Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Passenger (1975)

The Girl: Isn't it funny how things happen? All the shapes 

we make. Wouldn't it be terrible to be blind? 

David: I know a man who was blind. When he was 

nearly 40 years old, he had an operation and regained his sight.

The Girl: How was it like?

David: At first he was elated... really high. Faces... colors... 

landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world 

was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him 

how much dirt there was. How much ugliness. He noticed 

ugliness everywhere. When he was blind... 

he used to cross the street alone with a stick. 

After he regained his sight... he became afraid. 

He began to live in darkness. He never left his room. 

After three years he killed himself.

God I love The Passenger. Really I love every Antonioni movie I've seen so I should 1) binge more of them because there's a lot I haven't seen and 2) write about his work more. (I mean I watch Blow Up when I need to relax.) Anyway to get to the point actress Maria Schneider was born 73 years ago today. (She passed away in 2011.) Besides starring opposite Jack Nicholson in the above movie she's of course best known for starring opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. And coincidentally there's a movie about Schneider's disturbing experiences making Tango with Brando & director Bernardo Bertolucci that's in theaters right now! It's called Being Maria and I'll share the trailer down below. Anamaria Vartolomei plays Schneider and Matt Dillon plays Brando, while...

... the extremely hot Italian actor Giuseppe Maggio plays Bertolucci in what you might be forced to call an exxxtreme glow-up. That was certainly a choice. A lot of one. That said I haven't seen Being Maria yet, but I've got a screener so hopefully I can dive in this weekend. I'm extremely curious to see how it tackles all the shit that Maria went through making that movie. Here's that trailer:

Criterion Breaks The Protective Ice

I haven't seen Albert Brooks' 1996 comedy Mother in decades and yet that joke about "the protective ice" over Debbie Reynolds' ice cream has stuck with me all this time -- that's comedy. And that's leading the Criterion release announcements for August 2024 -- in 4K no less! Somehow that seems extravagent, but I look forward to seeing it. Mother comes out on August 24th, alongside another Albert Brooks joint...

... his 1979 mockumentary Real Life. Which I have never seen. Have you? It sounds from the description that it satirized reality shows before reality shows were really a thing -- I mean An American Family had happened a few years earlier and this sounds like it was riffing on that phenomenon. In Real Life, Brooks plays a documentarian who embeds himself with a family (led by Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) trying to capture the "truth" of their day-to-day existence.  

And from a funny mockumentary to a not funny at all true-story documentary -- next up is Martha Coolidge's 1975 doc Not a Pretty Picture, which has the filmmaker examining her own rape by casting an actress to play her younger self in a reenactment of the experience for her. Goddamn this one sounds rough. Rough but probably essential. Has anyone seen it? 

The August schedule is actually pretty full of new-to-me films -- I also haven't seen either Brief Encounters or The Long Farewell, the pair of films included in this double-feature set of Ukranian filmmaker Kira Muratova's work. These are her first two movies from 1967 and 1971 respectively, and they're both about women laboring under Soviet rule. Thanks goodness for those two Albert Brooks' movies because otherwise August is feeling like a heavy load! Oh and also on the docket is a 4K upgrade of Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece The Last Emperor, which hits on the 13th. And make sure to click the links to check out all of the many many special features on these discs. And to pre-order them of course. Criterion has a 30% off sale going on right now that includes pre-orders! Never a better moment to snatch 'em up than right now!

5 Off My Head: Threesome Movies

I know I've told this story here before but in 1994 when the movie Threesome was released I was still very much a closeted high schooler, but I had to see it. HAD to.  This was before the internet so anything with any hint of gay content coming anywhere near my small upstate New York cow town was extremely rare. And yet here was this movie opening at our recently built five theater multiplex! I had to be there! So I sneaked into a screening one night... and bumped into one of my best friends from church. There with her current boyfriend. Her current boyfriend who I had done a little light fooling around with a few years previous. And she insisted on us all sitting together. It was an utterly mortifying experience for me, and probably drove me deeper into the closet for another six months lol. Oh well! 

Anyway threesome movies! They're a good topic for today because of Luca Guadagnino's Challengers being the number one movie in the country, and also totally ruling. So here are five of my favorites!

5 of my Fave Threesome Movies

3 (Tom Tykwer, 2010) 

Design For Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 19833)

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) 

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Splendor (Gregg Araki, 1999)

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What are your favorite threesome movies?

I Peep Therefore Conform

I think I have tweeted about this but it deserves a proper post -- the most beautiful movie ever filmed, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 masterpiece The Conformist, has a 4K restoration hitting blu-ray on November 28th! Thanks to the fine folks at Kino, because of course it is. Shot by the legend Vittorio Storaro this is one of those movies that basically every movie since owes a gratitude to -- you watch it and you're like, "Oh, so this is where that piece of visual language that everybody uses now came from." It's one of my all-time faves and I envy anyone seeing it for the first time! Prepare to have your minds blown. But that's not the only kick-ass blu-ray news...

... because Michael Powell's controversial 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom just got a 4K announcement itself! And this is a 4K restoration on a 4K disc, to boot. You can pre-order it over at Diabolik but be forewarned that this is a UK disc (via Studio Canal) so only buy it if you've got a region-free player. I would guess we might get a US version (wherefore art though, Criterion?) but until then, make haste. This is also one of my favorite movies of all-time. That one's unfortunately not out until January so no stockings will be stuffed in 2023 with this perv masterpiece. Sad!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

The Dreamers (2003)

Theo: Papa's full of shit.

Matthew: I think you're lucky. Um,

I wish my parents were that nice.

Isabelle: Other people's parents are always

nicer than our own, and yet for some reason our

own grandparents are always nicer than other people's.

A happy 39 to Louis Garrel today!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Last Emperor (1987)

RJ: Words are important. 

Pu Yi: Why are words important? 

RJ: If you cannot say what you mean, your majesty,

you will never mean what you say and

a gentleman should always mean what he says.

The extraordinarily talented Bernardo Bertolucci was born on this day in the year 1941 (he passed in 2018) -- I just watched The Last Emperor over this past weekend because when I did the year 1987 for last week's edition of my "Siri Says" series I couldn't remember if I had seen it before; turns out I had, I remembered as I watched it, but it had been a very very very long time and I had definitely been too young to appreciate it when I had seen it. 

Now in 2022 Current-Me thought it a damn masterpiece (and also that John Lone is a total babe) but then I am pretty solidly in the tank for most everything Bertolucci when it comes down to it. Oh and I did it as a double-feature with Warren Beatty's film Reds, which turned out to be an absolutely spectacular way to spend a Sunday. 1980s Communist Epics, who'd have thunk? But I do mean an entire Sunday, as that's a full three-hundred-and-sixty-three minutes of entertainment there in just two pictures.

Doing this as a double-feature today pic.twitter.com/evsAVxmN4w

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 13, 2022

The Second to Last Tango

Deadline is reporting today that a new limited-series about the making of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris is getting made -- that film, which starred Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider and was about their characters' troubling, tumultuous, and anonymous sexual relationship, has been rightly the subject of controversy for the past decade or so after Schneider revealed that Bertolucci & Brando sprang the film's infamous rape scene on her. Just the sort of thing you want writers from Entourage to handle right? Well that's what you're getting -- funny enough Deadline doesn't mention the title Brando, but that's what is listed on the writers' IMDb pages --  but at least it will be co-directed by Killing Eve's Lisa Brühlmann, whose movie Blue My mind is definitely worth seeking out (read my review here). Anyway obviously the big conversation on this is casting -- who plays Brando, Schneider, Bertolucci? 

I haven't seen Tango in many a moon -- it's never been a film I got pleasure from watching; it always made me feel gross, and ever since Schneider revealed what went down even more so. But it's probably due a re-visit (and hey look the blu-ray on sale for ten bucks on Amazon today) since it's always felt like a film that will improve the older one is while watching it. There's an aspect of life experience that I think it requires; I just might have been far too young the first time I saw it. What do you guys think of Last Tango? And who would you cast in these roles?

5 Off My Head: Jake Shows Off

And Jake Week continueth! In case you've had your head up the backend of a super-pig all week let me explain -- the actor Jake Gyllenhaal is turning 40 this Saturday! We -- in case you hadn't noticed the 1100+ posts we've posted here at MNPP over the past 15 years -- kinda like Jake Gyllenhaal. And so we're celebrating by posting a new Top 5 every single day this week, leading up to the most blessed event. On Monday I listed my 5 favorite crazy-person performances of his. And then yesterday I posted my 5 no make that my 10 favorite costumes that we's worn. 

Well today is Wednesday, the middle of the week, also occasionally known by some as Hump Day. And so it only seems right that today I list something I hinted at during yesterday's post about clothing, which is... the exact opposite of clothing. This should lift everybody's "spirits."

My 5 Favorite Jake Gyllenhaal Nude Scenes

Group shower, Jarhead

Googling whilst gay, Velvet Buzzsaw

Forgot the camera in Love & Other Drugs

Sad suds in Southpaw

Washing by the river, Brokeback Mountain

-------------------------------------

Runners-up: Listen I could have listed half of Love and Other Drugs, as Edward Zwick was proper decent to us in that respect (if only the movie had been better). Bless that film.

And I did a compilation post once about Jake's many many many "naked in the bathroom" scenes -- see here -- so there are several more exciting choices as far as those are concerned. I mean he literally seems to spend half of the movie Demolition in the bathroom -- see here.

And he spends a lot of time showing off his manscaping in Enemy. And then, for historical sake, there's this shot in Jarhead, which beat Brokeback to the punch giving us our first glimpse of Jake's butt:

A true milestone, if you ask me! There are also the coulda-been scenes that we have been entirely denied -- I can't even post the caps of Jake papped naked-on-the-set of Everest because the studio freaked out about them and will send letters if one posts them, but if you google that shit it's out there. In the end the scene got inexplicably, hatefully cut from the final film, which went on to deservedly flop for that alone. Fuck you, Everest!

And then there is the most upsetting absence of all -- Jake chickening out and turning down Michael Pitt's role in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 hornt-up The Dreamers, opposite Louis Garrel & Eva Green. Can you imagine? I still weep myself to sleep at night over that loss...

Anyway I could go on and on and on. And on. And on! This is probably the lone topic in all of the world which I am the foremost expert on. My Film Studies degree put to excellent use! Ain't ya proud, Mom???

So what's your favorite Jake Gyllenhaal nude scene?

Good Morning, World

I have no reason to be posting about Louis Garrel and Michael's Pitt's bath scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers this morning, except... well it's Louis Garrel and Michael's Pitt's bath scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers. It is Reason unto Itself! But seriously I haven't seen the film in a dozen years at least, and it's not its anniversary or anything (although it does turn the very special i.e. not special at all number of 17 in a couple of weeks)... it literally just... popped into my head this morning. Nobody's complaining, I don't know why I am over-explaining myself. Anybody watched this lately? I still can't believe that Michael Pitt's role was real close to being played by Jake Gyllenhaal. THAT is the moment when our timeline went askew! 

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Conformist (1970)

Giulia: Marcello, don't go out.
They could hurt you.
Marcello: I won't be in danger. After all,
what have I done? My duty.
Giulia: But why do you want to go?
Marcello: I want to see how a dictatorship falls.

Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece (one of several!) was technically released fifty years ago today since it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on July 1st, 1970. But don't be surprised if I celebrate its 50th anniversary again come next March 21st, which will mark 50 years since it was released in the United States, since it's one of my top ten movies of all-time and I just wanna celebrate it whenever I possibly can. It's also a fairly timely piece of political storytelling, as that quote above lays bare. Solid Antifa Entertainment! Anyway go watch The Conformist on the absolute most massive screen that you can find right now, is my point.

I Miss Massimo

.

Since the last time I ogled Massimo Girotti I have managed to finally watch Pasolini's film Teorema, which brings the grand total of films starring him that I have seen to five, including Luchino Visconti's films Senso and Ossessione plus Mario Bava's Baron Blood and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. But as you can tell by just those five titles the man worked for a very long time, a career spanning six decades, and with some of the world's greatest directors, so I feel as if I must be missing some. 

The most obvious one off the bat to me is 1967's omnibus film The Witches, which has segments directed by De Sica and Pasolini and Visconti among others (Girotti was in Visconti's portion, of course) -- thankfully that one was released on fancy blu-ray from Arrow last year so that shouldn't be too hard. But I really would like to see some of the films he made when he was young, because... well you know why, you see that picture up top. So if anybody's got any recommendations give 'em a spin in the comments! I need some Massimo in my life this summer.

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Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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Before we begin I should make it clear that our eventual giallo victim Sofia here (played by Rossella Falk) is one of those vague invalids you used to get in the movies -- anyway for some unexplained reason she's confined to a wheelchair, so when she hears a noise she wants to investigate, and her dumb cat...

... pushes her wheelchair away, she's forced to crawl around. 

Hence all the crawling.

There is a lot of crawling, actually. You know how giallos like to draw this shit out. She crawls and she crawls and we wait and we wait for the inevitably gloved killer to strike...

Sofia makes it too easy for the killer, really -- if you're a vague movie invalid you really shouldn't crawl up to the edge of a staircase, ya know? 

 See?!?!

.

Yes, she's dead. You can see her dead. 

But this is a giallo, so we must really really see she's dead.

And so we get...

... to see her dead from multiple gorgeously lit angles.

The Fifth Cord (1971)

I've been on a renewed giallo kick over the past couple of weeks, but I've seen so many of the big ones at this point -- I put in The Fitfh Cord not expecting greatness, only expecting...

... a lot of Franco Nero with a mustache. But The Fifth Cord delivered on both counts! It's both terrific and has a lot of Nero-stache. Ya can't go wrong. The film was lensed by famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro -- he actually shot this right in between The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and it shows. 

And not just in shots of the camera zooming in 

on Franco Nero's Mustache Answering A Red Telephone either!

Here are five randomly chosen frames from the film:

I mean it's an absolute all-time stunner. Oh and the music's by Ennio Morricone too! Blessedly Arrow Films just put The Fifth Cord out onto blu-ray with a bunch of extra features, I highly recommend you check this one out if you're a fan of giallo, or of pretty things, or of Franco Nero... and obviously these things are not mutually exclusive.

Hit the jump for links to the Previous Ways Not To Die...