Good Morning, World

Considering how much posting I did when Benjamin Walker starred in the American Psycho musical on Broadway (to date the only time I've gone to see a Broadway show three times!) you'd think I'd have posted about Daredevil and Downton Abbey actor Arty Froushan's run by now -- I guess since it was in the U.K I will cut myself some slack, but still. Every time Arty has popped up on this season of Daredevil I felt a twinge -- well okay several competing twinges -- that I didn't get to see him give us his Patrick Bateman best on stage. SIGH. That show has now ended its run but -- and I can't believe I haven't posted about this news yet either! -- it will be staged here in New York again in 2027! It's not going to Broadway -- it's happening at some venue in Brooklyn that I am unfamiliar with but that thrills me because I can hopefully afford to go see it repeatedly again then! I have my doubts that the U.K. cast will carry over, but they can feel free to prove me wrong! I'd love to see Arty in the (bloodied) flesh. Anyway I've only posted about Arty a couple of times here on the site (see here) but I will hopefully get lots more chances to revisit the subject of him -- and he was kind enough to share some swoon-worthy behind-the-scenes photos from the show on his Instagram, which I in turn have thoughtfully curated for you (with some bonus shots because duh) after the jump...

Make Jake The Groom!

All due apologies to the main cast of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, meaning Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale mainly, but I was always going to begin this post with a picture of Jake -- no matter how small his role in the movie might be (and it's honeslty a little bit bigger than I assumed it would be) (that's what he said) it's always him. And thankfully a couple of extra shots from that new photoshoot I shared yesterday appeared this afternoon so no need for redundancy. Anyway! Exclamation point! The time has come, now that The Bride! is in theaters, for me to review The Bride! -- funny how that works. Click on over to Pajiba to read my thoughts on the movie, which is... 

... a lotta movie. I'm gonna make you click to find out if I liked it or not. But in related news the movie is already available to pre-order on physical media -- no release date set yet but buy the limited 4K steelbook here, or just the regular ol' blu-ray right here. That said you should probably watch the movie first, given how all over the map reactions have been. Also of note, physically-media speaking -- Waxwork Records is putting out a vinyl of the film's soundtrack which delightfully includes a few songs sung by Mr. Jake Gyllenhaal himself! That's out in May supposedly, you can pre-order it here. What a good sister Maggie is, giving her brother a lil' singing and dancing spotlight to savor. The boy loves a spotlight.

Franz Rogowski Eleven Times

If you'd have asked me last week if we'd be getting Bird star Franz Rogowski cosplaying as a Wall Street douchebag for the cover of the Financial Times magazine this week I'd have said, "You know what? The election is happening next week so it's entirely possible we might pop out the ass-end of a worm-hole and I am keeping all of my options open." So here's another weird sign o' the times -- exactly that has happened. The Rogowski thing, not the worm-hole thing, although who can even tell? 

Anyway seeing Franz dressed up this way has me picturing him playing Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho remake that Luca Guadagnino is supposedly working on (honestly I'll eat my shoe if that film really happens) and... well it would certainly shake that project up. It would be a totally different take than Mary Harron's was! Oh who are we kidding -- Franz would knock it out of the park. He always does. It would be a bold choice though! Hit the jump for the entire photoshoot... 

Luca Guadagnino's American Psycho Wait What

I fully changed my attitude toward "remakes" thanks to Luca Guadagnino's 2018 master-class on how to do them right called Suspiria -- I've always been a big fan of Dario Argento's original and I thought a remake was a terrible idea, and then Luca's version came out and he slapped my fucking mouth shut to the point where I now refuse to baldly criticize them on first glance. If an artist is willing to do something as different and interesting with the material as he did there, then by all means let the remakes happen! 

And yet! Luca himself has come to test me today! Because Deadline is reporting that Luca himself is working on remaking one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, one I love way more than I ever loved the original Suspiria -- specifically he's thinking about making a new adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, which I am sure you are all aware Mary Harron turned into a horror comedy masterpiece in the year 2000 with Christian Bale. For god's sake I just posted a gif from that movie less than 24 hours ago!

The thing is -- American Psycho the film works so well exactly because of who made the thing. The team of Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner gutted the book's POV and made the character of Patrick Bateman into a much deserved punchline. It's much more of a comedy than it is a horror film, althought the terror of toxic masculinity is very real and felt palpably throughout. 

And I have no doubt that Luca gets all of that -- Steven Soderbergh's favorite screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who Deadline says is working on the new script, I'm far more dubious about. Which isn't to say I haven't liked many of Burns' scripts -- he wrote The Informant! for god's sake. But perspective is everything, especially with material this questionable, and it'd be very very very easy to slide off the mark with this. It's honestly a miracle that Harron's movie got made and ended up the way it did -- one I wonder at anew every time I think about the movie. Which is quite often here 20+ years on!

And I say all of this with Luca's new film Queer very much at the front of my brain -- I reviewed that yesterday and it's as good as anything Luca has ever made. The man is killing it right now. I should not doubt in Luca. He's proven that time and time again. And the man can direct some horror! And I should also keep in mind that Luca attaches his name to a thousand projects that never get made, so maybe this will go the way of his Brideshead Revisited or his Lord of the Flies movies. Or maybe he'll make a movie of the musical! I love the American Psycho musical!

I am just... listen, in the Deadline article the head of Lionsgate is quoted saying they're thrilled to have a filmmaker like Luca coming on board this "potent and classic IP" and I know that quoite isn't Luca's fault and he would never put it that way but that dude needs to read the room. "Classic IP" rings all of the alarm bells of terror. So..... thoughts???? Help me out here, people. I am bewildered. 

Today's Mood

Jake Gyllenhaal Shirtless Cinema Spectacular

Our Jake is on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter today and unbelievably after all of these many many years being obsessed I learned three new things about him via the interview included alongside the pictures -- apparently he is legally blind and has to wear corrective lenses? How the fuck did that information remain elusive all these years? And the second bit is far less substantial but pretty amusing, having to do with the goofy reason that the Road House remake was born: 

"Road House, the apotheosis of Gyllenhaal’s mid-career action era, has an amusingly shallow origin story: He and director Doug Liman ran into each other at a 5K they were both running on Martha’s Vineyard during the pandemic. Gyllenhaal had been spending lockdown doing a lot of biking and was incredibly fit, and Liman decided he wanted to make a movie with him with his shirt off."

You know -- maybe I didn't love the Road House re-do, but I love this, and I love Doug Liman for this, and all the movie's mediocrity is now forgiven. More movies made simply to get Jake's shirt off, please! And the third new thing from the interview -- he apparently has a role in his sis Maggie's next movie, the Bride of Frankenstein update with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley! No word on what but let's hope it's a naked corpse on a slab. What? Don't look at me that way. Anyway words and revelations are nifty but sexy pictures are even better, so go ahead and hit the jump for the pictures now...

Pics of the Day

Well somebody at Paris Fashion Week knows and shares my kinks because they suited up our current new fave crush Lucas Bravo in full American Psycho drag -- blood splatter included -- at the Louis Gabriel Nouchi show yesterday (pics via) and I am here, so here, so very very here, for this. This is what the kids call "erotic cinema."

13 Toilets of Halloween #12

Hey not every entry in my list of the "13 Toilets of Halloween" has to be gross or scary says me. And so if I want to include the moment in American Psycho where Peak Christian Bale wearing nothing but tighty-whities takes his morning leak while staring at himself reflected in his Les Miz poster I am going to include the moment in American Psycho where Peak Christian Bale wearing nothing but tighty-whities takes his morning leak while staring at himself reflected in his Les Miz poster. My house, my rules! Oh, Patrick....

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Peeping Tom (1960)

Mrs. Stephens: I don't trust a man
who walks quietly.

Helen: He's shy.

Mrs. Stephens: His footsteps aren't.
They're stealthy.

Born 85 years ago today was the great Anna Massey, who ought to sit on her own Horror Icon Throne thanks to leading lady roles in both Michael Powell's masterpiece Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy twelve years later. I have struggled my whole damn life with that latter film -- with how mean-spirited and ugly it is. And the target of much of Hitch's ugliness therein is Massey's character of "Babs," who Hitch showcases from start to terrible-finish as shrill and pushy...

... right up until he's snapping her corpse's fingers and throwing it off the back of a potato truck. For too long I projected that distaste onto Massey herself as an actor, but I've come to love her as I've matured into a (slightly) more thoughtful person. She was very good at her job! Anyway besides those two bonafide and complicated classics she's got a really fun role in the 1973 anthology horror flick The Vault of Horror...

... and in 2004 she was apparently in Brad Anderson's The Machinist, otherwise known as the movie where Christian Bale starved himself to near-death -- now that is a movie that is in dire need of revisiting by yours truly. (It is streaming on Prime right now.) I remember liking it at the time but I haven't seen it since and part of me feels like there might be reason for it to have aged well. I think most people were so rightly horrified by Bale's transformation that they couldn't look at it for too long -- hell I just googled some pictures and had to turn my face away. Anybody seen that one lately?

My Ath Ith Thor

So whomst amongst you caught Thor Love and Thunder over the weekend? I saw a press screening before the holiday weekend and was inspired to say basically nothing about it when the time came -- I think my pal Kristy summed it all up pretty well in her review at Mashable, and the one by TK at Pajiba as well. It's got its charms but those charms are kind of smothered by an aimlessness and an absence of stakes. Bale was great but the writing really let him down, and it felt much more indifferently filmed than Ragnarok did to me. 

Well here is the best advertisement that exists for #ThorLoveAndThunder pic.twitter.com/gWKo47S0T6

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) July 7, 2022

I have no intentions of piling on Taika (which seems to be having a moment) but I will admit that between this and that pirate show of his, which I could barely finish an episode of, we might be slightly on the outs. Fingers crossed his long long long delayed soccer movie with Michael Fassbender rights the ship! I'd love to hear y'all's opinions on Thor though. Also answer me this if you can:

Now that #Thor is out can somebody tell me (this is maybe a spoiler but it's more of a question) - who is it we see giving Gorr the sword? I feel like I missed something - there's a flash of some figure telling him what to do in that moment, isn't there? Is this a future Big Bad? pic.twitter.com/NO75OcNUdE

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) July 11, 2022

Today's Fanboy Delusion

 Today I'd rather be... 

... flicking off Thor's disguise.

And yes like Zeus I too would flick too hard.

The new Thor: Love and Thunder trailer popped up last night and I assume any of you who wanted to watch it have gone and watched it already -- I do hate it when they drop things at night! I am not an all-nights-and-weekends kinda blogger, man! I need my me-time, by which I mean my "floor watching X-Files" time. All blogging and no Scully makes Jason a dull, dull boy. Anyway here's the trailer if you also try to have some semblance of life in this 24-7 media-saturated hellscape:

Besides Chris Hemsworth's blurred out little booty the big reveal in this trailer is the movie's villain played by Christian Bale, who appears to be summoning up some "Pale Man" from Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth if you ask me...

... that was my first thought when watching it last night anyway -- looking at it now I see some of the Crawlers from The Descent and I guess maybe Hades from Disney's Hercules movie (although there I have to admit I have still never seen that Hercules). Anyway he's making for a pasty scrawny flip-side to Thor's Golden God, so visually this is all working for me. We will see on July 8th!

Peak Christian Bale in Crisp 4K

I admitted yesterday in my New Criterion Announcement post that I still haven't bought the bullet on buying a 4K blu-ray player (Criterion is going to start releasing their movies on 4K come November) so this news update is more for y'all than it is for me (and you'd be surprised how much news I post here for my own personal enjoyment alone, haha) -- a super-fancy 4K steel-book of Mary Harron's masterpiece American Psycho is hitting the shelves of Best Buy on October 5th, says BD (thx Mac) and it's loaded with cool-sounding special-features. The extra-iest one is probably the slipcase though (seen down below), which shows Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman peeling off his legendary face-mask -- even without a 4K player I kinda wanna buy this just for that case! Here is a direct link to Best Buy's website to pre-order.

Make It Huckabees Two

Y'all think I love famous people -- well wait til you get a load of the director David O. Russell. He's always been known for gathering up big casts of name actors -- he might not have had the clout with his first film Spanking the Monkey but what clout he had off of Spanking the Monkey's small success (and I remember that movie being pretty buzzy when it came out in 1994) he immediately threw into casting with his next flick, the road-trip comedy Flirting With Disaster...

... which starred Ben Stiller, Tea Leoni, Patricia Arquette, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Richard Jenkins, and Josh Brolin. (Plus bonus points for Celia Weston, of course.) And his casts have only grown starrier from there, reaching probably their apex with American Hustle back in... 2013? Is that movie really seven years old? WTF.

This shot of Christian Bale on the set of the new David O. Russell movie is speaking to me in a language I don't understand pic.twitter.com/qVeHQUxtcM

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 13, 2021

Anyway we might have thought that was the apex, but his new project is putting all of those movies to shame. We don't have a title, we don't know what it's about -- except it's based on "an original idea" from Russell himself -- but we just got nine new names added to the already insane cast in the past 24 hours so let's list off the people who're signing up to get berated on set by him. First we heard about Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington. That's already a big movie right there. Then a couple of days ago they added Rami Malek and Zoe Saldana. But then! Last night! Last night the cast added (deep breath) Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Alessandro Nivola.

Russell has of course worked with a few of these people before -- Nivola and Bale and De Niro, of course -- but, I mean... did his casting people just come here to MNPP and start grabbing names after that? It's like that meme that says "We're gonna give the gays all that they want" but it's not "We're gonna give JA all that he wants." Olyphant, Riseborough, Shannon, Taylor-Joy and Schoenaerts in one place is literally breaking my brain. Literally. I would take a picture with my phone and show you my brain oozing out of my ears but my brain just oozed out of my ears and so I don't remember how to take pictures with my phone any longer. I am broken. Right, Andrea? 

Which Is Hotter?

Did y'all see yesterday's news of Darren Aronofsky's next film? His first project since mother! broke our brains in 2017 will be The Whale, an adaptation of a play by Samuel D. Hunter that's about a 600-pound gay recluse who tries to reconnect with his daughter. And yes that sentence is a lot, I will give you a moment to take it in. The play was apparently well critically received. Anyway my immediate first thought was, "Oh god Christian Bale is gonna gain all that weight isn't he," but it turns out that Aronofsky had another actor in mind, and he's already been cast, and yes the above photo spoils all of this build-up -- Brendan Fraser, former Mummy hunter and Encino Man will play the role. Although Fraser never stopped working this project obviously marks a step-up in the notable department since his heyday -- mother! might've been, you know, confusing to audiences or whatever (although I will defend it to my grave) but Darren Aronofsky is still Darren Aronofsky, so prestige, no matter how bonkers, is expected. Anyway I don't know what to expect of this project but we've missed Brendan and I hope this risk pays off. We'll see! Until then...

survey service

Good Morning, World

It's Monday! The worst time for exclamation points! And yet here I am! Sorry about that. I just watched a lot of old Ewan McGregor movies this weekend and I got excited. When I wrote about it being the 10th anniversary of I Love You Phillip Morris last week a flip was switched -- a switch was flipped? -- and I had to have some Ewan inside of me immediately. You know how that goes. I ended up re-watching Velvet Goldmine, Trainspotting, Shallow Grave (which the above gif is from, of course), and finally last night I re-watched the one that got me into this beautiful mess in the first place, Phillip Morris. And I highly recommend every single one of those films -- they all remain smashingly good. What a great way to spend a weekend! I won't rank them since they are all super, but the happiest rediscovery for me was Velvet Goldmine, which I always knew I loved, and never stopped loving, but while watching it I realized that I hadn't seen it in a decade if even, and man that movie fucks! It just fucks one's brains out, you guys. For serious. I did a little live-tweeting of the experience which you can click on and follow below...

#NowWatching pic.twitter.com/NvkWqzN4EO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 4, 2020

My Favorite Horror Movies! Of Ever!

It's the day I've been waiting for slash dreading -- over at Final Girl my beloved pal Stacie Ponder has shared with everyone my Top 20 Favorite Horror Movies list! Actually my list is actually 21 because I changed my mind after sending it and she gave me the bonus. On that note I say "dreading" because there's nothing more difficult in all this world than narrowing down this sort of thing, and my list could have been one thousand titles long. You make all sorts of qualifications in this sort of whittling down process -- you want to represent yourself, as a whole person, so entries that feel redundant get excised in an effort at a larger vision, if that makes sense? 

Anyway click on over, see my 21 picks with a few rambling thoughts about each one tossed in for good bad measure, and make sure you keep checking Final Girl all month long as Stacie's annual "Shocktober" celebration keeps churning out the quality content. And make sure you're listening to Stacie's podcast Gaylords of Darkness (with the wonderful Anthony Hudson) too! It is literally -- I'm not even exaggerating -- the only podcast I listen to. I'm not a podcast person. But Gaylords got me through quarantine and I'm now a hardcore addict to their weekly fix.

It's Hip to Be Bale

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Today marks 20 years since Mary Harron's American Psycho slashed and strutted its way onto the stage -- it is, quite plainly, one of my most favorite movies of all time, and so obviously I had to do a to-do about it. And if you click on over to The Film Experience you'll see I did just that and wrote up my thoughts on not one, not two, not three and not four of its performances, but five, five of its performances for my "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series. All those ladies are wonderful, hella worthy additions to my pantheon of The Queens of Scream. That said that was a lot of lady talk, so here on MNPP I will also share these two gifs of Christian Bale... sigh. What a gift this film was. Such boundless riches...

PS here's a terrific new chat with Marry Harron at LWL about the film this week, filled with smart insights from a seriously underappreciated genius on her timeless masterpiece... which is my way of saying it's worth ten minutes of your time. Choice bit:

“Whenever I film a TV show, somebody always comes up and tells me how much they loved American Psycho. I’m surprised by the intensity of people’s reaction to it. People tell me they’ve seen it 30 times – I haven’t even seen it 30 times! It seems to have touched a nerve, and it’s nice that people are still watching it.”

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Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... believing in taking care of myself with 

a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine 

with Kumail Nanjiani.

Kumail is on the cover of the new issue of Men's Health (thx Anna) showing off his brand new Eternals bod -- something we've all known was coming ever since he first posted those great big beefcake photos back in December -- and oh lordy it doesn't disappoint. Besides the workout video (which I have dutifully capped the ever-loving shit out of below)...

... and the interview with him, they have had him recreate several icons of meaty man testosterone iconography, such as Patrick Bateman (up top), Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, and the infamous Top Gun volleyball scene. (Of which I'm tempted to do a "Who wore it best?" with Glen Powell in the trailer for the sequel.) It's all so sweaty and veiny and goofy and stupendous I feel like I've gotten my own workout for the day just looking at these things. While I get some rest y'all hit the jump for a few dozen snaps...

Monsters Wanna Costume Too

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As I mentioned earlier there wasn't a lot that stuck in my craw during last night's Oscars, since they got a lot right -- or you know, right with the limited options they had presented themselves with, nomination-wise, anyway. But there was one big thing I found myself annoyed about, and that was the way they used costumes from both Midsommar and Us as dancing props for the opening musical number even though neither of those movies got nominated. If you follow me on Twitter you saw this happen in real time:

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The Midsommar dresses just make me sad :(

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) February 10, 2020

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Wow -- riveting Twitter feed, Jason. Anyway I turned that tweet into action and today over at The Film Experience I wrote a little bit about the Oscars' truly lackluster history with the genre's endlessly iconic costuming. When I really started thinking about all of the egregious oversights over the years it really piled up! Even just this past year there are two hands worth of examples!

I know it's just one of many, many examples of the Academy hardly ever allowing themselves outside of the box, but it seems like all we ever talk about with regards to that are the bigger categories when, if you dive into the smaller crafts that make up our shared movie history, you see it's just as infuriating. As much as I loved Greta Gerwig's Little Women -- and I deeply deeply did -- who's going to remember anything Florence Pugh wore in that movie more than they'll remember her day-mare floral May Queen extravaganza?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

Curt: We set out to change the world...
ended up just changing ourselves.
Arthur: What's wrong with that?
Curt: Nothing, if you don't look at the world.

I feel as if I definitely have to wish director Todd Haynes a happy 59th birthday today, since I spent a lot of December dogging his most recent movie Dark Waters -- he remains one of my all-time favorites, really he does; every director's allowed a dog or two... or ten even if they were once responsible for Safe and Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven and motherfucking Carol for chrissakes. You're allowed a Dark Waters now and then with that record. (And yes I am aware there's a good percentage of my fellow critics who love Dark Waters. They are mistaken.) And now I give you two shots from one of the greatest actor-director photo-shoots of all time...

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