link round-ups are for, to catch up on things I missed - Tom Hanks is going to play Mister Rogers in a bio-pic! That in itself is neat, if a little on the nose, but what's actually exciting about this news is the film will be directed by Marielle Heller, whose film The Diary of a Teenage Girl was one of my favorites in 2015 but she hasn't made a movie since. She has several projects listed in production on IMDb though, so hopefully they all happen. Just give her all the work.

--- King of the Castle - I still haven't watched the trailer for Toni Collette's upcoming horror movie Hereditary, even though I posted it, and here's another thing I am posting even though I'm not going to watch it: here is the first trailer for Castle Rock, the upcoming Stephen King series set in that titular Main town full of bad juju, which will bring together the entire Stephen King universe while starring a tippy-top-tier collection of actors like Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgard, and Sissy fuckin' Spacek. I don't need to watch that damn trailer, I was sold months ago!

--- Taking Shape - If you're as excited (and yet wary at the same time) as we are about David Gordon Green's upcoming Halloween movie then you should read this quote from John Carpenter himself that DH shares today via a recent interview - JC is a producer and a consultant on the new movie, plus he's doing the music! And here he talks about why he's signed up to work on this one even as he's avoided the sequels in the past. And he doesn't even mention the word "money" once! If you missed it we shared a shot of Jamie Lee Curtis on set with DGG earlier this week.

--- Super Quick CMBYN link round-up! THR interviewed Sufjan and he talks about going to the Oscars! Book author Andre Aicman is making the rounds - here's a chat with Lambda Literary and here's a chat with the Globe & Mail. (I couldn't read the second one because of a paywall though.) But most importantly...
.

The LA Times just dropped an alternate take of the final shot of #CallMeByYourName -- watch it here https://t.co/481c1iF9vo (thx Mac) pic.twitter.com/YivTEaDEZc

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 2, 2018

.
--- Tiffany's a Trip - I couldn't finish Girl's Trip when I tried to watch it, I thought it was awful, but Tiffany Haddish was very funny despite weak material and she's been a joy to watch over the course of the past couple of months - I'm hoping she'll get to work with material up to her level soon; if the whole PTA collaboration comes through that'd be something! Anyway she talks about that and more, much more, in this super fun chat with Vulture, and obviously I gotta share the Timmy bit:

Vulture: There’s also Timothée Chalamet from Call Me by Your Name, who took a picture with you at the New York Film Critics Circle. You two had the biggest fruit-sex scenes of last year. Did you compare notes?
Tiffany: His was way more sexier than mine! Oh my God. He was like, “You’re into fruit, I’m into fruit,” and I was like, “Yeahhhh, but your fruit has a cream filling!"

--- And Finally if you've ever seen Nash Edgerton's film The Square from 2008 (here's a brief review I wrote) then you have reason to be excited about his new directorial effort (yes this is the first feature-length film he's made in a decade) called Gringo even before you find out it has a cast to die for - it stars David Oyelowo as a hapless salesman (this is clearly a much more comic movie than The Square was) who gets in over his head in Mexico, and it co-stars Joel Edgerton (Nash's brother), Amanda Seyfried, Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton, Sharlto Copley and Harry Treadaway. It's out on March 9th. Here's the trailer:

.

.

Just Give Your Piece A Chance

.

Free Fire has movements like music - it's not quite a symphony of violence, or the ballet that John Woo movies are oft-times accused of resembling; it's more like modern noise. Clanging and bellows - discord. Noise is paramount - the sound of guns being fired has never felt like this to me before. It's one long shoot-out inside an abandoned factory made of cement, and every bullet explodes and whizzes and ricochets and echoes while the walls burst and crumble and the characters make these scuff scuff scuff noises as they crawl through the debris, occasionally yelping.

And in between the yelping come these torrents of dialogue - but there's nothing Tarintino-esque about their talk; it's funny but not inhumanly clever. These folks seem like folks, folks who've just found themselves in a great big giant pickle they weren't prepared for, and who are just kind of verbally awestruck by the sudden bullshit.

Writer-director Ben Wheatley (along with his co-writer Amy Jump) takes time, too - they let the scenario breathe, and the characters take long rests, and we come to know and like pretty much every damn one of these colorful but just-folks folks, which is a tough spot to be in when the bullets are flying so willy-nilly, for them and for we the watchers in the stands. Body counts are a tough business, from both sides. Free Fire is super fun and emotionally desperate in equal measure - it's an action movie with life and blood pumping through it, in it, and out of it too.

.

I could've gotten a closer picture of BEN WHEATLEY but I had to get that awesome FREE FIRE artwork in there #freefire #film #benwheatley

A post shared by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on Apr 20, 2017 at 7:38pm PDT

.

Hammer & Fire

.

I love love love the target practice posters for Ben Wheatley's upcoming 70s-set action flick Free Fire, don't you guys? And not just because of Armie Hammer's impressive beard and shadowy trousers fold. My boyfriend wrapped presents in vintage target posters one year and this brings back those happy memories. Ahh, memories. You can see the entire series, with Brie Larson & Sharlto Copley & Sam Riley and several more folks represented - over here. But speaking of Armie...

... I missed two photos last week when this photo-shoot for C Magazine dropped, and they're maybe the best of the bunch! So I must right such a monstrous wrong immediately, and offer my most tremendous apologies. Forever Armie!

What is the Opposite of Hardcore?

.

I met some very nice, very smart people during my brief two-year stint in film school, but there was this one dude who I couldn't stand - let's just call him Entitled Whity Number One, or EWNO for short. EWNO came into class convinced he knew everything, where "everything" in his language translated to him having more money to spend than the rest of us, the better to show off with, and show off was all he did. The short films he made during our time together (together is a bit strong - let's say adjacent, our time adjacent) were expensive and incoherent and loud and it was clear to me that if anybody in my class was going to be successful he was probably going to be successful because god he was terrible.

I thought a lot about him while watching Hardcore Henry, which is a garbage movie. It's the Crank movies (which are good movies!) told via first-person perspective, meaning it's a lot of people screaming directly at the camera, and the camera falling off buildings, and then leering directly at lots of breasts. The Crank movies are straight-dude movies too, but they're witty and cleverly offensive and Jason Statham is a deranged joy to watch. 

Hardcore Henry is anything but a joy to watch. It is a sexist slog, relentlessly derivative and just plain dull - it thinks it's reinvented the wheel but it's really just one long skid-mark instead. My film school professor would try to get EWNO to learn things about film technique - really basic things like editing and where to place the camera - but he wasn't having any of it, and Hardcore Henry feels like it's hot off the dick of some dude like him who doesn't need that shit. He is rewriting film language, all by himself - fuck one hundred years of cinema in the throat! 

Nobody is going to be looking at Hardcore Henry one hundred years from now to garner lessons about anything - this is not the new Battleship Potemkin, dude. It's the anti-clever, it's the anti-watchable, it is the anti-entertainment. It's a limp dick, dude. Your dick is sad and limp. Put it back in your pants and go home.

Today's Mood

.

Today's Mood has been brought to you by this picture of Shalrto Copley in character as "Cocaine Jimmy" in the upcoming first-person action flick Hardcore Henry, via Sharlto's Instagram. Watch the trailer for the movie, which is out next Friday, right here.

.

Just How Hardcore Is Henry Anyway

.

You guys have no idea (okay maybe you have some idea) how excited I was when I pressed play on the first trailer for Hardcore Henry -- the upcoming first-person action-movie starring Sharlto Copley -- and basically the first shot was bulge.

And the third shot was bulge. 

And the fifth shot...

... was bulge. So much Sharlto Copley bulge, I thought! This is precisely what I was hoping for when I pressed play -- all of my wildest dreams were coming to fruition. And then...

... Sharlto Copley showed up, on-screen, and I realized that I wasn't looking at Sharlto Copley's bulge at all! Mystery bulge! Turns out I was totally wrong about Sharlto playing the "Henry" of the title - thing is, IMDb doesn't list who it is playing the lead POV role. It really is a mystery bulge! The Playlist says that Sharlto is playing "mysterious British fellow called Jimmy" who aids Mystery Mr. Hardcore Henry on his quest, so at least I'll get to look at Sharlto, I guess. Not his bulge though. It's a real Sophie's Choice.

Anyway, you guys gotta watch this trailer:

.

.

It makes this movie look SO MUCH BETTER than I was anticipating it to look. The whole "first person" thing felt like a terrible gimmick when I first read about it but some of those shots in there are just mind-blowing spectacle. I can't wait to see this come April.

Who Wore It Best?

.

.
.

I Am Link

.

--- Fit Friends - What all the headlines blaring about Kingsman star Taron Egerton wanting to play Wolverine when Hugh Jackman moves on have missed are the meat of his quote when asked about the subject, which is all about working with Hugh on another film, the ski-jumper bio-pic Eddie the Eagle (we told you about it here), and how the two of them have talked a bunch about their bodies together, and how much they love to sing together, and jeez it's all gay as shit.
.

--- Punish Me - I hate hate hate this news and wish me ignoring it would make it un-happen but since I don't have the superpowers possible for that I'll just go ahead and make it clear here that I in no way shape or form endorse the casting of the terrible Jon Bernthal as Frank "The Punisher" Castle for the second season of Daredevil on Netflix. He is the worst, and I'm so annoyed I'm going to have to suffer through him schmucking up another TV show I like. I was so happy when he died on The Walking Dead dammit. Thomas Jane is rolling over in his grave!

.

--- Luke Evans Is Out - I feel as if I am seeing this kid Jack Reynor's name constantly but I still still have no idea why - no I didn't see that Transformers mess. I guess I'll find out when I see the Fassbender MacBeth movie which he co-stars in, and now he's just come on-board Free Fire, the next movie from director Ben Wheatley; in fact it looks like he's replacing Luke Evans in the film, who apparently had to drop out because of a scheduling conflict. Evans has already made a movie with Wheatley called High Rise, which hasn't come out yet. Anyway on top of Reynor Sam Riley has also joined the new movie, whose cast already includes Sharlto Copley & Armie Hammer & Brie Larson & Cillian Murphy.

.

--- Set Dressing - It's hard to believe that there's anything I don't know about the Jurassic Park movies but lo behold a thing - Screen Crush uncovers an Easter Egg involving a movie poster glimpsed in the San Diego carnage that caps off the end of The Lost World which is pretty spectacular. Basically what it comes down to is Steve Spielberg can get anybody to do anything, I guess.

.

--- Tasty Treats - I could probably do an entire post that was just links to fascinating writing on Hannibal ("probably" being an understatement) but let's keep ourselves in check, for the moment, and just offer up four -- here's a nice piece at Vulture that talks about the respectably ballyhooed look of the show, where they talked some to director Vincento Natali, who's directed three episodes this season (including the gorgeous one we've already seen). Here's a nice piece at The Playlist talking about how morally the show views its own immorality. Here's a piece at Time wherein they contrast their reactions to A Game of Thrones and Hannibal and the viewer's "Not For Me' threshold for violence. And finally here's Matt Zoller Seitz being adorably nerdy pretending he's chatting with Dr. Lecter about the show and its impressionistic aims.

.

--- Unequivocal Sex Invite - Vanity Fair shares a large excerpt from the upcoming book As If: The Oral History of Clueless, which turns 20 next month (the movie I mean - the book isn't out yet. Anyway if you're at all the target audience for such a thing (and you know already if you are) I dare you to be able to stop reading this once you start, and then I double-dare you not to need to watch Clueless immediately following reading it. All of that happened to me last night, anyway.
.

--- Bug Chasers - STYD shares a brand new poster for Cooties, the "schoolchildren zombies" flick with Elijah Wood & Allison Pill, but it's not as good as the first two (see the first one here and the second one here) - they've gotten progressively busier, and this is one that crams all the actors onto it in a bit of a photo-shop mess. That said I hadn't seen some of the pictures they're also sharing, which are very funny. Cooties is out in September; the trailer's here.

 .

--- Run To You - Every week while watching Inside Amy Schumer either me or my boyfriend will inevitably find ourselves speaking the words, "God I wish she was our friend." Every week. So that's all I could think of when I saw the picture making the rounds of her photo-bombing a gay couple's engagement pictures in Central Park that she happened to jog by being taken - I guess I've got to marry my boyfriend now so we can wander Central Park until the same thing happens to us! I do, boyfriend! I do!

--- And Finally, oh my god look it's Mulder and Scully!!!

.

EXCLUSIVE: Your first look at Mulder and Scully! #TheXFiles pic.twitter.com/UexSfktTbA

— The X-Files (@thexfilesfox) June 10, 2015

Sharlto Reporting For Duty

.

While we're waiting for British director Ben Wheatley's JG Ballard adaptation called High-Rise (which stars Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans and Sienna Miller as folks trapped in a you-guessed-it high-rise building) to come out - supposedly some time this year - he's moving onto his next project, the drug-deal-gone-wrong thriller Free Fire. It's already got Armie Hammer and Luke Evans (again!) attached; today comes word via Sharlto Copley that Sharlto Copley is also in it. Sure! Okay!

.

Good Morning, World

. 

Well plopping a half-naked Sharlto Copley in front of my favorite weird fetish a book-case is certainly one way to get me to finally watch Powers, that Playstation network superhero show of his. Did any of you watch it? It just got renewed for a second season...

... and so I'm thinking I'll give the first few episodes a whirl once I have a minute or ten. (See previous "Sharlto's shirtless on this thing posts here and here.) In the meantime you know the drill, there's more Sharlto after the jump (including some pictures of him running around in a wet-suit on vacation cuz duh)...

One Seventh Wagner

.

The Brazilian actor Wagner Moura was the second best thing about Neill Blomkamp's film Elysium (we all know what the first best thing was) so I'm glad to hear he's getting more work here in the US - he's just been cast as 1/7th of The Magnificent Seven in the latest iteration of that well-trod tale. Antoine Fuqua, who recently spent a bunch of time training his camera on Jake Gyllenhaal's well greased nipples, is directing; the dude who wrote The Blind Side and the dude who wrote True Detective together wrote the script. Moura joins Chris Pratt, Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Luke "Homophobe" Grimes, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Haley Bennett in the cast. Anyway I really like Moura's face; it's both attractive and kind of off-putting at once. I'm totally into that.

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... the tea to Sharlto's crumpets.

That is of course Chappie director Neill Blomkamp (soon to be Alien 5 director!) with him (pic via) although I prefer their previous shirtlessier photo-ops. They're so adorable together though. Get married, you two!

Actually nevermind, these two should get married:

And I will be the ring-bearer. (Insert your own cock-ring joke here.) In related news yes Chappie is out today and the reviews are mixed but hey, it gave us the above hug, and it gave us the following shots of Sharlto in his motion-capture costume playing the titular bot, so that's something...

There's a whole behind-the-scenes video from the movie over here that you can watch; besides there being more of Sharlto swinging around on the set...

... there's also a bunch of footage (and I do mean A LOT) of Jackman strutting around in his already-admired Chappie khakis. In fact I made a few gifs of that because why not? Hit the jump for it...

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

.

It's a gut-buster! And if you can believe it, I've never done this scene for this series before. It's been on the list since I started but the right moment never seemed to present itself... well I think the right moment has finally presented itself. Hit the jump for the rest...