February 6, 2017, 11:30 am
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Silent screen star and
tragic homosexual Ramon Navarro was born on this day in the year 1899 in Durango, Mexico - his family came to the US as refugees from the Mexican Revolution. Trained as a ballet dancer he worked his way up the Hollywood ladder from extra to "The New Valentino" in just a few years time; his skimpy little slave outfits in
the 1925 version of Ben-Hurapparently caused quite "a sensation." But who's sensational-ist?
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February 6, 2017, 12:52 pm
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Here are a few new pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal in front of and behind the camera for
Life, the outer space thriller he's in the Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson et cetera, which have arrived thanks to
IHJM -- I'm personally keen on the shots of him slipping out of his jumpsuit alongside director Daniel Espinosa seen below.
(click to embiggen) I'm surprised to see this movie's out in just about six weeks -- it comes out on March 24th. It feels like a Summer Movie, doesn't it? But I guess there's not really such a thing anymore. Oh these mad times we live in!
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And a new trailer aired during the Super Bowl...
..(thx Mac) You see a lot more of the invasive extraterrestrial species in this trailer and I gotta admit I love the design -- it's reminding me of the underrated horror flick from 2008 called
Splinter, which I hope all of you have seen. Anyway I hope it remains a sentient-adjacent slimy blob of tentacles and jelly-like matter, whose only directive is survival at the expense of anything its its way, because that is the sort of shit that scares me more than almost anything. Survival of the gooiest!
Lovecraftian ghoulies aside you'd think that my eyes would be full up with Jake & Mr. Reynolds bouncing around, but I gotta admit I spend each trailer hoping to see more and more of Hiroyuki Sanada, which this trailer really delivers on...
I hope he has something to do besides being "the Japanese one on the spaceship" -- he already did that in Danny Boyle's
Sunshine.
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February 6, 2017, 2:28 pm
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Today would have been just the 85th birthday of François Truffaut, which makes me terribly sad -- he really should still be around, having mad another dozen movies at least, don't you think? Instead he died from a brain tumor in 1984, having only made 21 films, although to be fair his legacy's pretty well assured off of those.
Well those and having bound himself inextricably to Alfred Hitchcock with
his Film-making 101 classic Hitchcock / Truffaut, which no cineaste's collection will ever be complete without. Have you guys seen the documentary that Kent Jones made about the book last year? I recommend it! Anyway in celebration of what would have been his birthday we're doing our first ever Director Face-off for this week's "Beauty vs Beast"
over at The Film Experience, so click on over and get your Auteur on.
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February 6, 2017, 2:53 pm
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Here's a new pair of pictures (
via) of Henry Cavill (with bonus Nicholas Hoult below!) in uniform for
Sand Castle, his upcoming war flick that we've been covering for the sole purpose of staring at pictures just like this. See more
here!
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February 7, 2017, 7:10 am
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This is kind of a weird way to say goodbye to
Miguel Ferrer - with naked gifs of him in a 1992 organ smuggling movie called
The Harvest - but hey what can I say I saw it would have been his birthday this morning and I was moved. Ferrer
died two weeks ago at the too-young age of 61 from cancer - you might know him from
Twin Peaks, or
Robocop, or a million billion things. I believe he will be in the new
Twin Peaks series reprising his role of FBI Agent Rosenfeld, so that'll be a nice tribute to the beloved character actor. What do you remember him most fondly from?
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February 7, 2017, 7:35 am
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February 7, 2017, 8:36 am
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Happy Tuesday, everybody - and I do mean everybody. Young or old, rich or poor, fat or thin, so on and so forth. This morning I have asked my phone to once again to choose us all
a number between 1 and 100, and today she came back at me with the number 73. So today we look at
The Movies of 1973. A good year for the movies. A scary year. My favorites are a dark and spooky bunch. I suppose one could argue something about the big black clouds of Vietnam and Watergate polluting the air, if one felt up to arguing such things. I'm just gonna get to my list though. Here they are...
My 5 Favorite Movies of 1973
(dir. William Friedkin)
-- released on December 26th, 1973 --
(dir. Terrence Malick)
-- released on October 13th 1973 --
(dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky)
-- released on November 29th, 1973 --
(dir. Robin Hardy)
-- released on October 16th 1973 --
(dir. Nicolas Roeg)
-- released on December 9th, 1973 --
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Runners-up:
Paper Moon (dir. Peter Bogdanovich),
Westworld (dir. Michael Crichton),
Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer),
Sleeper (dir. Woody Allen),
The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Victor Erice)...
...
Day For Night (dir. Truffaut),
Charlotte's Web (dir. Charles Nichols),
Fantastic Planet (dir. René Laloux),
Theatre of Blood (dir. Douglas Hickox),
Coffy (dir. Jack Hill),
The Crazies (dir. George Romero),
Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bertolucci),
Le Magnifique (dir. Philippe de Broca)
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What are your favorites movies of 1973?
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February 7, 2017, 11:29 am
.I don't know if I can bring myself to watch this video (directed by Cary Fukunaga!) of Jake Gyllenhaal singing a song from
Sunday in the Park with George, his upcoming Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim musical, because I can't afford to see the show and this is just going to depress me. The world's awfully depressing right now. I might have to wait until I can take it. But perhaps it will do something for you, other than despair anyway.
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February 7, 2017, 12:40 pm
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The Film Experience is celebrating - as should we all - the 50th birthday of Laura Dern this Friday with a week-long series focusing in on several of her performances through the years, and today yours truly has tackled her work in the 1991 film
Rambling Rose.
Click here to read it. Dern's shamefully only been nominated for an Oscar twice (she should have a dozen by now if you ask me!) and this was the first. She is typically wonderful.
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February 7, 2017, 2:30 pm
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These are from an old photoshoot
but they're hitting the spot today.
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February 7, 2017, 2:36 pm
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This picture of Michael Fassbender, Orlando Bloom and Josh Hartnett was taken at the Directors Guild Awards this past weekend, and it feels to me like somebody rounded them up just so I could ask this question, so here we go: Which would you Do, which would you Dump, and which would you Marry? Hit the comments like Michael Fassbnder hit up the martinis!
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February 7, 2017, 3:12 pm
.Don't ask me why Henry Cavill was reenacting Elizabeth Berkley's pool scene from
Showgirls on his
Instagram account - I don't explain the weirdness, I just exploit it.
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February 8, 2017, 7:12 am
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James Dean, who stood to pee,
was born on this day in 1931.
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February 8, 2017, 7:45 am
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A "teaser trailer" for
It Comes at Nighthas been released! Ahhh! Turn up the volume...
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.I suppose you can technically call what I just watched a "teaser trailer" but it really felt substantial enough to be just "a trailer" -- I mean we're not given the entire story-line or anything but it's plenty, ya know? I'm sold. Then again I was sold when the director of
Krisha signed on to make a horror film called
It Comes At Nightstarring Joel Edgerton, but I am a rare beast, so maybe more selling is necessary for other less-excitable folk. Did you guys see
the poster the other day? That sucker sells it pretty hard, too.
Anyway, some notes. The painting that the trailer opens with is called
"The Triumph of Death" and it was painted by the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the year 1562.
Here is a clearer look at it:
(click to embiggen) I thought it was a Bosch painting while watching the trailer (sidenote: I just watched the Bosch doc on Netflix the other night, which I recommend!) but Bosch was clearly a big influence on Bruegel. Bruegel's works have shown up previously in films like Tarkovsky's
The Mirror and Lars von Trier's
Melancholia - he's friendly to cinema, of the miserablest sort, you could say. But here's what the Museo del Prado, the
Museum in Madrid where this painting is hung, has to say about it specifically:
"In this moral work, the triumph of Death over mundane things is symbolized by a large army of skeletons razing the Earth. The background is a barren landscape in which scenes of destruction are still taking place. In the foreground, Death leads his armies from his reddish horse, destroying the world of the living. The latter are led to an enormous coffin with no hope for salvation. All of the social institutions are included in this composition and neither power nor devotion can save them. Some attempt to struggle against their dark destiny while others are resigned to their fate.
Only a pair of lovers, at the lower right, remains outside the future they too will have to suffer. This painting depicts a customary theme in medieval literature: the dance of Death, which was frequently used by Northern artists. Brueghel casts the entire work in a reddish-brown tone that gives the scene an infernal aspect appropriate for the subject at hand. The profusion of scenes and moralizing sense applied by the artists are part of Hieronymous Bosch´s influence on this work."
After watching that trailer I feel as if the "pair of lovers" described above might apply to the film in some way, although given the fact that there appear to be at least two pairs of lovers in the film (one played by Edgerton & Carmen Ejogo and the other played by Riley Keough & Christopher Abbott) ya got me at who's who. We could also be reading too much into the painting and what it's meant to reflect about the film, but seeing as how they decided to begin their first trailer with that image I don't think I'm nuts, finding it important.
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February 8, 2017, 8:36 am
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I mean to Fluff!
More on the movie
The Stuff here.
And here's the full scene:
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February 8, 2017, 9:13 am
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Patience ain't my bag but I guess I should've held off posting those two old pics of Aaron
yesterday because
Vulture just shared these two new pics of Aaron and, uh, they win. (thanks Jarett). He was shot by photographer Amanda Demme and there's
a great big interview too, which I have not read yet - clearly posting these pictures were of utmost importance. Oh and by the way somebody asked me yesterday why I always call him just "Aaron Johnson" and not "Aaron Taylor-Johnson" - it's just me being lazy, folks. When in doubt just assume it's me being lazy.
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February 8, 2017, 9:36 am
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February 8, 2017, 10:06 am
Today I'd rather be...
... sponging down Colin Farrell.
"What have you done to me, you vengeful bitches!!!" Man oh man the hot house of a trailer for Sofia Coppola's
The Beguiled - a remake of the 1971 film with Clint Eastwood - has just arrived and I am ants on a picnic basket into this shit.
See our previous post on the movie here - it stars Farrell as a wounded Union soldier...
... looking all kinds of good, who is taken in by a bunch of Southern ladies (played by Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning and Kirsten Dunst) and nursed back to health while everybody's hormones flood the place silly. Watch!
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. A couple of images were released earlier today;
see 'em
here. This movie's out on June 22nd.
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February 8, 2017, 10:23 am
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NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED.
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February 8, 2017, 11:28 am
... you can learn from:
Elizabeth: I keep seeing these people,
all recognizing each other. Something
is passing between them all, some secret.
It's a conspiracy, I know it.
Matthew: There can't be a conspiracy!
Elizabeth: Matthew, I'm telling you something
is going on here.
The paranoia of a
Body Snatchers movie feels pretty on point these days, right? I was going to say they should try to make a new version but then I remembered that the brilliant and totally unappreciated TV series
BrainDead with Mary Elizabeth Winstead already knocked our current political climate out of the park last year, and nobody watched it! Damn you all. Anyway a happy 68th birthday to the actress
Brooke Adams today --
BrainDead was even smart enough to cast her in a role...
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