Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Fight Club (1999)

Tyler Durden: Warning -- If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don't you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can't think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you're supposed to read? Do you think every thing you're supposed to think? Buy what you're told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you're alive. If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.

Happy 25 to another movie like American Psycho where all the wrong people that the movie is making fun of saw a movie that read to them the opposite of that. I don't think it's quite as clear in Fincher's hands as it was in Mary Harron's, but he's gone on with movies like The Killer last year to underline his points often enough about the show-offy fragility of masculinity that we know his heart's always been in the right place anyway. To be honest I haven't actually sat down and watched Fight Club start to finish in quite some time -- it'd be great if we got a 4K of this first but watching the way Fincher's been tinkering with the 4K release of Seven for a few years now, delaying its release over and over, I won't hold my breath. Dude is too tinkery! Stop tinkering and go make the next season of Mindhunter goddammit!

Only The Best Men

Silly me I thought I could get away with just tweeting out a pair of images from W Magazine's "Best Performances" issue yesterday -- there was of course more where those came from, and a proper post is called for. They did a very good job picking the actors they focused on with ONE exception -- you're not going to see those Jared Leto photos below. That movie is terrible and he, per usual, is terrible in it. But the rest of the fellas -- Steven Yeun, Riz Ahmed, Jacob Elordi, Jonathan Majors and Lakeith Stanfield? I mean come on. You can't shake a stick at that line-up? (Or could you?) Ahem. Each actor has a little Q&A which you can find at the link above, but after the jump nothing but snaps...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Urban Legend (1998)

Prof Wexler: Had those before?

Brenda: Yeah. They're Pop Rocks; 

they crackle in your mouth.

Prof Wexler: Eat some... thirsty?... 

What's wrong? Something you might have 

heard about mixing Pop Rocks and Soda?

Brenda : Well supposedly your stomach 

and your intestines and everything bursts.

If you'd have asked me in 1998 which member of the cast of Urban Legend would go on to win an Oscar, I definitely would have said Alicia Witt. I mean I was still totally infatuated with Jared Leto in 1998 thanks to My So-Called Life but even I wouldn't have seen that one coming. (Sidenote: it remains a travesty.) But if you'd have asked me in 1998 which member of the cast of Urban Legend would go on to commit vehicular manslaughter, I definitely would've said Rebecca Gayheart. So a happy 49 to her today!

I see on her IMDb page that a new Urban Legend film is in production? One that's got her reprising her role as the "nutty" Brenda Bates (Loretta Devine, aka the best part of the 1998 original, is listed as well) -- if I saw that this was happening previously I totally forgot it. And the most interesting thing is that Colin Minihan is set to write and direct the thing -- Minihan has made some interesting horror films over the past couple of years...

... What Keeps You Alive (reviewed here) was a solid wilderness slasher survival type of movie that was made more interesting by putting a lesbian couple's truly effed up relationship at its center; I've never seen his 2016 zombie flick It Stains the Sand Red but I've heard good things about it. Then there's Extraterrestrial (which he made when he was half of the Vicious Bros), which I saw and reviewed at Tribeca back in 2014, and which the only thing I remember about here six years later is an excruciatingly grotesque anal-probing scene. Not that one ever forgets that sot of thing.

Do Dump or Marry: Highways & Hemsworths

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My first thought seeing this photo of Jake Gyllenhaal and Liam Hemsworth and Jared Leto at the gym with their (plenty sexy himself) trainer (via Jared's Instagram) was... well those thoughts aren't fit to publish in this family publication. My first thoughts would get me stoned to death in several countries. My second... well maybe my twelfth thought, after all of the filthy stuff... was that Jake is not short, but Liam is making him look like Princess Toadstool over there. I need to find myself standing next to Liam some time, is my point. We should also...

... note that exchange from the photo's comments, I think. It is notable. The pretzel emoji! Anyway if you're as thorough a librarian of these fellas filmographies as I am then you will recall that Jake & Jared go way way back, way back to the movie Highway from 2002. That's a thing we've covered a'plenty over the intervening decades...

... since we came into the new millenium hella high on Jared (thanks to our My So-Called Life love affair) and that obsession slowly transferred with the passage of time from the one to the other Highway star. Now I can't stand Leto, but I do thank him for his service in bringing us that photo up top. So now I ask y'all to tell me in the comments: Do dump or marry the three actors, please!

Prey On This, Punk

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While I think Margot Robbie's performance as Harley Quinn in the first Suicide Squad got a little over-sold -- if something is merely good opposite so much that is deeply deeply bad it suddenly seems like more good, ya know -- I'm still against the odds into the spin-off movie Birds of Prey, but let's place the blame for this fool's interest squarely where it belongs: on the big strong backs of Ewan McGregor as the big gay bad and his bleach blond sex god slash henchman Chris Messina. Those two...

... could very clearly murder it and get away with it. But the trailer is colorful -- the Marilyn / Madonna "Diamonds" recreation looks fab -- and fun and perhaps not bogged down by all the Jared Leto bullshit Harley Quinn can fly properly. Oh and Rosie Perez and Mary Elisabeth effing Winstead, can't forget Rosie Perez and Mary Elizabeth effing Winstead. Watch:

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Birds of Prey is out in February 2020, and now you can

hit the jump for a few more Ewan & Chris gifs just cuz...

Hemsworth Abs Sell Magazines

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I hate it when these magazine do a bunch of different covers and you don't know if the one you want is the one that's going to show up in your mailbox -- W Magazine's new issue appears to have like ten different covers at least but obviously the only one anybody wants (with all due apologies to Tilda Swinton and Winona Ryder And Saoirse Ronan, all terrific!) is the one with Shirtless Chris Hemsworth on it. I mean come on! Anyway I also posted the pictures of Robert Pattinson on the Tumblr and (surprisingly) the one of Lucas Hedges on the Tumblr, but you can never make me post the Jared Leto ones. You can't! Click here to see all the different images.

Good Morning, World

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File this under Most Definitely NSFW but I stumbled upon this fun Tumblr yesterday that collects gifs of actors getting friendly with themselves and if you want to lose a few minutes staring at such a thing, click on over. It's NSFW because it includes movies with the real deal going on, not just pretend, so expect, you know, the occasional erection to pop up. As erections do! And I stole a few of my favorite (non-pornographic) gifs after the jump if you hit it...

That Bangin' Captain Boomerang Body

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First things fist (real typo but it's staying) no I have not posted that picture before but I did post two very very similar shots back in December; thanks to the ever-on-it Jai Courtney Forever Tumblr for catching this third one. Now let us pause, and enjoy that picture for a few seconds. Pause. Pause. Enjoy. Enjoy. Have you clicked on it? It gets much bigger. Click. pause. Pause. Enjoy. Enjoy. pause. Clean up. Okay, now on to the news.

We have averted the Mel-Gibson-pocalypse! Apparently Warner Bros was thinking about hiring that dick-cheese to make the second Suicide Squad movie for awhile and hey if nothing else Mel Gibson directing it we would've at least gotten a lot of deeply repressed homosexual leering at Jai Courtney's body. I'm not down with repression... except when it's hot, and sometimes it's hot. 

Anyway we don't have to worry about feeling icky because Mel's gone because of timeline delays, and a very good director, much better than Mel, is maybe picking the movie up - THR says that Jaume Collet-Serra, the man who made Orphan and most recently the not at all guilty pleasure of The Shallows is maybe about to sign on. Do it, Jaume! He knows how to spin gold from trash and god this series needs some of that magic. 

Of course I thought David Ayer would be able to handle it based on his previous credits and he fumbled hard, so who knows.

Good Morning, World

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When the movie Highway came out in 2002 I didn't even notice the google-eyed weirdo standing beside Jared Leto because my Jared Leto fixation was still in highest gear at that time, and Jared looked like this in that movie....

 ... so Baby Jake Gyllenhaal, he wasn't even registering. Of course cut to almost fifteen years later and my how the tables have turned. Jared Leto might have the most inexplicable Oscar ever awarded to any human being in the history of them, but Jake's got my heart. And clearly, that's much grander a prize. Happy birthday, Jake!

Where are you going...

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Give Me Your Little Joes Yearning To Be Free

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By now you've surely heard that Jared Leto has been cast as Andy Warhol in an upcoming bio-pic (sigh) - even better it's coming from the writer of The Wolf of Wall Street! Anyway before we have an aneurysm let's ignore that immediately cringe-worthy news and cast our dream Joe Dallesandro. I know there's a whole cast of characters that surrounded Andy but it's Joe, Little Joe, Big Joe, we care most about personally.

(He'd probably make for an even more interesting bio-pic too -- Andy, bless him, is kind of played out at this point.) Anyway who would you cast as the sleazy art-set sexpot? Is it weird that my first thought was Allan Hyde, the dude who played Godric on True Blood?

Quote of the Day

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"Watching Jared Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity."

That is from this fantastic piece by Angelica Jade Bastien in The Atlantic which I highly recommend you read -- I was nodding my head in agreement so furiously I was spitting out vertebrae by its end. I especially love where she dives into why Brando is so revered for Method Acting over the likes of Gena Rowlands (or say Montgomery Clift, who came before and was so good that Brando himself idolized him) because Brando "reinvented" Masculinity itself - all actors in Brando's wake want some of what he had, that semen-soaked sex walk. The Dick Strut. To be Men, Manly Men, and prove that Acting is a not for Pussies or Homosexuals, take your pick.

Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me

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Faceless lumps. An endless supply of faceless lumps. The anonymous gray sidewalks of an anonymous city littered with faceless lumps. In stroll some superheroes excuse me super-villains, and with them the color correction, supposedly. They are bright and boisterous and bosomy, every single one (although the costuming only highlights the female cleavage, of course) - they're gonna shake this mutha up right? Well kinda? They are fitfully interesting folks placed in a frantically uninteresting situation, and asked to dance like monkeys for our amusement, and some of them can shake a leg, some of them have legs to shake, some of them a cut off at the knees, stumps a'blazing. Remember when I said this?

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But do we really even need #SuicideSquad reviews? I mean, really? pic.twitter.com/9n0h9OkrTw

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) August 2, 2016

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Ahh simpler times, filled with simpler notions, like thinking that because they released an image from a movie said image would actually be in the movie. I was so young, so naive, then. I miss ol' me. Meet new me:

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I didn't think Suicide Squad could be as bad as everybody said, but it's worse

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) August 6, 2016

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Is it possible that Suicide Squad might be even worse than Batman v Superman? I kind of feel as if it's possible. As much as I hated BvS I don't recall wanting to walk out in the middle of it, but to walk out in the middle of Suicide Squad is a thing I wanted, and I wanted it hard as a boomerang to the balls. I think it was maybe right around the seventeenth classic song cue in a row heaped up like those faceless lumps of villains? Guardians of the Galaxy is rolling in its grave, David Ayer. Rolling in its grave!!!

I guess what it is is that more than BvS, which I went into expecting a crap sandwich, this movie somehow felt like a personal affront -- like someone actually wanted to hurt me for having expectations. I'd told myself that no movie could be as bad as Batman v Superman, and the suits at Warner Brothers, in between their cocaine enemas and drooling on their keyboards at tentacle porn, were all, "I'LL SHOW YOU MOTHERFUCKERS." Suicide Squad isn't so much a crap sandwich as it is that scene in Salo where they have the shit banquet. Suicide Squad is a Shit Banquet - slap that on your movie posters, motherfuckers.

Who Wore It Best?

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In the race for Hottest Olympic Swimmer I've long been a Nathan Adrian man, but I have to say I think Ryan Lochte's new bleached look is really working for him. But, and maybe this is just because he's also been in the news this week, it's giving me distinct "Jared Leto in Fight Club" vibes, so I must ask...

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My Suicide Romance

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The hottest thing to come out of Suicide Squad is clearly the new romantic relationship (shut up, facts) between Joel Kinnaman & Jai Courtney. (pics via their respective Instagrams here and here) But what shall we call them? Kinnaney? Courtaman? Those stink. Come up with something better, friends.

And in related news...

... I find everything I've heard about Jared Leto's behavior on the set of the movie utterly and totally repulsive, but the fact that he's gone and re-styled himself like the Jordan Catalano I fell in love with high school (see also this post on the Tumblr) is making my outrage crumble. My will is so goddamned weak. Nobody ever trust me with nuclear codes or anything like that -- all it would take to break me would be Jai Courtney walking into the room in his Bonds underpants and I'd blow Putin on the spot for more.
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Just Gotta Get Right Out Of Here

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Well the first full trailer for Suicide Squad is here, and they really kinda cheated, using a Queen song to distract me with good feelings like this. How can I side-eye Jared Leto when Freddie Mercury is squealing sweet somethings in my ears? Or when I'm fantasizing about curling up in a ball and nestling myself in Jai Courtney's muttonchops, for that matter? I cannot. I cannot side-eye any of it. It's totally giving off Guardians vibes, right? Anyway watch, and then tell me what you think in the comments...

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Quote of the Day

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"Man, I would love to play The Joker.

I’m sure Jared Leto’s going to do a great job, 

but I want it next time round."

-- That's Matthias Schoenaerts talking to Mr. Porter.

Weep for what could have been, folks.

And hit the jump for five more pictures...

Chris Disappearing

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Yesterday Chris Hemsworth posted that picture of himself skinnied down for his upcoming "man vs whale" movie In the Heart of the Sea, grossing out those who love him far and wide, forcing me to once again beg actors to stop doing this to themselves. Look at the magic that the special effects wizards were just able to do to Josh Hutcherson & Jena Malone in the latest Hunger Games movie -- there's no need for ruining your beauty for your art anymore, fellas! So let the ghost go.

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Luke Brings Up The Caboose

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Luke Evans, who probably knows something about being the girl on a train, has just joined the cast of The Girl on the Train, replacing Jared Leto who had to bow out because of a schedule conflict. Good riddance to bad rubbish and good afternoon to better. The Girl on the Train -- an adaptation of the best-selling book about some girls and some trains -- has had a lot of people come and go but Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett & Rebecca Fergusen have been pretty constant as cast-members for a bit -- Justin Theroux and Edgar Ramirez are also maybe in it now, which sounds nice to my ears and my eyes! Oh and Lisa effin' Kudrow, too. Have fun on set, Luke! Do everything that I wouldn't do.

I Am Link

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--- Amazing Bryan - In case you were worried that one Bryan Fuller show (his Neil Gaiman adaptation American Gods for Starz) wasn't going to be enough to fill the Hannibal shaped hole in your black heart, no worries -- he's doing a second show now! It was just announced that he is reviving Amazing Stories, Steven Spielberg's 80s sci-fi anthology series, for NBC! (Spielberg is not involved.) I watched the hell out of Amazing Stories at the time but I haven't seen a single one since they first aired but this seems like it could be something lighter for Bryan to dig into - I remember it all feeling very 80s Spielbergian, a la E.T. But I'm sure Bryan will make it his own -- his delightful own! 

--- Milky Substance - I wonder if Edgar Wright heard me bitching last week about his slowed-down output ever since Ant-Man collapsed - he's already lining up his next project for after Baby Driver films, and it's... with Johnny Depp? Once upon a time this would've sounded exciting but I kinda groan at the thought of Johnny Depp now. But if anybody can do something with that clown, it's Edgar. Edgar... and Neil Gaiman? So they're making a movie out of Gaiman's time-travel children's book Fortunately, The Milk, apparently. Okay? Anybody read this one? I missed this one somehow. I'm still waiting for my Graveyard Book movie.

--- Shimmer & Glow - Before Benjamin Walker slips into his translucent rain slicker as Patrick Bateman in the American Psycho musical on Broadway he's going to film a Memento-ish thriller called Shimmer Lake, which was written by and will be directed by one of the co-writers of 22 Jump Street. I'm surprised more movies haven't tried to spin off of Memento's structural lessons but then that whole backwards thing is a tricky tightrope and I can think of about fifty thousand ways they could fail. The film also has Adam Pally and Ron Livingston in the cast. (thanks Mac)

--- Royal Pains - We're still several weeks out from the US release of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard's MacBeth, but I know it's out all over the place otherwise and over at The Film Experience Andrew has gone and reviewed the movie -- his is the first I've read (I've been avoiding them) and it's pretty mixed, but it sounds like he liked Fassy's performance at least.

--- Blond Ambition - We've been keeping close tabs on Loving, director Jeff "Take Shelter" Nichols new film about the court case "Loving V. Virginia" that ended the US ban on interracial marriage, both because Nichols is awesome and because we love Joel Edgerton, who's starring -- when we saw those pictures of him in Toronto last month with bleached hair we were right on it! Well now there's an official pic from the movie, see it over at The Playlist, and he & Ruth Negga look perfect.

--- Eat It - Empire Magazine has got Jared Leto in his Joker get-up for the Suicide Squad movie on their cover and yeah, he looks ridiculous. I s'pose he is playing a psychotic clown so "ridiculous" very well might work; I just have very little patience for Leto at this point, but maybe y'all can keep more of an open mind. That tummy mouth though... no. I guess I'm probably just irritable that there aren't any good new pictures of Jai Courtney or Joel Kinnaman. Give the people meaning me what they meaning me want.

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The Boys on the Girls on the Train

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The folks making the movie version of the bestselling novel The Girl on the Train have already stuffed their film with a trio of terrifically appealing ladies -- Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, and Haley Bennett -- and now their turning their attentions to the men-folk... but only reaching a 50% MNPP approval rating this go-round. Chris Evans (yay) and Jared Leto (boo) are in talks to inject some testosterone into the proceedings - Chris will be Rebecca's piece while Jared will play Haley's. Besides having become a completely insufferable presence, Jared is too fucking old for Haley Bennett. He's seventeen years older than her! And don't give me any of that shit about him having retained his youth all this time - I was around for Jared's first youth and he hasn't retained jack of Jordan Catalano. Oh, Jordan...