The Power of Fassy Compels You

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Until recently I'd thought that Bryan Singer had directed the forthcoming Dark Phoenix movie, and I was gearing myself up for all the fun that those press rounds were gonna represent -- but no Dark Phoenix is the directorial debut of writer and producer Simon Kinberg. (And wow, imagine making your directorial debut with a 265 million dollar budget -- what a world.) But I imagine folks like Nicholas Hoult and Evan Peters, who've worked with Singer a few times, will probably still get asked, so prep your answers, boys! (Speaking of Sir Ian finally got on the record about that.) Anyway we're not here for Bryan Singer we're here for the new trailer for Dark Phoenix, which was not I repeat not directed by Bryan Singer. And it sure is nice to see Michael Fassbender acting!

Or at least standing around with an angry face while the CG things surrounding him are filled in later, anyway. But we should cherish these moments because dude hasn't acted a single minute since this thing was filmed and as far as we can tell might not do it again, either. (Please prove us wrong, Fassy. We'd love to be wrong.) Here's the trailer:

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Dark Phoenix is out on June 7th.
What do we think of the trailer?

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It's a Little Bit Funny, This Feeling Inside

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Earlier this week I shared with you the new poster and a glimpse of Taron Egerton proving his singing voice is up to par for the Elton John bio-pic Rocketman -- well now they've delivered the first full trailer for the movie and it really looks to me that his everything might be? Let's see that "everything" in motion...

That really is a gorgeous shot though isn't it? Shirtless Taron besides, I mean. The lighting, the framing, it's got a Caravaggio feel almost. I'm hoping director Dexter Fletcher stepped up his game from Bohemian Rhapsody -- we don't know how much of that travesty to blame on Bryan Singer, but I'm hoping for about a ten thousand percent upgrade for this gay musician movie... or else. We riot!

The trailer full of longing glances and furtive touching doesn't make Rocketman seem any gayer than Bohemian was, but we've got Taron on the record saying he and Richard Madden have a sex scene, so it's already ahead of Rhapsody on that count. Fingers toes and genitals crossed, y'all. Here's the trailer:

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Rocketman is out on May 31st.

What do you guys think?

The Queens of Nashville

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Yesterday the annual Film Poll at the Nashville Scene went up, which I've participated in for the past couple of years alongside a tremendous group of critics thanks to a kind invitation from friend-of-MNPP Jason Shawhan. Click on over to see our 25 favorite films of 2018 (hint hint the movie pictured placed pretty well!), along with our takes on the best and worst and so-forth, which gave me the chance to shit on Bohemian Rhapsody again, hurray -- I'll always take that opportunity. There was one movie about mincing queens with big hair and fancy costumes that I cared about this year and these were its stars...

Fassy's Final X

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I could be wrong because I haven't been paying a ton of attention but this is the first official shot that I can think of seeing of Michael Fassbender & Nick Hoult and so forth for X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the upcoming super-mutant flick that's out on June 7th. The pics, including the one below, come via here where they're also saying we'll probably get a trailer with the Super Bowl. Which reminds me - there's like a Super Bowl happening some time soon, isn't there? I have absolutely no idea, this is the first time I have thought of it since I avoided last year's. Anyway it's good to see Michael Fassbender is really my main point. Who knows if we'll ever see him act again, the way things be going...

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... throwing down with Nicholas Hoult & Aaron Johnson.

I have no idea what the context of this picture (via) is -- as far as I know Nicky & Aaron have never acted in anything together, have they? When I googled their names together one of the few things that came up was that Bryan Singer had considered them both for Jack the Giant Killer, which... well wow not what I was looking for today of all days, Google. (click to embiggen)

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Whacking Rhapsodic

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If you scan through our Rami Malek archives here at MNPP you'll see I've been a fan of his for awhile (since Short Term 12, I guess) so I feel okay with being vocally, uh, opposed to one of his performances. They can't all be gold, ya know? Just because I said of his work in Bohemian Rhapsody that "you could've replaced him with a pair of chattering wind-up teeth and a tossed handful of glitter and gotten the same effect" doesn't mean I don't look forward to what he does next.

Ohh... except I didn't actually say that... see, The Film Experience rounded up our reactions to the Golden Globes with Five Questions, read the post here, but one of the questions that didn't make the cut (because our answers apparently got too mean) was "Which win made you the angriest?" So now you know what I said to that. Or didn't. Nobody knows!

Who Wore It Best?

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The actor Ben Hardy (see more here) is celebrating his 28th birthday today on the back of his biggest hit to date - Bohemian Rhapsody, a truly godawful movie, is nonetheless a box office smash having just strutted past 700 million dollars this weekend. Hopefully watching it inspires at least a few people to go read about the real Freddie Mercury, nothing like that film's ugly miserable concoction.

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Sidenote: BR is getting dropped on blu-ray in about five weeks and they just announced today that the film's one highlight, the Live Aid performance, will be on the disc in full. So you can just watch that and skip everything else. (Or better yet just go watch the video of the real Queen's performance!) But that puts the BR a shocking full 150,000,000 above Hardy's previous Bryan-Singer-Joint, the shoulda-been-way-more-successful X-Men Apocalypse, which had Ben picking up his pair o' wings off of the previous Angel and Also-Blonde-Ben Ben Foster. But hmmm I do wonder if we've got an opinion on who wore those wings best...

bike trails

Richard Madden Two Times

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How the HELL did I miss the news that Richard Madden is playing Taron Egerton's lover in the Elton John bio-pic Rocketman? Here are some fun goofy pictures of the two on set about a month ago. Dick looks much cuter than the real John Reid thankfully - I want some good coupling dammit. On that course I hope that Dexter Fletcher, the film's director, is taking some notes from how the vast majority of gay critics have reacted to Bohemian Rhapsody (calling it, in my own words, homophobic trash) -- I have no idea how much of the final product was shaped by Fletcher after he took over for fired Bryan Singer, but he'd better be taking some goddamn notes. I've got my fingers crossed that having Elton John there (as opposed to Freddie Mercury, who's not around to defend himself) will help.

Someone Left the Cheesecake Out in the Rain

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Having some trouble stoking my brain fires today, in need for things to say, and so for the time being I'll just do one of those Golden Girls Cheesecake Clip-Show Episodes and direct you to old shit of note -- there are three movies out this weekend (in wide release anyway) that I have already seen and reviewed, and here are those reviews:

Click here for my thoughts on Boy Erased.

Click here for my thoughts on Bohemian Rhapsody.

And click here for my thoughts on Suspiria.

I did see Suspiria a second time last night and man is it a movie that benefits from a second dip - I mean I quite clearly loved it the first time given what I said about it then, and I think I did a pretty decent job sorting out some thoughts about it, but I do feel now as if I've got a slightly better grasp on a film that's incredibly complex, juggling dozens of themes and ideas at once while also managing to be a movie that had my boyfriend literally hopping into my lap at the same time. I will be writing more soon, so stay tuned... or run far away, depending upon your constitution.

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After a second viewing I can say with total certainty that I WAS RIGHT THE FIRST TIME @suspiriamovie is an ASTONISHMENT

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 2, 2018

Because You Don't Know What It Means To Me

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I'm willing to bet that Freddie Mercury, for all his damage, and the boy had damage, had some fun in his life. Don't you think? He was by all accounts difficult, fucked up by the closet, a tremendous drug enthusiast. But the dude partied with groovy people and I just have my doubts that his every moment of partying was a lonesome woe, a misery. You wouldn't guess that watching Bryan Singer's Bohemian Rhapsody though, which treats his every second not spent in the studio or on stage with his "band family" (including the "love of his life" Mary Austin) as a drudge of desolation, exploitation, inextricably linking his gayness with his downfall in some "Chick Tract" type morality play nonsense, the leather-jacketed mustache queers whispering poison in the poor doomed doe's ear and finding him a swift death.

Is there truth in the telling that Mercury did get ensnarled with a lousy dude named Paul Prenter (played here by Allen Leech of Downton Abbey) who hooked him up with drugs and boys and isolated him from good decision-making, only to betray him later on? There very much is. But there is presumably also a way to tell that story without projecting a forty-year-old antiquated stance on homosexuality as truth - we've come a long way from how Freddie Mercury felt about himself, baby. Bohemian Rhapsody presents Prenter as a snug-panted serpent slithering into an Arena Rock Garden of Eden - he practically hisses every time they cut to him - and besides absolving Mercury of all responsibility for his lousy behavior the film time and again links shady gayness with seediness, meanness, and eventually disease.  

The film feels like an artifact from the 1970s and 80s, and I don't mean in a well-captured time-capsule way - its point-of-view feels moth-balled and deeply offensive here in 2018. The storytelling seems to buy Mercury's closet-bred insistence that True Love was for the Beautiful Blonde Lady alone while sex, sex with men, must remain dirty and hidden - we get a couple of quick kisses and some skulking around a truck-stop restroom beside a flouncy butch, but only once Freddie is good and sick and soundly tragedized can a man come along for him. Nevermind that in real life Mercury met and lived with Jim Hutton before he even got diagnosed with HIV - here Hutton's presented as a sexless afterthought, a balm applied to a soundly dying man.

Is there good stuff to be had in Bohemian Rhapsody? Sure. The spectacular music of Queen is there, after all. If you're gonna see the movie see it loud, with a good vibrating sound system in your seat - something should get you stiff, anyway. The concert scenes can be heaps of fun (Malek struts real well) and the remaining members of the band clearly knew the right story to tell when it was about the four of them in a room figuring out wacky noises and acapellas to drop on their immortal rock anthems. The Live Aid sequence is some killer queening indeed. But the rest of the film relentlessly poisons all around it - a black green cloud of bad stuff snorted up its own fat bottom. Freddie deserved better.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Apt Pupil (1998)

Kurt Dussander: To have someone in your control.
To have them know that they are alive only because you
have not decided to the contrary. Do you have that power?
Ask yourself. It's not an easy question, I think you know that.
Todd: You know this means we're through, don't you?
You won't be seeing me around here anymore.
Kurt Dussander: No. I suppose I won't.
Todd: What are you doing?
Kurt Dussander: This is the end. Here. A drink.
To our lives together. The beginning and the end.
Todd: I think you should fuck yourself.
Kurt Dussander: Oh, my dear boy. Don't you see?
We are fucking each other.

Here on the cusp of Bohemian Rhapsody (more on that shortly, but uhhhh) let's look back at Bryan Singer's Apt Pupil, which came out 20 years ago today (the same day that Gary Ross' grand Pleasantville did, actually) -- it's an adaptation of a short story that Stephen King wrote (with the ominous subtitle "Summer of Corruption") in his really stellar collection called Different Seasons, which also gave us The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. The fourth story in that book called "The Breathing Method" has been slated to get a movie adaptation for several years (I first wrote about it in 2012) from the director of Sinister, and several sites have it listed for 2020 but... I guess we'll see. 

This was what Singer chose to follow-up the smash success of The Usual Suspects with - some would say it suffers from sophomore slump (not to mention that it's also been colored by on-set controversy and Singer's extracurricular issues) but I actually like Apt Pupil more than Suspects. For all the latter's iconic Keyser Sozes Suspects loses some oomph once its sleight's laid out, but Pupil has Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro firing on all cylinders dedicated to telling a deeply unsettling story. The Hitch Nerd in me also just gets a kick out of its title...

Good Morning, World

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A very happy 39th birthday to Brandon Routh today - I just caught most of Superman Returns on TV the other day and tweeted about how good he was in the role and what a shame it is that he didn't get to play the role again; the film itself is admittedly not perfect (Kate Bosworth is not a great Lois and the big battle is against a rock) but he's great and there are lots of great and interesting scenes and story-beats. Anyway these photos are from his single episode stint on the single-season sex-fest that was Enlisted - I guess him and Chris Lowell had a rivalry? A sexy rivalry. A sexy rivalry with sexy results.

Extraordinary Intergalactical Upsets

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With less than a month to go until Bohemian Rhapsody hits screens on November 2nd they've tossed us a new image of Rami Malek in Freddie Mercury drag above and a behind-the-scenes featurette that's all about his process of finding that drag, which you can watch below. If you need more reason it sure has a lot...

... of this, which I don't mind, nope not at all.

Rami looks good in a tight pair of pants.

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Is That a Rook In Your Pocket Or...

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It's been so so long since we've seen any photos of Michael Fassbender WORKING, you guys - his last film in theaters, the much (and rightly) reviled The Snowman (RIP Harry Hole) came out a year ago, and it was shot well before that. Ever since the only places he's been seen is gaying it up at the beach or, uh, gaying it up at the race-track. Oh and he like got married or something, whatever.

But now he's on set! (via) The set of the new X-Men movie, specifically. Hey, it's something. Yes the X-Men movies have been a series of rapidly declining returns but I'm hopeful that them re-tackling the best story in the canon - the Dark Phoenix Saga - will steer them rightward. Of course we've been through this once before, ruinously, so... we will see. (click 'em to embiggen)

One Queen's Attitude

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Rami Malek is on the cover of Attitude magazine this month for the Queen bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody and inside the cover story (which we only have a portion of for right now; thx Mac) he apparently addresses the controversy that's been aimed at the film for "straight-washing" the character of Freddie Mercury. Says Rami:

"Let me say that I don’t think the film shies away from his sexuality or his all-consuming disease, which is obviously AIDS... I don’t know how you could avoid any of that, or if anyone would ever want to. It’s a bit absurd that anyone’s judging this from a minute trailer... The film needed to approach it in a delicate manner. You can’t shy away from it. It was an important moment to have in the film, one that ultimately is very sad but also empowering in a way... It shows you just how resilient human beings can be and how much we rely on the strength of our friends and family to get us through tough times."

"Which is obviously AIDS" is such hilariously awkward phrasing. Anyway to be fair to all of us bitching, Rami, the controversy's been around far longer than the arrival of the first trailer -- Sacha Baron Cohen basically said he dropped out of making the bio-pic circa 2013-ish because the surviving band-members didn't want to gay the thing up with too much focus on Freddie's promiscuity et cetera. So we've been anxious for awhile now.

I also think saying the film needed to approach the subject "in a delicate manner" betrays the spirit of Freddie fuckin' Mercury, who approached nothing in a delicate manner, but we'll see when the movie comes out in November I suppose. At least we've definitely got more of Allen Leech being gay with a mustache to look forward to. Hit the jump for the rest of Rami's photo-shoot for Attitude...

The Moment I Fell For... James Marsden

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The teen horror film Disturbing Behavior starring Jimmy and Katie Holmes (and a great little turn from Nick Stahl) was released 20 years ago today and I'm sure I saw it opening weekend in college because I saw all the horror films opening weekend in college right then. In fact they often held preview screenings for us privileged kids - I know I saw Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer that way so it's possible the same happened for DB. 

Anyway I'm trying to recall if I knew who Marsden was before this movie - he'd done a bunch of TV like The Nanny and Party of Five and Blossom, so it's possible I'd seen him one of those places. He had also done some modeling...

... that I very well might have been aware of, ahem. But I certainly knew who he was after this movie, and apparently so did Bryan Singer because just two years later Marsden got cast as Cyclops in the X-Men movies and we've been blessed with Jimmy ever since.

Any fans of Disturbing Behavior? I honestly haven't seen it since it came out so you'll have to tell me if it holds up - I remember thinking it was decent at the time, but clearly not enough to re-watch it dozens of times like some of its contemporaries, aka the Scream movies and the Ryan Phillippe shower scene in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Speaking of...

... while researching this post I read that Marsden apparently turned down Phillippe's role in 54, which came out this same summer (exactly a month later actually) and I wonder what that story is. It's easy to project some career-based homophobia onto that - Ryan had already played gay stuff at that point in his career but Marsden took a few more years; tell me if I'm wrong but I don't think he did anything gay-ish until 2004's The 24th Day with Scott Speedman?

James hasn't shied away since though, giving same-sex a spin in movies like The Heights and The D Train, so he's forgiven. And I like watching Ryan Phillippe in 54 anyway so that turned out okay. So next up for Jimmy, between Westworld seasons anyway...

... is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie (man I don't know, don't look at me), which funny enough he was just spotted on that set today - see more pictures over here. He is playing a police officer, it seems, and... not a Hedgehog. That's probably for the best.
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Buddy You're a Young Man Hard Man

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A new trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody, the sort-of-directed-by-Bryan-Singer sort-of-bio-pic of Freddie Mercury, sort of, has arrived, and it tries a little bit harder to be semi-explicit about The Gay than the first one did, in that there's a moment in the trailer where everything stops and they're like, "GAY!" with spotlights. I assume they've heard our whinging about one of the biggest queer icons seeming a little neutered so far. That said all the trailer's really giving us is a couple furtive hand touches and...

... Allen Leech in a mustache, and while I am firmly in the "I like Allen leech with a mustache" camp of righteous and sane individuals I'm still not sure that this movie is gonna end up being the movie is should have been. We will seen. Here's the latest trailer:

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Bohemian Rhapsody is out on November 2nd.

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Fearless Lives Forever

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Open your eyes and look up to the skies and see this, the first poster for Bohemian Rhapsody, the endlessly troubled musical bio-pic of the band Queen or maybe somewhat specifically Freddie Mercury - we'll have to see how specifically since the surviving members of the band have been so... insistent... about having the movie handled the way they want it to be that they've driven people off of the project. Although that wasn't the problem with Bryan Singer, who got fired for allegedly having some kind of breakdown and disappearing or something. Anyway! Ramie Malek is a pretty good choice for Freddie but we fans o' Queen have a lot of reasons to be worried but we'll see come November, the end.

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Even More Pics of the Day

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I'm not feeling super creative with post titles today, my apologies, so these new shots of Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury in the forthcoming rock bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody are just going to have to get umbrella'd in under some same old same old, sorry. I still have no idea what to think about this movie - it seem troubled even before Bryan Singer got fired as its director, what with all the word that the surviving members of Queen were having way too much input and possibly diluting what should be an R-rated story. We'll see! If you missed the previous pic of Rami in costume click here.

Rami Malek One Time

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So this is part of his ongoing campaign to prove he can pull off Freddie Mercury, right? I see your little chest hairs there, Rami! Good for you! (click to embiggen; thx Mac)

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