Good Morning, World

Before the series The Staircase aired I never would've thought to do a post on nepotism-baby Patrick Schwarzenegger because he hadn't done anything to give me a reason to. I hadn't seen him act in much but when I did I wasn't exactly walking out inspired -- like, I'd wanted to like the horror movie Daniel Isn't Real more than I did but I thought the two leads, one of which was him, were distractingly weak. Anyway like every single person on The Staircase, Schwarzenegger was very good -- maybe not Toni Collette or Parker Posey good, but asking that of him would just be mean -- and here we are and I am sharing these photos from Interview Magazine this morning. There's a long convo with his co-star Dane DeHaan there as well, check it out if you're so inclined, or just hit the jump for the rest of the photoshoot...

I Am Link

--- Now Them's Some Women -- I was already pleased as a punch to the happy-places when it was announced back in December that not only was Sarah Polley planning on directing her first new movie in nine years (an adaptation of the book Women Talking) but that it was going to star Frances f'ing McDormand, so trying to measure my renewed enthusiasm when a big batch of absolute queens were further announced to fill out the film's cast this week would be a folly's errand. Stratospheric shit! Said queens include Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Ben f'ing Whishaw, oh my! The story "follows a group of women in an isolated religious colony as they struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony’s men." This is gonna be something y'all.

--- Friends No More -- I'll admit that my enthusiasm for In Bruges director Martin McDonagh has been dulled a bit by the projects he's done since that -- Seven Psychopaths and especially Three Billboards (ugh) were big letdowns for me -- but today's news that he's reuniting with the stars of his original masterpiece, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, for his next one well that gives me renewed vim n' vigor, McDonagh-wise. The film will be called The Banshees of Inisherin and will film in August and is about a pair of lifelong friends who're navigating the awkward space where they no longer want to be friends.

--- Ain't No Mountain -- Similarly it's hard to get too worked up over a new Doug Liman movie, even though his earliest work I glommed onto, 1999's Go, ranks among my all-time faves, since he hasn't made anything as good since. But I'm gonna give him another chance with this next project because it stars Ewan McGregor and Ewan is always worth a chance. It's a biopic of adventurer George Mallory, who tried to climb Mount Everest back in the 1920s, and it will co-star Mark Strong and Outlander hunk Sam Heughan.  Oh and it'll be called Everest, just like the Jake Gyllenhaal movie from a couple of years back, but I have a feeling that if Ewan has a nude scene in his Everest movie he'll let them leave it in, unlike Jake, so Ewan wins.

--- Step Up -- Another addition to the incredibly stacked cast of that true-crime adaptation The Staircase, which already had Juliette Binoche, Colin Firth, and Toni Collette -- ex-twink Dane DeHaan will now also be sleazing around the joint. I was going to make a joke about how he could play The Owl but I don't know if any of you will get that joke. Anyway I apparently missed the news that the series will also co-star Parker freaking Posey too! Everyone, literally everyone, will be there. get me to this set!

--- What's Good For The Gigolo -- An update on a project we've been keeping tabs on: the series re-do of American Gigolo starring Jon Bernthal got picked up by Showtime, a ten-episode order. It's actually technically a sequel to the movie starring Richard Gere; Bernthal's playing the same character, just years later after he's gotten out of jail. See all of MNPP's previous coverage on this series here, but pay special attention to this post. That's the winner.

--- Til Death Do -- Kristen Wiig is going to star in an adaptation of the upcoming book called The Husbands, which "follows an overworked mother who, while house-hunting in a nice suburban neighborhood, meets a group of high-powered women with enviably supportive husbands. When she agrees to take on a legal case involving the untimely death of one resident’s husband, she risks exposing not only the secrets at the heart of her own marriage, but the true secret to having it all, one worth killing for." I can't for the life of me tell the tone from that description; it could be dead serious or it could be Desperate Housewives. Even a gender-flipped Stepford Wives maybe?

--- Channing Sandwich -- Speaking of movie descriptions that I can't get a handle on the tone for, Zoe Kravitz has gone and written herself a star vehicle called Pussy Island (indeed) that will have her heading to the orgy-centric tropical getaway of a tech-billionaire (to be played by Channing Tatum, somehow); while there things go from sexy to dangerous, or something. I don't know. Just throw me in a Channing Tatum Orgy and I'll figure it out as I go.

--- And Finally since I began this post with a crazy stacked cast I'll finish with the same - Apple is producing a psychological-thriller series called Surface from the creator of the High Fidelity series, and it will star several MNPP fave babes including Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Stephan James, Ari Graynor, François Arnaud, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Marianne Jean Baptiste. Good grief -- Get me to that set! To all of the sets! I gotta get the fuck outta my house! Ahem. Surface is described as "an elevated thriller about a woman’s quest to rebuild her life after a suicide attempt, and her struggle to remember – and understand – everything that led up to the moment when she jumped." Gugu is the lead. (And hopefully Oliver & Francois are sharing a trailer.)

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.

She Isn't Gone

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That picture of Alex Wolff is a couple of years old I think - it was well after the time he was on In Treatment at least, but man that show was a real quality factory for up-and-comers what with Dane DeHaan and Mia Wasikowska and Allison Pill all up in there, wasn't it? I didn't watch that show so I'm on-board the Wolff train late, but happily, thanks to the one-two punch of My Friend Dahmer last year and then of course this year's instant horror masterpiece Hereditary, which is out on VOD today! Go watch it once twice then ten more times, like I did, and now I have those horrible horns from the finale stuck in my head once again...

Immortal Landline & the City of West Columbus

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I have gotten a little bit behind on movie reviews so here are some quick thoughts on five films that I don't have it in me to write long thoughts on. They are in order from Best to Worst for no real reason whatsoever except my own personal kicks.

Columbus -- I wish somebody had let me know beforehand that this movie was both a love letter to the mid-century modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana - you can read a great primer as to why Columbus has so much killer architecture right here - and a love letter to John Cho's butt in and out of khakis. Those are like all of my favorite things in one place! In all seriousness this movie is a gorgeously simple meditation on the intermingling of public and private spaces (which okay is a fancy way of saying "butts and belfries") - that is just to say that it would be hard not to fall in love with someone who stands under Eero Saarinen with you and too feels the holy spirit. 

Ingrid Goes West -- While I still managed to post each and every trailer for this film before it came out (because every trailer gave us a little more of Billy Magnussen in his little short shorts) I still wasn't sold on it by those same trailers; it seemed like it was going to be a one-joke movie at the expense of social media, and in case you haven't noticed... I like social media. So color me face-slapped that this movie actually pushes deeper into the dark recesses of its themes, of mental health and modern disconnection, and that Aubrey Plaza is straight up super in it. I mean I wasn't surprised that Aubrey's great - she's always great, in her way.

But Ingrid really lets her root around in her already somewhat pigeonholed image like Jim Carrey did with The Cable Guy or Adam Sandler did with Punch-drunk Love and find curious and strange facets to that image that we haven't gotten to see before. She was up to the task. And this ain't a one-woman show either - Magnussen manages to spin his fuckable lunkhead image into nasty new territory himself, while O'Shea Jackson Jr. is a thousand watt charm goofball and Elisabeth Olsen is fiercely funny with her every avocado-toasted line delivery. This is a good movie!

Landline -- Jenny Slate remains winningly adorable (her snort is halfway to becoming Marilyn's coo, trademark wise) and she's surrounded by very fine folks on all sides (it was especially lovely to see Finn Wittrock play an actual human being for a change, which American Horror Story has yet to cast him as) but at a certain point Landline just begins to feel like an excuse to string together a bunch of mid-90s references. Watch people go to rent videotapes! Watch people listen to World Music on headphones at the record store! Chokers and barrettes, oh my! I mean they got the details perfect - I felt like I was transported to High School at times - but all that stuff subsumed the story, which felt like rote stuff, and got sitcommier by the second. I guess all the abortion stuff really sharpened the edges of Obvious Child - Landline needed something like that. More abortion, I say!

Blade of the Immortal -- I have watched two movies in the past couple of weeks that felt so excruciatingly long that I began to wonder if I might drop dead and my bones disintegrate into ash before the final credits roll, and this is one of them. There is no reason for this movie, which has loudly been sold as Takashi Miike's 100th Film - to be just under two and a half hours long; the only thing I can think of is that Miike has clearly made some sort of deal with the devil that he's got to churn out one million minutes of movie before he turns 60 or he will lose him immortal soul. That's got to be it. But hey at least I got a fucking sword out of it!

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets -- This is the second movie that felt so excruciatingly long that I began to wonder if I might drop dead and my bones disintegrate into ash before the final credits roll.

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More like Valerian and the Movie of a Thousand Minutes amirite

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 5, 2017

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In Valerian's defense Cara Delevingne at least comes out of it not looking like this whole "acting thing" is as grave an error on her part as it looked coming out of Suicide Squad - she's actually pretty charming here. Which helps one surf somewhat gently, for awhile, across the endless, endless wastes of this loudly clanging pile of space debris. But only for awhile. The effects look good?

Dave Franco Puts The Lick in Catholic

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I think we're totally overdue a new Vulgar Nun movie (one of the great genres) and wham bam thank you Dave Franco here we go -- The Little Hours is from the writer-director of Life After Beth (that movie starring Aubrey Plaza as the zombie girlfriend of Dane DeHaan and his surprising bulge) and stars a great big cast of comedy somebodies including Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Micucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Jemima Kirke, Adam Pally and Nick Offerman.The red-band trailer just dropped today and it looks fun! It's out June 30th.
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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... redefining business casual 

with Dane DeHaan.

As actual outfits a person might wear in the real world a lot of these looks they've stuffed Dane into for W Magazine (via, thx Mac) are just simply put unacceptable. Business Shorts? Noooo. And yet...

... somehow the dude's making 'em work. With legs like these...

... it's Business Shorts for the win.
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Comfortably Dumb

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I like weird things. I like going to the Mutter museum and staring at deformed fetuses in glass jars. I like the scene in The Abominable Dr. Phibes where we see how Vincent Price's skull-face is hidden under his human mask. Well so clearly does the director Gore Verbinski, but Gore Verbinski has never met a fun scary idea that he couldn't just strangle the fuck dead. A Cure For Wellness could have been an entertaining 90 minute creep-fest but instead what we get is going on three hours of interminable incoherent bullshit. 

Oh Verbinski certainly has a way with dream-like imagery - the endless corridors of a steam-bath haunted by four-legged creatures and black pools of water; a manic dance of white robes swirling and twirling fiendishly. They just don't add up to anything. Wellness is kind of like if the videotape from The Ring had been one of those 90s two cassette bundles like how James Cameron's Titanic was packaged - its just that by the time the curse has gotten to you you've already fallen asleep out of boredom.

He also doesn't know how to make his nightmare logic consistent -  watch something like Suspiria and yes, what the characters do might not make any sense, but there's a horrible inevitability to it; it makes its own fateful sort of irresistible sense. Nothing anybody does in A Cure For Wellness makes the slightest lick of sense but there's no captivating mystery to it; I could have written the entire movie after the first 20 minutes of set-up. Instead it just feels as if the film was filmed enough to make twelve versions and then they grabbed the footage off the floor in armfuls and said, "This will do! This is movie shaped!"

It's got a terrible case of Wander-Around-icitis - Dane DeHaan could've gotten to the bottom of what's going on if he'd simply ended any conversation he begins, instead of mid-conversation just walking off in another direction on some random tangent. And that's all that ever happens - the laziness on display in keeping him going in circles is staggering. There's just not enough mystery to unravel though, so he just walks in circles, hitting the same notes again and again and again until I just wanted to go set the damn castle on fire myself so we could get to the end we'd seen coming for hours.

The frustrating thing is that Verbinski does like the things I like and a good movie could have been assembled with these ideas... if he hadn't been in charge. Watching Wellness I thought often of what Ken Russell - an actual mad-man - would've done with this material. But everything Verbinski does, even down to the most deviant, feels worn to the nub, as if he and a boardroom of executives drew up pie-charts and diagrams about how much tooth-abuse or incest was a millisecond too much. His weirdness is by committee.

And he's a humorless filmmaker, so a role that Vincent Price would've gloriously sissified up here gets turned into a black hole of anti-charisma by Jason Isaacs in a parade of starchy white jackets. We know thanks to Harry Potter that Isaacs is game for some sneering camp, so its clear direction was at fault, especially since it sucks the like out of Dane DeHaan as well - these are actors possible of flourish, of having actual derangement in their eyes, but A Cure For Wellness isn't interested. It's anesthesia for the imagination.

Sick Boys

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Are we all going to go see A Cure For Wellness this weekend? I plan to, although I haven't figured out just when as of yet. (PS this is a three-day weekend, so we'll be back on Tuesday.) I was not the biggest fan of what director Gore Verbinski did with The Ring (I'm one of those hipster snobs who prefers the original Japanese version) but I'm looking forward to Wellness all the same - I really dig the freaky stylish trailers for it; they remind me of the best bits of the 1999 House on Haunted Hill remake (which is so much better than it has any right being). Anyway did I really never see this photo-shoot of Dane DeHaan did for Interview Magazine in 2014? It's typical Steven Klein greasy whore stuff but the look works for Dane - it's maybe the best he's ever looked. Hit the jump for a couple more, and if you see A Cure For Wellness this weekend let me know what you thought in the comments...

I Want To Get Well

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The Cure For Wellness was announced back in April - see our post here - it is The Ring remake director Gore Verbinski's return to straight horror after filming thirteen thousand straight hours of Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (I say "straight horror" because there admittedly is A LOT of horror in the Pirates movies, which is an aspect that gets glossed over, I think). Anyway The Cure For Wellness stars Dane DeHaan as a dude who ends up at some sort of nightmare cult spa...

... which even though this trailer's titles are in Korean and no words are spoken visually it kind of gets across the whole "nightmare cult spa" thing pretty clearly. It's reminding me of both the 1999 House on Haunted Hill remake (an underrated underrated gem) as well as Ken Russell's Altered States, which are things I always want to be reminded of at any given moment, so I say bring this movie on. 

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The Cure For Wellness comes out around Valentine's Day - the movie just screened in Austin and over here you can read a round-up of reactions, which seem very positive. Park Chan-wook gets name-checked and again, these are exactly the sorts of things you wanna hear.

Great Moments In Movie Shelves #24

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Am I really gonna do this? I guess I'm really gonna do this. Prepare yourselves for TMI, probably. You were warned. (Although I'm surprised I haven't shared this specific too-much-information already, honestly.)

Anyway don't get me wrong, my well-documented library fetish goes way way back to childhood, I have numerous vivid happy memories of libraries as a wee little book-lover... 

... so when I went to college (as an English major, natch) it only made sense for me to take a part-time job working in the campus library. I worked at the main desk, checking in and out books, and also opening and closing the enormous building. You'd have to walk the entire library, floor by floor, locking it up as you went.

My Junior Year this insanely adorable Freshman became my co-worker. He wasn't my usual type at all - for one he was younger (I've typically always like guys older than me) and for another he had this floppy blond hair and at the time, as a still rather close-minded 20 year old, I had a narrow view of attraction...

... I mean if you look around MNPP I've clearly 

still got a type (dark hair preferential) 

but back then I was really very rigid about it. 

I was much more Daniel Radcliffe than Dane DeHaan. Point being I was somehow surprised that a six-foot tall 18 year old rowing team member with rosy cheeks was getting me going, and yes in retrospect that seems like the definition of insanity. WTF, me.

Anyway we flirted for ages, and to get to the point 

one night he brought a bottle of booze to work...

... and as we went through the library 

checking the stacks for stray patrons 

one drink led to another and before you knew it...

... we were slamming each other 

against the Dewey Decimal System. 

And this scene in Kill Your Darlings totally reminds me 

of that wonderful memory every time. 

So thank you, Kill Your Darlings.

Thank you very much.

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Dane DeHaan Rub Down

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If I was Dane DeHaan I'd be so sick and tired of every stylist at every photo-shoot insisting I dress up like a half-assed reject from a Bowie concert circa 1972. Enough with the scarves and silken fabrics and stripes already! 

Aaaanyway Dane's just lined up his next project and it sounds interesting - he's making a horror movie with The Ring remake director Gore Verbinski called A Cure For Wellness, about "The Spa From Hell!!!" They're not using the phrase "The Spa From Hell!!!" that is all mine, but they can feel free to borrow it for their posters or what not. The film will co-star Nymphomaniac's Mia Goth (so many willowy blondes). 

I like about 75% of Verbinski's The Ring (I prefer the original Japanese version... and yes, you should read with in a snooty hipster voice) so having him head back to horror should be interesting... but on the other hand he's proven himself a bit of a bloated bore too reliant on gigantic budgets and excessive run-times (see: everything he's done) and if there's one thing that doesn't jibe with effective horror it's both of those things. But I like the basic premise (the cult of massage therapists creep me out - don't touch me!) and Dane's a terrific little actor, so we'll see.

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Which Is Hotter?

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It's Emory Cohen's 25th birthday today, and since The Place Beyond the Pines has been randomly haunting me this week (it's come up several times) this seems like the perfect question to ask!
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Which is hotter in The Place Beyond the Pines?

Emory Cohen

Dane DeHaan

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It seems cut and dry to me - no offense to Dane DeHaan (especially after seeing Dane DeHann in his underwear) - that Emory wins this face-off, even though I thought he was terrible in Pines while I thought Dane was terrific. Practical talent is not what we're voting on! (See more of Emory's real talents here.) But as long as we're talking this movie...

... remember how gay it was without ever actually being gay? That was weird. I guess you put a cute shirtless boy in front of Bradley Cooper and the gayness is just gonna happen, but besides that the interplay between Dane and Emory, plus all the leering at Ryan Gosling... Derek Cianfrance, I can only hope you bring such a richness of vision to your next film, an adaptation of The Light Between Oceans starring Michael Fassbender.

Speaking of there's a new-to-my-eyes picture of Fassy with a lucky-ass fan on the set of that awhile back. (via) Sex Stache Alert!
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Good Morning, World

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It's still sort of technically morning, right? Before Noon counts. Sorry, I got a late start today - hopefully these pictures of Dane Dehaan's surprisingly ample bulge in Life After Beth make up for my tardiness. Matthew Gray Gubler...

... also shows up in the movie in some tighty-whities, but the camera plays coy with him, framing everything just out of the way of our prying eyes -- whatcha afraid of, Matthew Gray Gubler??? (If you were going to form an argument in favor of his shyness you could say the movie's going out of its way to emasculate his character, and in that way this is effective.... if you felt like making that argument, of course.) Anyway hit the jump for a few more, and happy Monday...