The Grand Hot Witch

I don't know why I keep watching Wednesday, I think it mostly sucks save some fun casting -- I do like Jenna Ortega but it's Gwendoline Christie, Heather Matarazzo, and that little weirdo Evie Templeton who keep me coming back. That said this last run of mediocre episodes had me thinking I might be giving up that ghost altogether... but Tim Burton's gone and dragged me back in! My beloved Eva Green has been cast as Morticia's sister Aunt Ophelia, a character who has been teased several times -- I cannot, will not, ever say no to Eva. She elevates everything she touches and working with Burton again will surely bring out her delicious witchy ways once more. Aww now I wanna go watch Penny Dreadful again. Hey remember when Josh Hartnett went gay all of a sudden? Good times, good times...

Nivola in the Morning, Nivola in the Evening...

Everything is obviously shit but I woke up in a good mood this morning and I listened to this song on repeat on my commute which kept the good mood rolling so as I sit here I find myself trying to put optimism into the world. A monumnental task I have set for myself! Thankfully one of our faves actor Alessandro Nivola has done a lot of work on that front this week for us, so let's just take his lead. First off he gave us this new photoshoot via Avenue magazine -- there's also a chat with him there, click here for it. Seeing his smiling face always makes the world smile! But there's even more...

... do you remember that time he wore this tennis outfit in JC Chandor's film A Most Violent Year? I did a big post on it because DUH and hysterically the subject came up in a new chat with him at Vulture! It's mostly about The Brutalist but bless my fellow Pajibite writer Roxana Hadadi, who conducted the chat, for flipping the script over to the internet's thirst for him in these shorts. Here's what he had to say about it:

"Someone once sent me, I don’t know what you call it — a GIF, a meme, something — of that scene where I’m in my very short tennis shorts and there was some repeating thing of my ass filling up the camera frame. I figured somebody had posted it. I didn’t know that this was reaching a wider audience. [Laughs.] But I couldn’t be more thrilled."

That "someone" was me LOL and I am glad this Very Important Subject has been  carried out of this here gay ghetto and into the world at large. Give it light! Anyway I wasn't going to post about this but reader Harrison -- hey Harrison! -- messaged me, egging me on, and I figured since we have a lot of Alessandro to talk about today we might as well relive those shorts. Make a full tennis movie, Alessandro! The people demand it! 

Aaaaaanyway yes, there is even more Nivola News to share this morning -- the actor and exceptional silent screamer has just joined the crazy amazing cast of a movie called (wait for it) Diamond Shitter (lol!) that's to be directed by actor Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who you should know from Jane Campion's Bright Star or the recent terrific spy-series Black Doves. And what do those two properties I cherry-picked out of her sizable filmography have in common? They both also star Ben Whishaw, and yes our boy Ben Whishaw, the great gay hope, is also in this movie alongside Alessandro. Oh plus Eva fucking Green! My god! And also up-n-comer Raffey Cassidy who you should know from The Killing of a Sacred Deer or Vox Lux or White Noise -- Vox Lux was of course directed by Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist (which co-starred both Cassidy and Nivola!) while White Noise co-starred Alessandro's talnted son Sam Nivola (who's about to be seen on the new season of The White Lotus) -- basically there's a lot of incestuous overlap with these folks coming together and I'm here for it! Good sexy talented people all around. And speaking of sexy people! Hit the jump for the rest of this Alessandro shoot...

Pic of the Day

It's that annual time of year, when all of us who don't get to go to Cannes get very annoyed about all of the people who do get to go to Cannes -- at least this year I will get some pain assuaged by getting to see photos of the Three Gs together. Gerwig, Green, and Gladstone, oh my! Greta is president of the jury this year, while Eva Green and Lily Gladstone are joining her as members alongside some other people, who cares, I only care about these three. Queens, all! I demand Greta scrap her dumb Narnia movie and make a sexy thriller starring Lily and Eva as lover-assassins next!

I know it doesn't work this way but I really like the image of Greta Gerwig being handed a flip-book of people and her smacking her finger down on the Eva Green and Lily Gladstone pages

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 29, 2024

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)

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

What are your favorite threesome movies?

Go Weird This Weekend

I see some sites saying that the studios aren't releasing anything right now because the Black Panther sequel next week is about to swallow everything up for a bit, but by my estimation there are four movies out today (five actually, counting streaming) that are definitely worth a look. So let's give you a run-down. First up Daniel Radcliffe stars as Weird Al in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a phony biopic that's very funny. I shared the trailer right here -- I have seen the movie and I enjoyed it but I'm not writing a review because I don't think I could string more than five sentences together on it. It's got some good laughs but I feel the entire thing slipping away less than a week on -- in ten years I imagine it'll pop back into my head randomly and I'll be like, "Oh my god, that happened" and that will be the extent of it. 

The only new movie that's out today that I have unfortunately not seen is Nocebo, the horror movie starring Eva Green that I told you about when it was announced as the Opening Night film for the Brooklyn Horror Fest last month -- the trailer can be viewed right here. Y'all oughta know by now what gigantic Eva Green stans we are around these parts, and Sara at Pajiba seemed to like the movie a lot (I only skimmed the review, since I didn't want any spoilers). This movie's only in theaters. 

Which leaves us with three movies that I have both seen and reviewed. First up we have Indonesian genius director Joko Anwar's new movie, Satan's Slaves 2: Communion, a sequel to his 2017 film, and it is on Shudder right this very second. Both of them are! Watch them back to back! I reviewed the new one right here at BHFF and said, "These movies are seat-jumping funhouses full of chaos and over-the-top terrors, and this one's as big a blast as any."

And speaking of scary the Nazi Wine Mom thriller (what a phrase) Soft & Quiet is out today and man alive talk about a terror -- here is my review of that one from earlier this week. Choice quote:

"The innocence of the American Dream is befouled, and this brave movie looks the filth of it straight in the face. It's the truest sort of horror -- the one too horrible to be anything but true."

This movie might be a lot to watch the weekend before the election honestly, but it's real good and I recommend seeking it out. I don't do "trigger warnings" because I respect y'all enough to be smart enough to know your own boundaries and whether you might be able to sit through something, but I'm not gonna lie -- this one's got some really rough fucking moments, mostly because they ring so true to the reality of our moment. 

Lastly, lightestly, but not leastly, we have Luca Guadagnino's documentary Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, which I shared the trailer for yesterday. This doc doesn't ask anything of you but it's well-done and a true comfort watch, following the original Ferragamo's creation of his brand through the earliest years of Hollywood, where he got his start making boots for Mary Pickford & Co. It's a surprisingly fascinating story! On a sidenote: I hope your foot is okay, Luca! How ironic that he attended the premiere of his documentary about shoes with a big cast boot on one of his feet!

The Monsters Are Taking Brooklyn Again!

First things first -- that might be the most gorgeous artwork for the Brooklyn Horror Fest to date? Totally gorgeous. Anyway this fest, one of my faves, is up to its seventh year now, and yes I have been covering it all seven. And today they announced the first round of titles for their 2022 spectacular -- you can see them all right here but the things that leapt right out at me (beside the fact that the fest has been officially taken over by Shudder, which is not a surprise in the slightest) are this. One, they are doing a retrospective of Lucio Fulci movies! It's eight films long and it will include the new 4K restoration of The Beyond that the master musician Fabio Frizzi created an entirely new score for. 

And two -- the Opening Night movie stars Eva Green! Called Nocebo it's from director Lorcan Finnegan (who made Vivarium) and it has Eva playing a woman plagued by a mysterious illness, who starts taking folk remedies that a Filipino caretaker (who just...shows up one day... dun dun dun), which leads to a rift with her husband (played by Mark Strong). I am sure this will all work out well for everybody involved! Anyway I'm intrigued (slash nervous) to see how the racial aspects play out here, but Eva Green anything is always welcome.

And third -- they've got Joko Anwar's new movie! The Indonesian master has made a sequel to his 2017 film Satan's Slaves and it's been out in his home country for several weeks now and I have watched in absolute raw jealousy as raves for it over there have passed by my eyes -- I wasn't sure when we'd get to see it here in the US, so this is welcome news indeed! 

Anyway there are several more titles of note in this, just the first announcement -- they've got the new V/H/S anthology film, they've got Benson & Moorehead's latest, they've got a doc about Stephen King movies and they've got Kyle Gallner and they've got the very fine movie The Harbinger, which I reviewed at Fantasia last month right here. The fest runs from October 13th through 20th and you can buy your fest badges right now at this link. Click on over and check it all out! Or else...

Eva 4 Eva

Today is the international holiday known the world over as Eva Green's birthday, click on over to The Film Experience where I gave her some love today in the form of a look-forward at a couple of projects we should be graced with shortly. I hope so anyway -- I f'ing miss staring at her!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Casino Royale (2006)

James Bond: Why is it that people who can't 

take advice always insist on giving it?

It is the 15th anniversary of the film that made me start caring about James Bond movies -- Martin Campbell's Casino Royale came out on November 17th 2006 and zapped that franchise back to super-powered life via the electricity of ten thousand blue speedos all bursting like fireworks at once...

THIS MOMENT IS 15 YEARS OLD TODAY pic.twitter.com/76FQ7jo5XV

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 17, 2021

In all seriousness (and apologies to Sean Connery) but Daniel Craig is for me the best Bond, Eva Green is for me the best Bond Girl, and Mads Mikkelsen is for me my favorite Bond Villain. Casino Royale remains a rip-roaring action humdinger here a full fifteen years on. I think it's pretty much a perfect action film and a heart-swelling sexy romance to boot. Is it perfect? It might be perfect. I think it's perfect!

I do love you, Vesper Lynd! I do, I do! Every one of Craig's films that came after knew her shadow hung over every moment in the series, right up through the grand finale No Time To Die this year whose entire plot was set off by James going to visit her tomb to say goodbye. (If you missed my review of NTTD read that here.) And Rami Malek's simpering drip of a villain isn't worth one drop of blood from Mads' eyeball. Perfect movie.

Because I Could Not Stop For Nanobots

The first James Bond movie I ever saw was Casino Royale in 2006. The character as he stood in pop culture never held any sway for me -- a sexist murderer who loves cars and martinis, great! Right up my alley! But in 2006 Daniel Craig held a lot of sway for me. Fresh off of the killer triumvirate of Enduring Love (by the way RIP Roger Michell) and Munich and Layer Cake, with notable-to-me roles stretching back to Road to Perdition and Love is the Devil, he was becoming one of my favorite character actors at that point, and his 007 casting seemed so left-field you had to take notice. If it was angering the Bond lovers then maybe they were doing something right! And then this happened in the trailer:

And it was history from there. I became a Bond Person then and there, insofar as the Daniel Craig movies were concerned -- I have since gone back and seen several of the earlier installments, including almost all of the Connery ones, and... they're fun? Casino Royale remains my favorite of every Bond film I've seen though, and I can't write that statement as fact without name-dropping Eva Green either, my favorite Bond Girl. The chemistry those two had in that film was off-the-charts. Oh and Mads Mikkelsen! The chemistry Daniel Craig and Mads had was also off the charts. A repertory screening of Casino Royale at MoMA was one of the last films I saw on a big screen with an audience (and with Daniel Craig in attendance!) before the pandemic shut everything down and that movie continues to play like gangbusters. 

The Daniel Craig films since that high point have generally been a mixed-bag, but Craig -- even when it's been clear that he was fairly miserable being there -- has always been rock solid (and yes of course I mean that in multiple fashions). The plots got convoluted and who-cares but I always cared about his Bond, a surprisingly vulnerable and tender mass-murderer under all those abs. Which brings us to his fifth and they-say final film in the role, No Time To Die, finally hitting theaters this weekend after ten thousand months of delays. How is it? It's fine!

Don't ask me to narrate the plot or how that entirely relates to the previous films, because I'd be terrible at that -- most of them, Royale aside, I haven't seen a second time. I enjoyed them but these aren't exactly films I revisit. They're disposable pop entertainment to me, and No Time To Die has plenty of that to offer. In a good way. What struck me the hardest with No Time To Die was just that -- this was the first very expensive action film I've seen on a big screen since I saw Casino Royale in February of 2020, and there's something to be said for that spectacle in and of itself. The money drips off the screen -- the costumes and locations and cars and special-effects. I missed the feeling of all of that, and this film absolutely delivers on each one of those fronts. 

Does it deliver that stuff for far too long? For sure. You can feel the film dragging its heels toward its destination, nobody wanting to say their goodbyes to the franchise, and I'm generous enough and willing to grant them some leeway on that front because Daniel Craig's James Bond has earned it. He's just an absolute pleasure to watch play this role. But No Time To Die is maybe the first time it felt like he was playing it in a vacuum? There are terrific actors all around him -- Ben Whishaw and Ralph Fiennes and Lashana Lynch and Naomie Harris and Jeffrey Wright all get their little moments to shine, and Ana de Armas truly steals the show in her too-brief sequence -- but every role (except Armas) feels deferential to Bond in this film in ways that kind of suck the air out of it.

This is especially noticeable with the two main actors I didn't list above, Léa Seydoux as Bond's main squeeze Madeleine, and Rami Malek as the big villain. The film begins with Madeleine nodding her head towards how she has long felt the shadow of Eva Green's character over her relationship with Bond, and speaking for myself I felt it too -- Seydoux is in it a lot yet she leaves very little impression in the film, and she and Craig don't have anything approaching the crackling chemistry he had with Green. No Time To Die very much wants to be the great romance that Casino Royale effortlessly was, and comes up a hard short there.

Meanwhile Malek, perhaps (if I am being generous) inclined to tone down his usual parlor tricks after he inexplicably won an Oscar for turning Freddie Mercury into a chattering platter of eyeballs and tics, plays the villain  Lyutsifer Safin as if he's been doped down by his own supply -- heir to a poison throne (yes really), in the last reel Safin shows off his garden of deathly plants, one of which will turn anybody who touches it into a brainless zombie, and I couldn't help but think one of Safin's peons has been slipping that sucker into your tea, dude. It's a lifeless performance with absolutely no logic to his dastardly machinations. 

No Time To Die's plot, involving DNA-nanobots, is an utter gibberish disaster -- this isn't necessarily a problem, or it hasn't been a problem in the past, as gibberish can be Bond's stock-in-trade. There's fun to be had in such nonsense!  I get that. But without any through-line as to why Safin is doing the things he's doing -- and the movie literally offers none that I could find save a couple of tossed-off comments about "ehh, power, that's how they do" -- there's a great big cavernous rock-garden where its brain should be. If the movie can't even care why any of this is happening why should we?

But it looks great, it sounds great, and Daniel Craig is everything looking and sounding great one could ask for, and that all might be enough... for about half the movie No Time To Die is anyway. Nearly three hours is too much of an ask, but contradictorily I felt the urge to hang on with Mr. Bond for all of those extra minutes too. Depending on who gets the role next and what direction they take I can probably move on with my life now though, putting such double-oh things behind me, and maybe that's No Time To Die's biggest gift of all.

Cassel on the Green

Now here is a power couple I can get behind. (Or they could get behind me, I am not picky.) Apple has just green-lit a French-language thriller series called Liaison that will star Vincent Cassel and Eva Green; this comes just a few months after it was announced that Cassel & Green will also be co-starring in a pair of Three Musketeers films, about which I was very very very enthusiastic at the time. And remain so. And that enthusiasm carries over to today's announcement -- I wouldn't be sad if literally everything starred Vincent Cassel and Eva Green. Who could be sad about Vincent Cassel and Eva Green? They are life! Here is how Liaison is described:

"Liaison is a high-stakes, contemporary thriller exploring how the mistakes of our past have the potential to destroy our future. The series combines action with an unpredictable, multi-layered plot in which espionage and political intrigue play out against a story of passionate and enduring love.”

The series is coming from some dude who worked on the show 24; it will co-star, also enticingly, the ever great Peter Mullan. (We fucking love Peter Mullan here at MNPP.) So we'll keep our eyes peeled for this, and duly welcome the arrival of our new Cassel / Green entertainment empire. And here as a treat a new-to-my-eyes photo-shoot of Vincent, after the jump...

They Got Their German

Oh happy day, I haven't had an excuse to post about Thomas Kretschmann in quite some time! I did think of him a few weeks ago when WandaVision was on, since the character he plays in the MCU (that would be "Baron Wolfgang von Strucker" which somehow is a name I was just able to pull out of thin air, wtf) was tied up with the Romanov twins. But he never showed on that show, even though that would have made sense in the flashbacks...

... so today's news is the first news of a real gig regarding him to cross my path since his one-episode stint on Westworld. (I didn't watch the Penny Dreadful spin-off he was on because fuck that Eva-Green-less bullshit.) To finally make it to the point -- Kretschmann has just been cast in an "undisclosed role" in the fifth Indiana Jones movie! Yes I am sure we have no idea what this German actor will be playing in the big new Indiana Jones movie...

Putting the Musk in the Musketeers

Speak of the French Devils! Just yesterday I did a nicely sized post about the "Rendez-Vous With French Cinema" series here in NYC next month, and all of the good-looking French actors that will be featured in it -- now today comes word that four of my favorite Hot French Actors whose names were not in yesterday's post (plus one Hot British Actor who wouldn't have been mentioned there, but I am happy to mention him now) have just been cast in a new project, all together, and now I can fill up my Hot French Actor Bingo Card for the week. Phew! Prepare yourselves, folks, because this is A CAST.

It's a big budget (for French Cinema anyway) re-do of The Three Musketeers, which yeah sure okay I guess they have to make one of these every ten to fifteen years -- that's not the exciting part. The exciting part is the truly insane cast -- this Musketeers will star François Civil (see more of him here) as D’Artagnan, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and Romain Duris as Aramis! It will star Louis Garrel as King Louis XIII! And it will star the British fur-monster Oliver Jackson-Cohen as the Duke of Buckingham!

I don't think I'm familiar with the actor Pio Marmai, who's playing

 the other Musketeer called Porthos, but this is him below... 

And he's plenty hot, he'll fit right in. My god, y'all. But wait. You thought I was done? All this XXX-treme male hotness aside there's the female role of Milady de Winter, and they ain't skimping there either -- Eva Green! Eva Green! My beloved Eva Green!!!

Is this The Hottest Movie Cast Ever Assembled??? I think this might be The Hottest Movie Cast Ever Assembled. And they haven't even named who's playing the villainous Cardinal yet, but at this rate they'll de-age Alain Delon to his Purple Noon visage and toss hot-bomb that into the mix. PLUS there're adding in a character called "Hannibal" for a black actor that will be based on real-life person Louis Anniaba (aka the first black Musketeer) so there's even more opportunity for sexy casting ahead. And then this is all going to be spread across two films -- the first titled The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan and then the second titled The Three Musketeers: Milady. Does that mean the second one will be Eva Green-centric? I am exploding here, people. It's too much, too much.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Personal Shopper (2016)

Maureen: I mean there are invisible... presences... around us. Always. I mean whether or not they're the souls of the dead, I don't know, but... You know when you're a medium you just are attuned to some sort of... vibe.
Ingo: What do you mean by- by vibe?
Maureen: It's an intuition thing; it's a feeling. You... You see this door... That's only like slightly, ajar.

An actor I always want to talk more about but never find the time to is the great German actor Lars Eidinger, who's been in so many things over the past dozen years that I've been a fan of -- besides the above-mentioned one he's also got a vital role in Olivier Assasyas' Clouds of Sils Maria; he was on both Sense8 and Babylon Berlin (!!!) and in Claire Denis' sci-fi wackery High Life; then in just the past few months he had a lovely turn opposite Eva Green in Alice Winocour's lovely lady astronaut flick Proxima. He's really become somebody I perk up at whenever he shows up on-screen...

... oh and I'm absolutely dyyyyying to see My Little Sister, the Swiss film starring him and the queen Nina Hoss that's currently playing virtually, but haven't gotten around to it yet. You can already tell that Eidinger is one of the greats. All we need is one great fearless director (somebody like Lars von Trier or Nicolas Winding Refn maybe?) to give him a great fearless role, because he's also...

... I must add, because of course I must, a wildly underrated hot piece and total exhibitionist super-freak who's proven to be wildly unreserved when it comes to nudity. (There's some stuff even I couldn't post down below.) Gosh bless the Europeans! For example just two days ago a NSFW short art-film in which he's turned into a nude human paint-brush was brought to my attention, and...

... you see what I mean? You see what I mean. Anyway today is Lars' 45th birthday and I have this big folder on my computer of Lars Photos that I haven't found an excuse to post before, so what better time than the present? Hit the jump, it's a little NSFW but also totally worth losing your job over, believe me...

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?