Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Kaboom (2010)

Stella: It's a well known fact that your dreams are

just your brain taking a dump

at the end of the day. They don't mean anything.

It's wild that Gregg Araki's Kaboom turned 15 this year, isn't it? WILD. But that's not why we're here -- we're here (and we're queer) because it's Gregg Araki's birthday today! His 66th if you can believe that shit -- and knowing him (via his movies only, unfortunately) he's probably excited about the whole devil number thing. As excited as any gay man can be about turning 66 I suppose but hey, dude's been looking 20 years younger for decades -- he's winning.

Anyway I've seen stills from the above 1992 interview with Araki (because he looks extremely slutty and hot in it) but never the entire interview, so finding out that somebody uploaded the entire thing onto YouTube is a treat! I'll watch that over my lunch-break and you should join me. 2026 will bring us Araki's first film since White Bird in a Blizzard ELEVEN years ago -- his perfect series Now Apocalypse is sandwiched in between there but it's still a nightmare of an extended break from having Araki-goodness in our lives so let's hope that I Want Your Sex is the start of a fresh cycle of movies.

I was actually forced to delete my post sharing that image from IWYS last week via an actual email from an actual fucking lawyer -- I think it was Sundance freaking out about the image leaking a day early but I didn't leak it! It was everywhere. But there it is now, reposted, now that Sundance has had their EXCLUSIVE (not exclusive) day in the sun with it. Can't wait to see the movie anyway! And in summation, will somebody put Kaboom out on 4K (or even just blu-ray) already? It's another movie of Araki's that's gone totally under-served on physical media -- it's ridiculous how much a pain in the ass they're still making it to watch his movies properly! Thank the heavens for the box-set of his "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy" that Criterion finally dropped after years of my shrieking about it.)

The Night Xavier Woke Up

I have just now realized, within the melee of 2020, I never did get around to writing a review of Xavier Dolan's most recent film Mathias & Maxime, which is a real shame -- I remember thinking it was his best effort since Tom at the Farm (which remains my favorite film of his). Maybe before the end of the year (where ever that falls, given the structurelessness of the movie calendar right now) I'll be able to give it a re-watch, share some proper thoughts then. For now there's news on what Dolan is doing next -- he's going to make a five-episode drama for Quebecois TV called The Night Logan Woke Up, described as a "psychological thriller [that] will chart the story of three friends whose lives are shattered after one of them commits rape." 

As controversial as that sounds Dolan seems steeped enough in the here and now to me to handle that subject with smarts, I think -- as aggressively in-your-face as his films can be they've never really struck me as provocative simply for provocation's sake. He's certainly no Verhoeven, for better or for worse. I mean the central relationship between a closeted movie star and a starry-eyed little boy in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan maybe could have used more provocation if you ask me? That one felt of hard edges sanded down, which was too bad. Especially with Kit Harington pouncing on Chris Zylka for god's sake. Give me a hard edge, Xav!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Damsels in Distress (2011)

Violet: What would you say are the most
effective means to fight depression?
Thor: Beer?
Frank: No, beer's a downer! Cocktails! Hard
liqueur and spirits is what really gives you a lift. 

Surprisingly he hasn't but doesn't it seem like our beloved Billy Magnussen, who's turning 35 today, should have played characters named "Thor" more than just once by now? I don't even mean the superhero -- although I'd have loved to have seen Billy's take on the Thunder God. He just... looks like a Thor. More specifically in the way of Chris Zylka's character called "Thor" in Gregg Araki's Kaboom, I mean. Which is also definitely a character Billy could've played!

Basically what I am saying is give us the Billy Magnussen Thor Universe we deserve, dammit. On that note if y'all would like to do a "Do Dump or Marry" for Chris Hemsworth, Billy Magnussen, and Chris Zylka (loads more Zylka at this link) in the comments right now I wouldn't put up much of a fight about it!

Welcome to another hell week pic.twitter.com/dAOctM7HKL

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 20, 2020

Quick On Three Before The Storm

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View this post on Instagram

Let’s get this party started, 2019 Edition #nyff #newyorkfilmfestival #film

A post shared by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on Sep 16, 2019 at 6:07am PDT

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I don't know if you heard me one or two of the five billion times I mentioned it in the last week but I'm currently immersed in press screenings for the New York Film Festival. Which is great! That said I've got today off and I'm not quite immersed in writing those up yet so I figured this is probably my last chance, before my brain's one hundred percent washed away by that, to toss out a few words on some movies that have nothing to do with NYFF that I nonetheless managed to see recently and actually, you know, have words for. A few anyway. 

The Death and Life of John F. Donovan -- As appealing as some individual moments in here that are coming at us from the ridiculous pool of talent that Xavier Dolan managed to gather up for this, his English-language debut -- Natalie Portman has a couple of lovely moments and you can't point a camera at Kathy Bates without coming away with something interesting -- man this thing flounders. My only thought at its end was what, pray tell, was the point of all this? 

Dolan seem to've felt forewarning on that front in the process of making the movie because he actually gives a character a speech about Why All This Matters -- that no it's not War And Famine but beautiful people feel things too, dammit! But that only serves to underline the vacuousness, like setting off fireworks at a three-alarm fire. Dolan has always been self-indulgent and self-obsessed but he's made that work to his advantage before -- Donovan feels like he's squeezed the rag dry. Definite bonus points for Kit Harington making out with Chris Zylka, though!

Tigers Are Not Afraid -- Even if Guillermo Del Toro hadn't been its biggest fan and sung its praises left right and everywhere it would have been impossible not to bring up Guillermo Del Toro, since the debt this mystical film about Mexican orphans owes his work -- specifically his kiddie ghost stories  Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone -- is plain.

That's not meant as any sort of slight, since writer-director Issa López has acknowledged the influence and more importantly she turned it out -- out enough that she manages to stand clear of his big shadow, even. Tigers Are Not Afraid is a low-key marvel, surprising and rough and emotional, at times darkly beautiful to behold. Like Del Toro she's not afraid to walk into those dark places and confront the things she finds there -- there are moments here that held me and held my breath in awe and sheer terror. S'real good!

The Dead Don't Die -- Well I think I have a new favorite Jim Jarmusch movie? That's not saying an especially lot given he's never been a film-maker I've connected too fiercely with -- he comes off as so posturing to me; like Patti Smith you get the feeling he couldn't possibly remember a person's name if they have never been mentioned in Interview Magazine. And yes that's describing my impression of him as a person, but that East Village brand of smug has heretofore bled all over his work, even when he's tackling a genre film like Only Lovers Left Alive, which Tilda aside -- always Tilda aside -- didn't strike me as having to say much of anything except the worn out "Vampirism is Drugs!" thing. 

But his zombie movie here seems a different beast -- maybe it's just that he's older and gotten the Cred he's plainly felt so owed for so long, but The Dead Don't Die finally just feels relaxed in the best of ways. Perhaps it's the Adam Driver Factor -- I feel like that big dude could loosen even the tightest of wads. The vibe is just so pleasantly off-kilter -- something about the humor so dry it's deserted smacking up against the wet slap of cartoon gore and severed heads straight on hit my sweetest of spaces. It's the correct sort of goof, for me, for me now.

Death Comes For Us All, Eventually

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Shiver me effing timbers there's been a picture of a semi-shirtless Kit Harington about to kiss a dude (a dude I think might be Chris Zylka, at that) in Xavier Dolan's upcoming movie The Death and Life of John F. Donovan online for a couple of weeks and I'm just now seeing it? Where have I even been? And here's more semi-shirtless Kit:

Well that's actually shirtless shirtless.
I am ashamed, ashamed, of this oversight. But wait

it gets worse. There's a trailer too!

And it seems promising!

I'll have to do a "Who Wore It Best?" poll after this movie comes out, asking y'all "Who got the 'seedy club blowjob from a dude in a red room which made them cry afterwards' better, Kit or Michael Fassbender in Shame...

And I guess I should go hang around more red rooms!

Here's the trailer:

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The Death and Life of John F. Donovan played at Toronto in the fall where it got some fairly terrible reviews, as I recall, which probably explains why it still doesn't have a US release planned (the trailer is an international one since it is actually hitting Italy and France next month), but perhaps we'll see it sometime this summer. And hey perhaps Xavier has re-edited it?

Perhaps, perhaps. We will see. 

At some point. Probably?

Good Morning, World

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I don't even need to look back through our extensive Chris Zylka Archives to know I've posted some images from these scenes of Gregg Araki's Kaboom before, surely I have at some point, but I know it was before I got good at making gifs, so the gifs'll be new. Anyway Chris is turning 32 today and he's still sexing up The Leftovers low-key like (he looked great in hisuniform recently, but Justin Theroux clearly has some diva-like demands written into his contract about him getting sexualized the hardest) so we wish him a nice one. (And PS I am two episodes behind on The Leftovers right now so no spoilers please.) (And PPS where the fuck is Gregg Araki right now?) Hit the jump for more from Kaboom...

The Walking Living

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Did you guys watch The Leftovers' first season? I know you enjoyed the gifs we posted of Justin Theroux's obscene sweatpants bulge in the show, but I'm not sure how many of you actually watched the show. I personally didn't even watch it until well after I'd posted all those pictures - I binged it after the fact. Anyway I mostly liked it! I don't know that I could say I was obsessed with it, but there were pieces (mostly Carrie Coon and Ann Dowd, and also Justin Theroux's obscene sweatpants bulge) I loved very much. So I will be watching the second season is my point, for which there's now a trailer, which you can see right here:

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There are no shots of Justin Jr. bouncing around in there (what are they thinking, leaving out their primary cast member?) but there is this shot...

... of somebody very wet that's appealing. I can't tell 

if that Justin or Chris Zylka though. Any guesses?

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Chris Zylka Eleven Times

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(via) My boyfriend finished watching The Leftovers the other day and told me I should finally get around to it (no, I haven't gotten around to it yet) but his one reservation was "that Abercrombie looking kid," by which I think he meant Mr. Zylka here. What do you guys think - is Chris the weak link? And should I sit down and watch it finally? But most importantly, will Justin Theroux show off his gigantic bouncing bulge again in the next season?

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Chris Zylka Nine Times

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Imagine my delight while reading this interview with director Gregg Araki (thanks Mac) on White Bird in a Blizzard to find a link to some never-before-seen-by-me outtakes from a 2012 photo-shoot of Kaboom's Chris Zylka! We'd posted three pictures previously from this, but the rest I'd missed. Swoon. Hit the jump for more.

I Am Link

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--- After Gay - The rest of the cast is filling in for that "ex-gay pastor" movie starring James Franco that Gus Van Sant's producing (but not directing; I thought I remembered hearing he was directing?) - Zachary Quinto & Chris Zylka will be playing ex-boyfriends of Franco's (why do I think that James had a hand in casting the boys he'll be making out with? Well I'd cast Zylka too) while Emma Roberts will play his current girlfriend.

--- Spell Chaser - Watching the premiere of the second season of my New Favorite Show Utopia last night I tweeted that Rose "You know nothing, Jon Snow" Leslie is in everything these days but if I'd know how right I was going to be I'd have held my tongue - she's just signed on to co-star opposite Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter, which will be about a (you guessed it) witch hunter being forced to team up with (you guessed it) a witch. It's from the director of the remake of The Crazies though, which is much better than it should've been, so we'll see. That story description does not inspire confidence though.

--- And Speaking of Miss Rose, here are some new pictures from the horror film Honeymoon which stars her and Penny Dreadful's Harry Treadaway (you can see a large gratuitous post for him here). This played at Tribeca earlier this year and I really wanted to see it but didn't get the chance; I heard very good things about it though. It's out in September.

--- Go Three - Some of you will probably yell at me for this but I never saw Girlfight; I've just always found Michelle Rodriguez too annoying to deal with. But I saw and loved (yes loved; suck it haters) director Karen Kusama's second movie, the horror-comedy Jennifer's Body. Kusama just finished her next movie and what's grabbing my eye this time is the cast, which is led by two very hot pieces - Prometheus' Logan Marshall Green, and Khaleesi's ass-master on Game of Thrones Michiel Huisman.

--- Sexy Devil - I liked Joe Hill's book Horns pretty well but the movie's definitely got me in its corner judging by the erotic reaction I had to the sight in the just released teaser trailer of Daniel Radcliffe sporting the titular head-ware with a snake coiling around himself. Drag me to hell, Danny-boy, indeed.

--- Desert Lady - The Playlist has rounded up some newsy tidbits from Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert, his bio-pic of Gertrude Bell (I keep calling her the female Laurence of Arabia for brevity's sake) starring Nicole Kidman and James Franco and Robert Pattinson. There's the first picture from the movie (seen below - camels check, sand check) and a quote from Werner saying how good Nicole is in the movie... I am so excited to see a Herzog movie centered on a real honest-to-goodness woman, you guys.
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--- Bone First - All the headlines are touting the news that Kurt Russell is saying that Quentin Tarantino's next flick The Hateful Eight will be filming at the start of 2015, and that's great and all, but I might actually be more excited to hear the sub-news that Russell's other movie, called Bone Tomahawk, is supposed to shoot this Fall before TH8 gets going. Tomahawk is supposed to star Kurt and Timothy Olyphant, Peter Sarsgaard and Richard Jenkins as cowboys battling cannibals. I wanna see that.

--- Hardy For All - A couple tidbits of the Tom Hardy sort - his re-team with Inception star Leo DiCaprio called The Revenant is apparently going to call for a very long shoot next year, eighty days, but will be out by December. That seems optimistic to me, but we'll see. Second bit - Tom's film Child 44, which co-stars the triumvirate of sexy Jason Clarke, Joel Kinnaman, and Vincent Cassel, finally has a release date - it'll be out in April.

--- Monk Fight - Reading the news that Martin Scorsese's monk movie Silence is going to be out November of next year just made me remember that its star Liam Neeson has been narrating my dreams all week. There is a reason for this - I've been reading the book A Monster Calls before bed every night, and that book's being turned into a movie in which Neeson has been cast as the voice of the monster. Good story, right? Right. Anyway it's good to hear that Andrew Garfield is going to have something to do some time soon, even if it won't involve the Spider-bum. Maybe he can wear his spandex under his monk's robes?

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Left Behind With Hotness

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We've had a couple quick glimpses at the upcoming HBO series called The Leftovers from Lost's Damon Lindelof and Election author Tom Perrotta - it stars Justin Theroux and a cast of characters as the people who don't get raptured up to heaven (or at least that's the assumption - perhaps they just disappear) and the fall out from that. But now we've got a full on trailer, and you can consider my interests especially peaked. Turns out what everybody wants at what could be the end of the world is an orgy! I can sympathize.

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Especially when it's Justin Theroux in a towel...

... and Chris Zylka without a shirt on...

 ... with a lot of man-on-man touching...

... and what might be Justin Theroux's butt...

(Those are his back tats, right? Honestly this is the kind of end of the world I would vote for if I had to vote for an end of the world, wouldn't you? Yeah yeah there's chaos and violence and stuff going on too, but so far the good's outweighing the bad here.

Most Delicious Leftovers

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This the first teaser trailer for HBO's upcoming series The Leftovers is doing things right - it starts off with footage of Justin Theroux jogging towards us in gray sweatpants (and judging from the eye-popping pics we've seen of such things on the set, this is a lot of something to, uh, behold) then quickly shows him in a cop uniform...

... and then gets him shirtless alotogether a couple moments later. I'm sold! The Leftovers is based on the book by Election and Little Children author Tom Perrotta and is about two percent of the population vanishing a la a "rapture" type event and what happens to the folks who are, as they say, left behind. Lost's Damon Lindelof is running it and besides Theroux it co-stars a bunch of people, like Liv Tyler and Ann Dowd and Christopher Eccleston and ooh Chris Zylka, yum. Here's the trailer:

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Good Morning, World

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A happy 28 to Chris Zylka today.

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Gratuitous Chris Zylka

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I have let Chris Zylka get away from me! I shoulda known this would be a fertile time for picture-taking where he was involved - he has made of himself an incredible object to be admired, far and wide. Yet somehow I haven't posted anything in a couple of months. We must right that, because there is a lot to right it with. A lot.

Which we'll get right to. First though, I checked to see when the last time we posted on him was, and it was in late June when he was announced as having joined the second season of American Horror Story - a news item which obviously made me happy. One of them peanut-butter crashing into jelly moments. But since it's now November and American Horror Story's second season's halfway through, I got curious - where the heck is he? The news is not good.

Via Zap2it came word way back in September word that Ryan Murphy canned him when he was hesitant about shaving his head for the part. Jinkies! Whatchu thinking, Chris? We have seen you with next to no hair, and you look plenty good, dude!

Anyway that is a shame. I'd have liked to have seen him in there. Maybe him and Evan Peters playing doctor... alright alright back to the topic at hand. I've got over fifty new Chris Zylka pictures, and you are going to look at them. After the jump with you!

American Whoring Story

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Hey look hot piece Chris Zylka has joined the cast of the second season of American Horror Story! Do you think he has "Property of Ryan Murphy" permanently tattooed on his most perfect ass or maybe they just went with magic marker? I suppose covering it up with make-up when he has his inevitable string of nudie scenes would be time and labor intensive. Says EW about his character:

"Zylka is staying mum on his character’s details, [but] EW has learned that he will in fact be playing a character named Daniel, who is the “Most Beautiful Boy in the World”… and also a deaf-mute."

Casting Chris Zylka and then making him unable to speak is perhaps the greatest thing Ryan Murphy will ever do. And in summation, yes I am just totally jealous. I mean, aren't you? LOOK AT HIM!